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Senator Elissa Slotkin is a Democrat, but she comes at her critique of the Trump Administration from a somewhat different angle than equally critical colleagues in the Party, such as Chris Murphy, Cory Booker, and Bernie Sanders. She represents Michigan, a swing state whose voters saw fit, in 2024, to send a Democrat to the Senate and Donald Trump to the White House. She argues that her constituents responded to their shared focus on economic issues—but she is deeply skeptical that Trump’s promise to return jobs to Michigan will yield fruit. Her constituents will see this, she argues, if Democrats adopt some “alpha energy” and force the President to “own” his policies.
Slotkin has been a fierce critic of Trump, blasting him and his team for “ignorance” in their treatment of the Ukrainian leadership, telling Vanity Fair that the President is “cozying up to dictators and kicking our allies in the teeth.” Earlier this year, in the Democratic response to Trump’s hundred-minute-long address to a joint session of Congress, Slotkin urged her listeners not to give up: “Don’t tune out. It’s easy to be exhausted, but America needs you now more than ever. If previous generations had not fought for this democracy, where would we be today?”
Fluent in Swahili and Arabic, Slotkin worked for the C.I.A., in Iraq, and, later, for the State Department and the Department of Defense, before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, in 2018. She comes from a prosperous family that made its money in the meat business; before selling to Tyson Foods, the company used to make Ball Park franks. In our conversation for The New Yorker Radio Hour, Slotkin urged Democratic leadership to concentrate their criticisms of the Administration on the everyday economic issues: if you’re not speaking to people’s struggle to pay their bills, she said, then “you’re just having half a conversation.” Our discussion has been edited for length and clarity.
Senator, you won the Michigan Senate seat in a state that voted for Donald Trump. What do you think those voters saw in both you and the person they voted for for President?
I’ve boiled it down to basically two things. No. 1, I focussed pretty religiously on economic issues. The vast majority of my TV ads, and my mailers, and my digital stuff was about pocketbook issues in one way or another. And I think people were questioning Democrats in general, and what their priorities were and whether their priority was actually to lower costs.
And then the second thing is a little bit more ephemeral, and that’s just kind of an alpha-energy thing. I think people are looking for leadership, to lead through the dark tunnel into the light, during a very complicated time in our country’s history. And so they want a little alpha—and that’s not a male-female thing, that’s just a leadership thing. I obviously have major disagreements with the way Trump leads, but I don’t think most people would deny he’s got alpha energy.
For me, in order to win and represent my state, I’ve got to go into very conservative, very red areas, very Republican areas. My whole strategy is: lose better in red areas. Go in and meet enough people, and surprise enough people, that you peel away some of those voters and you lose better—with forty-one per cent of the vote instead of thirty-five per cent of the vote in a certain county or an area. It’s not about your policy papers on your website, it’s not about wonky stuff. It’s just, like, do they get the leadership vibe from you? And I maybe had a few more ounces of that than the average Democrat, and it helped me in some of those areas where Democrats lost pretty big.
Just to be clear, are you saying that if you stray from issues like high prices, if you start talking about democracy, if you start talking about oligarchy, or even corruption, when it comes to Donald Trump, that in a place like Michigan, you’re going to fail?
Well, we can walk and chew gum, right? There is no way I would ever say, given what Donald Trump is doing to roll back our democracy, that we shouldn’t be watching those issues and activating on those issues. We should. As someone who’s been in national service my whole life, what we’re trying to do here is preserve our democracy.
But I think if you’re only doing that, and not speaking to people who are really struggling to pay their bills, you’re just having half a conversation. In Michigan, in general, if you’re not talking about the economy, you are literally having half a conversation. And I’ve had someone say to me, “I can’t pay for my kid to go to summer camp with democracy.” So it’s not that people don’t care—they do. But if you’re working two jobs and have crappy health insurance, it’s just not the thing that’s keeping you up at night. And I have made this very plain, that Democrats can do more than one thing. But in my part of the world, you’ve got to start from people’s pocketbooks and their kids.
Do you think that Kamala Harris failed to address economic issues?
Well, look, I mean she had, what, a hundred days? Something very, very short. I think what ended up happening is that people couldn’t tell what our priorities were at the highest levels. There were so many priorities that there were no priorities. And again, I have no love for Donald Trump, but he just really made it an election about your pocketbook, and every yard sign, everything he did, was just focussed on that. And so people said, Well, look, I don’t really like everything he has to say, but I want more money in my pocket. I’m going to vote for the person who’s going to put more money in my pocket—
More than anything, more than immigration, even?
For sure. I mean, yes, of course immigration is an issue that polarizes a lot of people, activates a lot of people. But even if you look back—Trump and [J. D.] Vance were talking about immigration also as an economic issue. Vance made a false claim that illegal immigration was why housing was so expensive. You couldn’t get a house that you could afford because of immigration. It’s a false story, but they were turning immigration into an economic issue because that was the lead foot, certainly at the end.
President Trump has been in office this second time for a hundred-plus days, and the most significant economic proposal was tariffs. It tanked the stock market. It alienated trading partners around the world. How do your constituents view what’s happened economically since then?
I would say that context matters. In the middle of the country, certainly in Michigan, we have lost lots of manufacturing jobs in our state over the past thirty years. If you ask the average person, the combination of NAFTA, or what’s now called U.S.M.C.A., and China have sucked jobs away from us. That’s just the general feeling on the ground. So, I heard from people just this weekend: “Trump has a grand plan. He wouldn’t be putting us through this pain, this short-term pain, if it wasn’t for a big payoff later on.”
