LANSING (AP) — Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan will seek the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Democrat Debbie Stabenow in 2024, becoming the first high-profile candidate to jump into the battleground state race.
In a video announcing her campaign, Slotkin says that the nation seems “to be living crisis to crisis” but that there “are certain things that should be really simple, like living a middle-class life in the state that invented the middle class.”
Slotkin, a 46-year-old former CIA intelligence officer and third-term representative, is coming off an impressive victory in last year’s midterms, winning reelection despite having been considered vulnerable. Her contest against Republican state Sen. Tom Barrett was the third-most expensive House race in 2022.
She is the first Democrat to announce her intentions to run for a seat that will be crucial to the party’s efforts to maintain control of the Senate, where it holds a 51-49 majority. The only other candidate in the race so far is Republican Nikki Snyder, a State Board of Education member.
Slotkin, first elected to Congress in 2018 when she flipped a traditionally Republican district, has consistently won close races in the battleground state and has proved herself to be an effective fundraiser.
After narrowly winning reelection in 2020, she was targeted by Republicans in last year’s midterms after new congressional maps divided her home district. She was forced to run in Michigan’s new 7th Congressional District, where she was a new face for about a third of the district’s voters, many in rural GOP-leaning counties north of Lansing.
Throughout the campaign, Slotkin touted herself as a Democrat representing a Trump-voting district, emphasizing to voters her pragmatism and highlighting her role on the House’s bipartisan Problem-Solvers Caucus.
She has represented two congressional districts that experienced mass shootings, and she has called for stronger gun laws. Now a congresswoman for the Lansing area, she represents an area that includes Michigan State University, where a gunman killed three people and injured five others this month. She previously represented Oxford, where a school shooter killed four students and injured seven others at Oxford High School in 2021.
The dean of Michigan Democrats, the 72-year-old Stabenow shocked many in the party when she announced last month that she would not be seeking a fifth term, saying she had “decided to pass the torch” to a new generation of leaders.
Slotkin was immediately named as a favorite to replace the outgoing senator and began forming a national campaign team, telling the AP in January that she was putting her “ducks in a row” before an announcement.
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