How Michigan became ground zero for COVID-19 debate

On a humid summer evening at a public park in western Michigan, hundreds of local Republicans are eating barbecued chicken and listening to GOP candidates for office. Time and again, they drop their plastic cutlery to voice loud antipathy for the state’s Democratic governor.

“Who’s ready to get rid of Gretchen Whitmer?” former Speaker of the Michigan House of Representatives Tom Leonard asks the crowd, to roaring applause. “What about a ‘Heil, Whitmer?’” asks state representative candidate Mick Bricker, making a Nazi salute. There is a pause, a few gasps, and then more raucous clapping.  

The ire here is motivated almost entirely by one thing: the pandemic. During the height of COVID-19 in 2020, Governor Whitmer and Michigan became an epicenter of pandemic partisan polarization, as state conservatives and then-President Donald Trump whipped up opposition to Ms. Whitmer’s lockdown measures, which were among the strictest in the nation. Using an Emergency Powers Act created in 1945 in response to a Detroit riot, Ms. Whitmer banned Michiganders from visiting their own second homes, banned the use of motorboats, and prohibited some stores from selling gardening or painting supplies, among other restrictions. 

Many voters across the state backed Ms. Whitmer’s actions, and her