The ongoing toxic water crisis in Flint, Michigan, has underscored just how critical state and local politics can be. State Republicans, led by Gov. Rick Snyder, have long used their power to usurp local government authority by appointing unelected emergency managers in solidly Democratic cities, including Flint. Their aggressive gerrymandering has insulated their legislative majorities from public disapproval, even though the GOP habitually loses the statewide popular vote. Together, these measures have subverted the democratic process in Michigan.
However, there is a way to break the Republican stranglehold on state government and align Michigan’s policies more closely with its citizens’ wishes: Move gubernatorial and state elections from midterms to presidential years.
Republicans benefit heavily when elections don’t coincide with the presidential cycle because voters who skip midterms tend to disproportionately lean Democratic. Sixty-five percent of eligible Michigan voters turned out in 2012, but without a presidential race on the ballot, turnout plummeted to just 43 percent in 2014. Snyder won a second term that year by just a 4 percent margin; with presidential turnout, he could very well have lost. It seems even likelier that he never would have won in the first place had Michigan elected its governor in 2008 and 2012, when Democrats easily won the state for president—as they have every year from 1992 on.
One new reform effort gaining steam in Michigan would use the ballot initiative process to move elections for governor (as well as other statewide offices and the state Senate) from midterm to presidential years starting in 2020. While still in its formative stages, an early poll shows voters favoring such a move by a 60 to 32 percent margin. Nonpartisan advocacy organizations such as Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, who’ve been instrumental in passing similar good-government reforms in other states, seem supportive of the idea as well.
It won’t be easy, though: Proponents would need to gather at least 315,654 valid signatures by July to place a constitutional amendment on the 2016 ballot. It's a tough but extremely worthwhile mission. For everyone who is justifiably enraged by what’s happened in Flint, this is a way to channel that anger into meaningful change. While this plan can’t fix the tragedy currently playing out before our eyes, it can prevent the next one by ensuring that Michiganders have a government responsive to their concerns.