Michigan Republican Rep. Dave Trott won his second term 53-40 last year in a contest that attracted little outside attention while Trump was taking his suburban Detroit seat 50-45. Democrats would love to target Trott, who made his fortune through foreclosures, and he’s now got his first noteworthy opponent. Haley Stevens, who was chief of staff to President Obama’s Auto Task Force in 2009 when it was overseeing the financial rescue of Chrysler and General Motors, announced she was in on Thursday. Stevens is well-regarded by her old boss, businessman and ex-auto rescue czar Steven Rattner, and she may indeed have the connections to raise enough money to stand up to the very wealthy Trott.
Michigan’s 11th Congressional District, which awkwardly loops around the Detroit area to take in Troy, Novi, and Livonia, has been in GOP hands for a long time, and the Republican legislature did all they could to draw it so it stayed that way. Trott himself won’t lack the resources to defend himself, and he’s wasted no time arguing that Stevens, who recently moved back to Michigan from Chicago, is a carpetbagger. Still, if Stevens has the resources to get her message out, she may finally be able to make Trott’s long and ugly business history stick.
And she won’t lack material. Perhaps most notoriously, Trott’s law firm foreclosed on a 101-year-old Detroit woman named Texana Hollis in 2011 after her son failed to pay her mortgage, which evicted her from her home. Hollis was able to reclaim her home of 60 years thanks to a campaign led by writer Mitch Albom, and she died a few years later.
This ugly story surfaced during Trott’s 2014 primary campaign against then-Rep. Kerry Bentivolio, but Bentivolio (a true accidental congressman if there ever was one) didn’t have the capability to run a serious race against Trott. Trott’s Democratic opponent that fall did try to make this an issue, but he didn’t have much money available to broadcast it far and wide, and national Democrats triaged this race as the political climate got worse and worse; last year, Trott won without any real fireworks. While Trott’s foreclosure horror stories aren't new news, there are undoubtedly plenty of local voters who have forgotten about them since 2014, or never learned them at all. If Democrats can make a serious play for this seat and 2018 is a bad year for the GOP, Trott could very well be in for a rough ride.