We get to pick who the parties nominate for almost every office from state representative to county commissioner to governor. This happens in a statewide primary, which this year is August 3rd.
But we don’t have any say in who the Democrats and Republicans nominate for two of the state‘s most important offices: Secretary of State and Attorney General.
The attorney general is the state‘s chief law enforcement officer, supervises a large staff of attorneys who go after criminals, and sometimes has to sue other states or the federal government, as for example, over the Asian Carp crisis.
For the average person, the Secretary of State’s office may be the most important part of state government. Most people can easily go their entire lives without interacting with the governor’s office, or having to deal with a state attorney general.
However, everyone has to visit one of the secretary of state’s branch offices sooner or later, if only to get your driver’s license renewed. The secretary of state is also in charge of voting and elections procedures in Michigan.
We get to elect Michigan’s secretary of state and attorney general to four-year terms in November. But who decides who the major party nominees will be? The parties themselves, traditionally at conventions held after the primary, in late August or early September.
In recent years, Democrats have made a mess of this, because they’ve felt the most important thing was to strive for racial and gender balance. That’s often led them to reject their strongest candidates, with the result that Republicans have held both offices for years. Now, they are trying something new. While the nominees will be officially chosen in August, they were essentially chosen at something called an endorsement convention last Saturday.
Right now, it looks like that may have been a success. Jocelyn Benson was the overwhelming choice for secretary of state.
She’s the strongest candidate Democrats have run for the job in years: an attractive and dynamic thirty-two year old law professor at Wayne State. She’s also the author of a book on how secretaries of state do their jobs.
The attorney general nomination was much closer. David Leyton, the Genesee County prosecutor, narrowly edged Richard Bernstein, a lawyer who has been blind since birth and who is a member of Wayne State’s board of governors.
This was largely a battle between the United Auto Workers union and the trial lawyers, and the union won.
After the balloting, the losing candidates gracefully conceded, which means these candidates now have a four-month edge on their eventual Republican rivals, time they can spend raising money and getting known by voters around the state.
We won’t know till after the election if early selection will in fact give the Democrats an advantage, but we do know this:
Ethnic balance is still important to Democrats, and unless Alma Wheeler Smith wins the nomination for governor, it is now all but certain that the nominee for lieutenant governor will be African-American. Does that mean that if Smith loses the primary, she is likely to be offered the second spot? Absolutely. And if I should turn out to be wrong, well, just say I misquoted myself.
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