By Robin Bravender
Gongwer News Service
Republicans face an uphill battle in their bid to oust two sitting Supreme Court justices on Election Day.
Two GOP-backed candidates are campaigning to unseat justices with Democratic support in the races that are technically nonpartisan but where parties back their favored picks. The outcome will be hugely significant: The state’s highest court has the final say on issues including criminal sentencing, consumer protection, election procedures and much more.
But Republicans are facing a raft of challenges that could keep the court’s current makeup of 6-1 Democratic-endorsed justices intact.
Their problems include tough headwinds for Republicans across the nation this fall as President Donald Trump’s approval rating has plummeted. Ad spending for the Democratic-backed candidates dwarfs that of the GOP-endorsed judges. The sitting justices are buoyed by an incumbent designation that puts them atop their competitors on the ballot. And this year, two candidates who aren’t eligible to serve on the court will also appear on the ballot, potentially siphoning votes from the Republican-endorsed judges.
“I think any non-incumbent is an underdog in any judicial election,” said Michael Warren, a judge on the Oakland County Circuit Court and a Republican Party nominee for the Supreme Court.
“The incumbency designation is powerful and not impossible to overcome,” Warren said. “But it’s an uphill battle for sure.”
Even the best-case scenario for Republicans is to pick up two seats on the court, which would still leave them in a 4-3 minority position, adding two GOP-backed justices alongside the court’s current Republican, Justice Brian Zahra. Still, it would be a critical step toward potentially reclaiming the court in a future election.
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Meet the candidates
Warren grew up in Detroit and St. Clair Shores before he attended Wayne State University and the University of Michigan Law School. He fought to help the Ann Arbor Hash Bash keep its permit, he said. He clerked for Justice Dorothy Comstock Riley on the Michigan Supreme Court in the 1990s when he thought, “It’s my dream to come back, but as a justice,” he told Gongwer in a recent interview.
Warren joined the Detroit law firm Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn LLP and went on to serve on the State Board of Education until he lost his 2002 re-election bid. That was a “blessing in disguise,” he said, because it opened him up to be appointed to the Oakland County Circuit Court in December 2002 by outgoing Republican Gov. John Engler. Warren has since been re-elected several times.
The other Republican-nominated candidate for the Supreme Court, Casandra Morse-Bills, was born and raised in Osceola County. A graduate of the University of South Florida and the Thomas M. Cooley Law School, she worked in private practice before she was elected as prosecuting attorney of Oscoda County. She was elected in 2018 and reelected in 2024 as presiding judge of Michigan’s 23rd Circuit Court spanning four counties – Alcona, Arenac, Iosco and Oscoda.
The Republican-backed challengers are taking on Supreme Court Chief Justice Megan Cavanagh and Justice Noah Hood, the Democratic nominees.
Cavanagh, the daughter of a former Supreme Court chief justice, grew up in East Lansing, trained as an engineer at the University of Michigan and earned a law degree from Wayne State University. She practiced appellate law in Detroit before she was first elected to the Supreme Court in 2018 and elevated to chief justice in 2025 by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Hood is facing his first election to the court after his 2025 appointment by Whitmer. He’s a Detroit native with an undergraduate degree from Yale University and a law degree from Harvard University. He returned to Michigan for a stint with the Miller Canfield firm before serving as assistant U.S. attorney in Toledo and Detroit.
Whitmer appointed Hood to serve as a judge on the Wayne Circuit Court in 2019 and on the Michigan Court of Appeals in 2022.
Two candidates backed by the U.S. Taxpayers Party of Michigan — Thomas Howe and Jody White — are also on the ballot this year, although they aren’t eligible to take office if they win, as they aren’t attorneys and don’t meet the requirements for service.
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Challenges for the challengers
The inclusion of Howe and White on the ballot could make a tough race for the GOP-backed candidates even harder.
“They’re not even lawyers. They don’t even qualify to serve as a judge anywhere in the state, let alone on our Supreme Court,” Morse-Bills said. “We definitely are the underdogs because now we not only have two incumbents and two non-incumbents, but we have two individuals that are going to split the non-incumbent vote that don’t get the designation.”
The Constitution prohibits anyone from serving on the court without having been admitted to the practice of law for at least five years but does not bar someone from running without that level of experience.
The Democrats’ favored candidates have a money advantage, too. Advertisement spending or reservations for Cavanagh and Hood totals $3.3 million between Sept. 1 and Election Day, according to data from AdImpact. Most of that — $2.2 million — comes from the pro-Democratic super PAC Justice for All.
