The News
BENTON HARBOR, Mich. — Democrats are trying to message on a lot of fronts in Washington. Elissa Slotkin would prefer to keep it simple.
“There is a fundamental cost of living, middle-class issue out there,” she told Semafor after addressing more than a hundred Michiganders gathered to hear her sketch out her “economic war plan” at a Boys & Girls Club in this small Democratic city off Lake Michigan.
And she sounded the same note in her remarks to voters: “Donald Trump[’s] central theme, when he ran in November, was that he was going to lower your costs in every single category,” Slotkin told them. “He is not lowering your costs. He is raising your costs.”
The first-term senator got a nationwide introduction earlier this year, when her party tapped her to deliver its response to the president’s joint address to Congress. She’s spent the months since then freelancing an agenda for her party, one that’s focused on keeping the cost of living down as some economic indicators start to wobble under Trump.
Slotkin said Democrats needed to approach next month’s government funding deadline very differently than they did in March, when they gave in to the GOP. She identified Republicans showing strain on the economy as Trump’s policies failed to lower prices, citing Sen. Josh Hawley’s proposal of a $500 rebate to defray the costs of tariffs.
“Just don’t have an insane tariff policy, and you won’t have to send another check to people, right?” said Slotkin, a former intelligence officer.
When Michiganders got higher premiums this fall, she urged them to make it political: “Take that letter, scratch out your address, and post that sucker online.”
The View From Elissa Slotkin
David Weigel: You talked here about the funding bill; what every Democrat grapples with, is, do we really want to be the party shutting down the government? Does Abigail Spanberger need that in Virginia right now?
Elissa Slotkin: Look, I was a federal government employee my entire adult life. I know how expensive and problematic a government shutdown is. It would give me no pleasure to think about Donald Trump and a government shutdown, but I do think we should negotiate in order to give our votes, and that was my concern back in March.
I understood and felt deeply sympathetic to the argument that, hey, we can’t let the government shut down with Donald Trump in charge — maybe he’ll declare martial law. I’m sympathetic to that argument, but I want to get something for the vote.
The administration signaled that it’s not going to act on Trump’s IVF pledge. Should Democrats run next year, saying: He wouldn’t cover this, but we will?
I don’t have enough ink to cover all the things that he said during the campaign that he’s now gone back on. Most importantly, the central thesis of his campaign, which was, “I’m going to put more money in your pocket.” Right? I challenge any American to tell me today, in August of 2025, if any of your major costs have gone down.
But should Democrats take the IVF pledge he made, dust it off, run on it?
Americans literally can’t afford to send their kids to summer camp. They can’t afford the Christmas trip that they took every five years. They can’t afford to open a new wing of their business. So I think that there is a fundamental cost of living, middle-class issue out there.
While there would be some people who would be deeply focused on that, it’s just not to me. To me, Democrats need to go broad, right? Not just focus on one issue.
Do you support Texas Democrats leaving their state to delay or stop gerrymandering, and Democrats in other states saying: We may just give up on independent commissions so we can gerrymander?
In Michigan we passed, by a very bipartisan margin, a constitutional amendment getting rid of political gerrymandering, with a citizens’ commission. My dream is that that happens in every state, that that is the law of the land for every state in the country.
But if the Republicans are going to go nuclear, so am I.
And while in some states like Illinois or California, it’s going to be easier than in others, I regrettably will go nuclear if they go nuclear, because he is trying to rig the game. I’m grudgingly supportive of that. I think when the average citizen understands what gerrymandering is, they don’t want it done.
You voted for a gerrymandering ban nationwide with the John Lewis Voting Right Act. Would it be worth getting rid of the filibuster to get rid of gerrymandering?
Gosh, there’s so many issues where we didn’t cast important votes. I just haven’t thought about it as my Number One reason why we need to reform the filibuster. Carveouts are pretty difficult to manage.
I think we need to have a real conversation about how we propose bills and amendments in the Senate — make a policy change for everyone, as opposed to making carveouts for specific issues, because then everyone’s going to make their issue a carveout issue.
The Democratic solar system includes some left-wing voters who really don’t like the CIA. What do you say if you’re in an elevator with a Democrat who says: Look, please stop talking about the CIA?
That is something that I see online. I don’t know that I’ve ever been asked that by a citizen of Michigan. While there are certainly people who have long lists of grievances against the intelligence community or are anti-government or whatever, all I can do is show up and show up and show up and be as transparent as I can, answer tough questions as much as I can, and hope that I can give them a better example of a CIA officer.
You said you would have voted for the resolutions cutting military aid to Israel right now, and wanted a course correction. What would be enough of a course correction from Israel for you to say: I am comfortable voting for military aid again? Letting more food into Gaza?
For me, it was a very important data point to see Netanyahu cut off aid, even to the point where members of the IDF were coming out publicly against the plan. Retired military officers that I’m in touch with in Israel were flagging it as a major problem. Some sort of course correction would have to include allowing in sufficient aid so that particularly children were able to eat and have medicine and have basic humanitarian standards.
I know they’re now airlifting things in. That’s a start, but you can’t possibly get the volume of food in there that you need via an airlift. So I think that’s what I’m looking for. In the meantime, enough with Hamas and this piecemeal crap on hostages. Release all of them, living and dead, and let’s end the war.
I personally think that whatever happens to Hamas leadership, they have it coming. I have no problem with the targeting and killing of Hamas leadership and anyone associated in any way with October 7.
One of the things that happened right before the vote, last week, was that I had a rabbi and a Muslim leader come together here in Michigan, and come to me with a specific proposal. I wrote to Rubio about it. It was: If you don’t have the trust to bring in a huge volume of food, at least allow infant formula and clean water to make baby formula.
The Michigan community, Jews and Muslims, we’ll raise the money, buy whatever we need. That shows you the level of exhaustion we have here.
Do you support the proposals to recognize Palestine as a state?
I just don’t believe that we should be recognizing a new state in the middle of an active hot war. I don’t believe that’s sustainable. I don’t believe that is a way that’s going to set off a new state on the right foot.
I have always believed in two states living next door to each other in peace. I believe in a Jewish state in Israel. I don’t know how you do that without two states living side by side.
And some of the most important changes in the region came after the darkest moments in the region. I can only hope that such cataclysmic violence will bring about something different.
Notable
For CNN, Edward-Isaac Dovere talked to Democrats who worry that their base is fed up with funding Israel. “Critics have tried in vain for parts of four decades to wait out Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, a conservative who has stymied Democratic presidents going back to Bill Clinton.”
For Michigan Public Radio, Dustin Dwyer reported on Slotkin’s negotiating strategy for the next government funding bill.
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