By Craig Mauger, cmauger@detroitnews.com
LANSING — Former Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, an independent who’s running to be Michigan’s next governor, accused the Michigan Democratic Party of being “obsessed” with him Monday, as the 2026 campaign year opened with a volley of competing press conferences.
Duggan, a former Democrat who broke from the party in December 2024 to launch his independent bid for the state’s top office, held a session at noon with reporters. Before that, at 11 a.m., Michigan Democrats put on their own event, criticizing Duggan for not being more outspoken in opposition to Republican President Donald Trump.
Curtis Hertel, chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, labeled Duggan’s campaign for governor “an expensive and self-serving ego trip on a road to nowhere.”
“Duggan has been consistently in last place, with no path of winning a general election,” Hertel told reporters.
Duggan countered by saying Hertel was attempting to cover “the fact that Democrats don’t stand for anything, except they’re against the Republicans.”
“You saw right out of the gate how obsessed the Democrats are with me,” Duggan said.
At another point Monday — 302 days before the Nov. 3 general election — Duggan added of Hertel, “For a guy he doesn’t think can win, he sure spends a lot of time talking about me.”
The back-and-forth pointed to the high stakes and unusual nature of Michigan’s 2026 race for governor, in which both Democrats and Republicans are trying to figure out how to handle Duggan’s independent campaign.
The two major political parties have long dominated state government. The person holding the governor’s office in Michigan has been a Republican or a Democrat for more than a century, according to the Secretary of State’s office.
Michigan’s current governor, Democrat Gretchen Whitmer, can’t run again this year because of term limits.
Some Democrats fear that Duggan’s candidacy could shift enough voters away from the party to give Republicans a victory in November.
The press conferences on Monday showed Michigan Democrats view Duggan as a threat, said David Dulio, a political science professor at Oakland University. The risk in going after him aggressively is that the party could alienate Duggan’s supporters in both the governor’s contest and in races down ballot, Dulio said.
“It might irritate them so much that they sit out the Senate race,” Dulio said.
National Democrats frequently attacked independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the 2024 presidential election. Kennedy eventually dropped out and endorsed Trump, the Republican nominee who ultimately won.
However, Dulio said Hertel might have made a valid point by questioning the impact of spending by pro-Duggan groups so far in the campaign.
Hertel told reporters Monday that Put Progress First, a nonprofit that’s backing Duggan, has already spent somewhere around $8 million on media and billboards around the state while Duggan continues to poll in third place behind the Democratic and Republican candidates.
“I think this campaign has shown that it has zero movement and zero real grassroots support throughout the state,” Hertel said of Duggan. “I think it’s going to be a problem when it comes to getting on the ballot, and I think it’s going to be a problem when there isn’t anyone to actually do the work of knocking doors and talking to voters.”
There are expected to be primary races on the both the Democratic and Republican sides to pick their nominees for governor.
As for the strategy of attacking Duggan, Hertel said his party had a responsibility to tell people that Duggan and others, like Trump, “have no interest” in policies that help working people.
State Reps. Joey Andrews, D-St. Joseph, and Carrie Rheingans, D-Ann Arbor, also spoke at the Michigan Democratic Party event. Andrews labeled the three-term former mayor a “shapeshifter.”
“Duggan is whoever he needs to be for whatever room he’s in,” Andrews said. “You know, he’s going to tell people in the trades, when he’s with them, that he’s going to get them good jobs, and then, he’s going to go to the business groups and tell them he’s going to get them cheap labor.”
But Duggan said Democrats had become “a party that has basically one mantra: Vote blue no matter who.” He added that Democrats couldn’t come up with a statewide affordable housing plan or a proposal to improve K-12 schools when they had majorities in both the House and Senate in 2023 and 2024.
As for Trump, Duggan noted that he has criticized Trump’s tariffs against Canada.
“The other stuff that these guys get into, the Republicans and Democrats, with their outrage machines on whatever the latest thing that Trump said, I’m not going to get into that,” Duggan said. “I am going to deal with solving problems.”
Duggan defended his path in the election, saying there’s “enormous sentiment” in favor of a third option and he’s going to “be campaigning day and night in every corner of the state.”
“I have never seen a state more evenly divided than Michigan today, and people more fed up,” Duggan maintained. “And so, I don’t think the climate’s ever been more fertile.”
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