GOP spending for advertising on the races: $0, per AdImpact.
Cavanagh and Hood have also dramatically outraised their opponents so far this cycle.
Cavanagh’s campaign raised a cumulative $595,303 so far this cycle and Hood raised $645,356, according to their latest filings that tallied contributions through mid-September. Warren’s campaign raised $229,225 in contributions through mid-September, while Morse-Bills raised $13,481.
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Tipping the scales
Warren, Morse-Bills and their Republican allies are all hoping to make a dent in the court with a 6-1 Democratic-backed majority.
Democrats have held the court’s majority since 2021; Republicans were in the majority for most of the two decades before that.
“On the Democratic and progressive side, people have really upped their game in terms of focusing on the court and getting people out to vote for it,” said Mark Brewer, an attorney and former longtime chair of the Michigan Democratic Party.
“The previous court, which had its origins when [John] Engler was governor and he managed to nominate and/or elect a majority of the court, was extremely conservative — very anti-consumer, anti-voter, anti-civil rights just across the board. And what this court has done is bring the court back to where it belongs, which is in the middle,” Brewer said.
Republicans have a very different view of the current court’s balance.
The current bench has a “supermajority of far-left judicial activism,” said Sen. Jim Runestad, chair of the Michigan Republican Party. He criticized the court’s recent track record on criminal justice cases and its decision to require the removal of sex offenders whose crimes predated 2011 from a sex offender registry.
“I don’t think this is what the people want. It’s just that there just hasn’t been enough education, I think primarily by the media, to kind of parse out, ‘What are we talking about in these justices?’” Runestad said.
Warren and Morse-Bills are eager to shake things up, too.
“We have a very unbalanced court,” Warren said. “It’s a 6-to-1 Democrat-nominated majority, and they have been issuing a number of decisions that are reflective of that very unbalanced court perspective.”
Morse-Bills criticized the current bench for a lack of judicial experience before they assumed their current jobs. “If you take all of the justices combined on our Supreme Court, I have more judicial experience than all of them together, aside from their time on the Supreme Court,” she said.
Of the seven current justices, only two served on a court prior to their election or appointment.
—————
‘Not partisan shills’
Cavanagh and Hood are defending the court’s recent decisions as they campaign to keep their jobs.
Hood pointed to some of the court’s recent big decisions as evidence that the justices aren’t splitting down partisan lines. He noted two of the court’s “most political-seeming cases from the past term.” That included the Attorney General v. Eli Lilly and Company case, a 4-3 ruling that backed Attorney General Dana Nessel.
He also referred to a 6-1 decision on the Line 5 tunnel project, where Zahra, the court’s lone GOP-nominated justice, penned the dissent. That ruling “ostensibly is six-to-one, but you’ve got to read Zahra’s dissent,” said Hood. Zahra concurred with part of the majority opinion in that case.
“There’s also a lot of our cases that are unanimous,” Hood said. It’s “not partisan shills dictating the result. You’ve got seven jurists trying to sort out a case based on its facts and based on the law.”
Cavanagh dismissed critics’ claims that “you’re not qualified to be a Supreme Court justice if you haven’t been a trial judge.” Those arguments are “non-starters,” she said.
“Obviously, I’ve been a judge for eight years doing this job in particular,” she said. “We’re a multi-member bench, right? We make decisions among seven of us, and having differing backgrounds and experiences absolutely, I think, contributes to better decisionmaking.”
Runestad is hopeful that the conservative candidates will get a boost heading into the race’s final stretch.
“I think the stakeholders, like the Chamber of Commerce and many other stakeholders, need to step up,” he said.
The Michigan Chamber of Commerce was once the top funder of Republican-nominated Supreme Court candidates, paying for informational ads supporting them and criticizing the Democratic nominees. But they have discontinued those efforts in recent years.
“We have two weeks left to go, and you never know in campaigns what will happen,” Runestad said. “Certainly, when you have an off-year election and you’re in a party where the president is in power, it’s a headwind. There’s no doubt about that. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t pull out a victory.”
Upsets can happen. Just ask Cavanagh, who narrowly defeated incumbent Supreme Court Justice Kurtis Wilder in 2018.
“I’m not taking anything for granted,” she said. “I’ve defeated an incumbent, so I never trust that that incumbent designation is going to be some magic bullet.”
