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Mayor Mike Duggan (Campaign photo)
The Wall Street Journal puts the national spotlight on Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan’s independent bid for governor in an upbeat article titled: “He Turned Around Detroit as a Democratic Mayor. Now He’s Ditching the Party.”
“The identity of the Democratic Party is we hate Republicans in general and we hate Donald Trump specifically,” Duggan, 67, tells The Wall Street Journal. “That is the only unifying principle of the Democratic Party today. They disagree on everything else.”
Duggan also talks about his father, the late U.S. District Judge Patrick Duggan, a Republican, who died in 2020 at the age of 86.
“He was a proud Republican: stand up to the Russians, balance the budget, cut taxes. The Republican Party doesn’t stand for those things today. And the Democratic Party used to be focused on leveling the playing field for blue-collar workers and people in rural areas. Today, those folks don’t think the Democratic Party speaks for them at all.”
The author of the article, John McCormick, focuses on Duggan’s break from the Democrats and avoids any real criticism of the mayor. He fails to mention that, while many have credited Duggan with turning the bankrupt city around, critics say he hasn’t done enough for the neighborhoods—and that the real credit for the rebuilding of downtown Detroit goes to mortgage mogul Dan Gilbert.
In interviews with Deadline Detroit on Election Day at a polling station in Midtown Detroit, four voters were asked whether Duggan was a good candidate for governor. Two said they thought he's a great candidate, one said, no, explaining she thinks he's too beholden to billionaires and wouldn’t represent the working class, and another danced around the question. (See video below)
The WSJ article notes that Duggan, a longtime critic of Donald Trump, "is shying away from such criticism now. In the interview, he said he voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris because he thought she was 'a better choice.'"
The Journal writes:
It is a long-shot bid in one of the nation’s most closely divided swing states, but Duggan has faced doubters before. He won his first mayoral primary as a write-in candidate and has brought back some of Detroit’s vibrancy following the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.
If he were to win as a Democrat, Duggan said, he wouldn’t have been able to get anything done because of hyper partisanship in both parties. He said his mayoral support of certain pro-business projects that delivered jobs and helped neighborhoods upset some progressives.
