With Michigan’s August 2 primary just over a week away, candidates for the Republican gubernatorial nomination to unseat Democratic incumbent Gretchen Whitmer have been ramping up their condemnations of one another. One unfortunate line of attack has been the endorsements that candidates have received.

Former president Donald Trump has not made an official pick in the race thus far, so the most important endorsement has come from his secretary of education, Betsy DeVos. She and her family, a political powerhouse in Michigan, threw their support behind Tudor Dixon, a former businesswoman and political commentator of whom Trump has spoken kindly.

Dixon’s opponents have latched on to DeVos’s support and funding for her. In a recent ad, Kevin Rinke, who has the most to spend on the campaign, blasted Dixon as being “endorsed by the RINO establishment’s leading never-Trumpers” and compared her to those “who say anything to win President Trump’s support then betray him when it matters most,” showing DeVos’s face along with those of Mitt Romney, Adam Kinzinger, and Liz Cheney. The latter three have not endorsed Dixon.

In a debate earlier in the month, Garrett Soldano, who gained notoriety for pushing back against Whitmer’s draconian pandemic policies, accused Dixon of being “bought and paid for” because “the DeVos empire” supported her.

Dixon has attempted to counter these attacks. She received backlash for a now-deleted tweet noting that Florida governor Ron DeSantis has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in support from the DeVos family, arguing that it does not make him a “RINO.”

Although Dixon was mocked for the tweet, she was right to defend herself. DeVos and her family have done a serious amount of good for Michigan and the country.

DeVos has long been an advocate of school-choice policies in the state. All the way back in 2000, she supported a ballot proposal that would have allowed private-school vouchers had it been approved. She also worked with her Great Lakes Education Project throughout the early 2010s to lift the cap on charter schools that are allowed in Michigan.

Her successful career caught the incoming Trump administration’s attention after the 2016 election. DeVos then became secretary of education, where she moved to undo the “kangaroo courts” on college campuses created by the Obama administration, which violated the due-process rights of students accused of sexual assault. In the summer of 2020, several university presidents parroted left-wing talking points of institutional racism, claiming that their own colleges were racist. DeVos made them put their money where their mouths are, investigating them for their own claims of racism.

DeVos has a history of pushing for conservative policies, and she has been successful in doing so. Now she apparently sees a candidate in Dixon who can put in place similar policies. Dixon is not a perfect person or candidate by any measure, but her opponents should attack her based on her legitimate flaws, not for being supported by one of the most successful political families in Michigan.

Education will surely be an important issue for the state in 2022. With other states such as Arizona leading the way on school choice, Michigan Republicans should not be trying to discredit DeVos, a person who has achieved countless successes on the issue.