Gongwer News Service
Republicans face an uphill battle in their bid to oust two sitting Supreme Court justices on Election Day.
Two GOP-backed candidates are campaigning to unseat justices with Democratic support in the races that are technically nonpartisan but where parties back their favored picks. The outcome will be hugely significant: The state’s highest court has the final say on issues including criminal sentencing, consumer protection, election procedures and much more.
But Republicans are facing a raft of challenges that could keep the court’s current makeup of 6-1 Democratic-endorsed justices intact.
Their problems include tough headwinds for Republicans across the nation this fall as President Donald Trump’s approval rating has plummeted. Ad spending for the Democratic-backed candidates dwarfs that of the GOP-endorsed judges. The sitting justices are buoyed by an incumbent designation that puts them atop their competitors on the ballot. And this year, two candidates who aren’t eligible to serve on the court will also appear on the ballot, potentially siphoning votes from the Republican-endorsed judges.
“I think any non-incumbent is an underdog in any judicial election,” said Michael Warren, a judge on the Oakland County Circuit Court and a Republican Party nominee for the Supreme Court.
“The incumbency designation is powerful and not impossible to overcome,” Warren said. “But it’s an uphill battle for sure.”
Even the best-case scenario for Republicans is to pick up two seats on the court, which would still leave them in a 4-3 minority position, adding two GOP-backed justices alongside the court’s current Republican, Justice Brian Zahra. Still, it would be a critical step toward potentially reclaiming the court in a future election.
—————
Meet the candidates
Warren grew up in Detroit and St. Clair Shores before he attended Wayne State University and the University of Michigan Law School. He fought to help the Ann Arbor Hash Bash keep its permit, he said. He clerked for Justice Dorothy Comstock Riley on the Michigan Supreme Court in the 1990s when he thought, “It’s my dream to come back, but as a justice,” he told Gongwer in a recent interview.
Warren joined the Detroit law firm Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn LLP and went on to serve on the State Board of Education until he lost his 2002 re-election bid. That was a “blessing in disguise,” he said, because it opened him up to be appointed to the Oakland County Circuit Court in December 2002 by outgoing Republican Gov. John Engler. Warren has since been re-elected several times.
The other Republican-nominated candidate for the Supreme Court, Casandra Morse-Bills, was born and raised in Osceola County. A graduate of the University of South Florida and the Thomas M. Cooley Law School, she worked in private practice before she was elected as prosecuting attorney of Oscoda County. She was elected in 2018 and reelected in 2024 as presiding judge of Michigan’s 23rd Circuit Court spanning four counties – Alcona, Arenac, Iosco and Oscoda.
The Republican-backed challengers are taking on Supreme Court Chief Justice Megan Cavanagh and Justice Noah Hood, the Democratic nominees.
Cavanagh, the daughter of a former Supreme Court chief justice, grew up in East Lansing, trained as an engineer at the University of Michigan and earned a law degree from Wayne State University. She practiced appellate law in Detroit before she was first elected to the Supreme Court in 2018 and elevated to chief justice in 2025 by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Hood is facing his first election to the court after his 2025 appointment by Whitmer. He’s a Detroit native with an undergraduate degree from Yale University and a law degree from Harvard University. He returned to Michigan for a stint with the Miller Canfield firm before serving as assistant U.S. attorney in Toledo and Detroit.
Whitmer appointed Hood to serve as a judge on the Wayne Circuit Court in 2019 and on the Michigan Court of Appeals in 2022.
Two candidates backed by the U.S. Taxpayers Party of Michigan — Thomas Howe and Jody White — are also on the ballot this year, although they aren’t eligible to take office if they win, as they aren’t attorneys and don’t meet the requirements for service.
—————
Challenges for the challengers
The inclusion of Howe and White on the ballot could make a tough race for the GOP-backed candidates even harder.
“They’re not even lawyers. They don’t even qualify to serve as a judge anywhere in the state, let alone on our Supreme Court,” Morse-Bills said. “We definitely are the underdogs because now we not only have two incumbents and two non-incumbents, but we have two individuals that are going to split the non-incumbent vote that don’t get the designation.”
The Constitution prohibits anyone from serving on the court without having been admitted to the practice of law for at least five years but does not bar someone from running without that level of experience.
The Democrats’ favored candidates have a money advantage, too. Advertisement spending or reservations for Cavanagh and Hood totals $3.3 million between Sept. 1 and Election Day, according to data from AdImpact. Most of that — $2.2 million — comes from the pro-Democratic super PAC Justice for All.
