Nobody Is Buying What Gretchen Whitmer Is Selling

L ike President Joe Biden, Governor Gretchen Whitmer thinks she has a messaging problem. Just as Biden believes that Americans who are struggling financially need to better understand his achievements, Whitmer wants to reverse Michigan’s decline with slick advertising in other states. This month, she launched “You Can in Michigan,” a $20 million campaign that her administration is billing as “the largest state talent attraction campaign and effort in the U.S.”

Whitmer is right that Michigan needs more families and job creators. Between 2020 and 2022, according to the U.S. Census, Michigan’s population declined by 0.4 percent, a net loss of more than 43,000 residents. Overall, the state is growing more slowly than all its competitors in the Midwest, including neighboring Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Michigan ranks 49th in population growth over the past two decades (behind only West Virginia), and by the end of the next two decades, University of Michigan researchers predict, the population will steadily decline. Big and small businesses alike are desperate for workers they can’t seem to find, and that crisis is only going to worsen.

Will an advertising blitz save the Great Lakes State? Whitmer certainly hopes so. “You Can in Michigan” features ads in television, radio, and print, as well as billboards around college campuses. It’s also flooding social-media platforms. The campaign is targeting neighboring states as well as twelve major cities across the nation, including New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Austin, and Raleigh-Durham. Yet the first three of these cities are also losing population, and while the last three are growing fast, Whitmer hasn’t asked the all-important question: Why?

Atlanta, Austin, and Raleigh-Durham are in states that prize and promote economic freedom. According to the Fraser Institute, Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina were among the top ten states for economic freedom in 2022. Also on the list: Florida and Idaho, the fastest-growing states in the country, along with booming Tennessee. In these states, taxes are low, regulations are light, and government gets out of the way of families and job creators. Lo and behold, people flock to places where their individual rights are protected and their entrepreneurial initiative is respected.

But Michigan is going in the opposite direction, reducing freedom while enhancing the power of special interests and government. The best example is Whitmer’s signing of legislation repealing Michigan’s right-to-work law, which gave workers the freedom to choose whether to join a labor union. That law made the state significantly more attractive to job creators, contributing in particular to Michigan’s manufacturing renaissance over the past decade.

My 2022 study (with Ball State University professor Todd Nesbit) found that, nationwide, states that adopted a right-to-work law after 2000 enjoyed a nearly 21 percent higher share of manufacturing employment than they would have absent the law. By contrast, the demise of right-to-work is already contributing to a hostile economic atmosphere, currently reflected in the United Auto Workers union’s bitter strike against the Big Three automakers. Such antagonism is more likely to drive away workers and businesses than attract them to the state.

Governor Whitmer is also spending Michigan’s money on union favors. She has reinstituted a prevailing-wage mandate, spiking the cost of taxpayer-funded construction projects while ensuring that less urgent infrastructure projects get built. A 2023 study found that Michigan’s prevailing-wage law raised road-construction costs as much as $9,200 per mile, or 14.3 percent. Meanwhile, Governor Whitmer’s allies have introduced legislation that would provide a refundable tax credit to cover the cost of union dues.

And then there’s the governor’s spending spree with money from taxpayers’ pockets. She and state lawmakers have already authorized $4.1 billion in corporate fiscal favors this year. And while Michigan families got a legally mandated tax cut this year, Whitmer supports illegally raising taxes back to their previous level in 2024 and every year thereafter. Meanwhile, the fastest-growing states are pulling further away from Michigan with tax cuts, spending restraint, and education reforms that give families more choice. On that last front, Governor Whitmer has signed legislation ditching Michigan schools’ grading system and repealing a law that required schools to ensure students know how to read by the third grade. How is that a winner with families from other states?

None of this backsliding shows up in the come-to-Michigan pleas. Nor will you see it on the campaign’s website, which features a career finder powered by artificial intelligence. But families and entrepreneurs have real intelligence, and as the past few years make clear, they’re smart enough to recognize that Michigan is rushing in the wrong direction. Like Biden, Whitmer doesn’t have a messaging problem. She has a policy problem. And as the states that are growing can attest, the solution is to empower families and job creators, not try to woo them with empty advertisements.