GOP spending for advertising on the races: $0, per AdImpact.
Cavanagh and Hood have also dramatically outraised their opponents so far this cycle.
Cavanagh’s campaign raised a cumulative $595,303 so far this cycle and Hood raised $645,356, according to their latest filings that tallied contributions through mid-September. Warren’s campaign raised $229,225 in contributions through mid-September, while Morse-Bills raised $13,481.
—————
Tipping the scales
Warren, Morse-Bills and their Republican allies are all hoping to make a dent in the court with a 6-1 Democratic-backed majority.
Democrats have held the court’s majority since 2021; Republicans were in the majority for most of the two decades before that.
“On the Democratic and progressive side, people have really upped their game in terms of focusing on the court and getting people out to vote for it,” said Mark Brewer, an attorney and former longtime chair of the Michigan Democratic Party.
“The previous court, which had its origins when [John] Engler was governor and he managed to nominate and/or elect a majority of the court, was extremely conservative — very anti-consumer, anti-voter, anti-civil rights just across the board. And what this court has done is bring the court back to where it belongs, which is in the middle,” Brewer said.
Republicans have a very different view of the current court’s balance.
The current bench has a “supermajority of far-left judicial activism,” said Sen. Jim Runestad, chair of the Michigan Republican Party. He criticized the court’s recent track record on criminal justice cases and its decision to require the removal of sex offenders whose crimes predated 2011 from a sex offender registry.
“I don’t think this is what the people want. It’s just that there just hasn’t been enough education, I think primarily by the media, to kind of parse out, ‘What are we talking about in these justices?’” Runestad said.
Warren and Morse-Bills are eager to shake things up, too.
“We have a very unbalanced court,” Warren said. “It’s a 6-to-1 Democrat-nominated majority, and they have been issuing a number of decisions that are reflective of that very unbalanced court perspective.”
Morse-Bills criticized the current bench for a lack of judicial experience before they assumed their current jobs. “If you take all of the justices combined on our Supreme Court, I have more judicial experience than all of them together, aside from their time on the Supreme Court,” she said.
Of the seven current justices, only two served on a court prior to their election or appointment.
—————
‘Not partisan shills’
Cavanagh and Hood are defending the court’s recent decisions as they campaign to keep their jobs.
Hood pointed to some of the court’s recent big decisions as evidence that the justices aren’t splitting down partisan lines. He noted two of the court’s “most political-seeming cases from the past term.” That included the Attorney General v. Eli Lilly and Company case, a 4-3 ruling that backed Attorney General Dana Nessel.
He also referred to a 6-1 decision on the Line 5 tunnel project, where Zahra, the court’s lone GOP-nominated justice, penned the dissent. That ruling “ostensibly is six-to-one, but you’ve got to read Zahra’s dissent,” said Hood. Zahra concurred with part of the majority opinion in that case.
“There’s also a lot of our cases that are unanimous,” Hood said. It’s “not partisan shills dictating the result. You’ve got seven jurists trying to sort out a case based on its facts and based on the law.”
Cavanagh dismissed critics’ claims that “you’re not qualified to be a Supreme Court justice if you haven’t been a trial judge.” Those arguments are “non-starters,” she said.
“Obviously, I’ve been a judge for eight years doing this job in particular,” she said. “We’re a multi-member bench, right? We make decisions among seven of us, and having differing backgrounds and experiences absolutely, I think, contributes to better decisionmaking.”
Runestad is hopeful that the conservative candidates will get a boost heading into the race’s final stretch.
“I think the stakeholders, like the Chamber of Commerce and many other stakeholders, need to step up,” he said.
The Michigan Chamber of Commerce was once the top funder of Republican-nominated Supreme Court candidates, paying for informational ads supporting them and criticizing the Democratic nominees. But they have discontinued those efforts in recent years.
“We have two weeks left to go, and you never know in campaigns what will happen,” Runestad said. “Certainly, when you have an off-year election and you’re in a party where the president is in power, it’s a headwind. There’s no doubt about that. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t pull out a victory.”
Upsets can happen. Just ask Cavanagh, who narrowly defeated incumbent Supreme Court Justice Kurtis Wilder in 2018.
“I’m not taking anything for granted,” she said. “I’ve defeated an incumbent, so I never trust that that incumbent designation is going to be some magic bullet.”
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