Duggan’s inconsistency on trifecta raises alarms for Dems: ‘I really don’t know who Mike Duggan is’

At the Detroit Regional Chamber’s Detroit Policy Conference at the end of January, former Detroit mayor and independent gubernatorial candidate Mike Duggan railed on state legislature Democrats for failing to accomplish major goals during the two-year Democratic trifecta. 

But he seemingly contradicted himself less than a week later, when on the Michigan Chamber of Commerce’s MI Business Matters podcast, he said that in one term of a trifecta, Democrats undid eight years of policy from Republican former Gov. Rick Snyder’s time in office.

Two members of the Democratic leadership team during the trifecta are now asking how both of those statements can be true — and defending the work they did in those two years.

“There seems to be a little bit of trying to have it both ways. Either we tied ourselves in knots and couldn’t get anything done, or we moved so quickly that we are just undoing policies left and right,” said Rep. Laurie Pohutsky (D-Livonia), who served as Speaker Pro Tem during the trifecta. “The fact of the matter is we worked as deliberately and as quickly as we could to do the things that we knew we had been sent there to do.”

Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks (D-Grand Rapids) added that Duggan’s comments on repealing Snyder-era policies also came across as “tone deaf” because of the successes of policy changes like passing gun safety legislation and codifying reproductive rights. 

“It’s ironic to me that he’s talking about this in such a partisan way when he is claiming to be less partisan,” Brinks added. “I really don’t know who Mike Duggan is.”

Duggan responded to questions about the discrepancies in his statements on the trifecta by referencing two economic development programs — Transformational Brownfield legislation passed under Snyder known as MiThrive, and the Strategic Outreach and Attraction Reserve, commonly known as the SOAR Fund, passed in 2021 under Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat. 

Andrea Bitely, Duggan’s campaign spokesperson, said that Duggan sees the transformational brownfield plan as a statewide success — and the debate over passing SOAR and considering repealing it during the trifecta years as extremely damaging to the state.

“Democrats spent the trifecta period so engaged in endless internal conflict over SOAR that they failed to adopt any meaningful economic development strategy and actually made things worse by failing to extend the TBP caps, effectively killing a Snyder-era success,” Bitely said, referring to spending limits on the Transformational Brownfield Program.

But the Transformational Brownfield Program has in fact been expanded, including under the Dem trifecta — in 2023, SB 289 increased the cap from $800 million to $1.6 billion, part of a package signed by Whitmer to set up a Transformational Brownfield Fund. The incentive was also extended in 2022 to approve projects through 2027, and legislation put forward in 2025 would expand the cap even further if passed.

Both Democrats defended the work of the trifecta, saying that the Snyder-era policies repealed were done to support workers rights, civil rights and health care.

“Within the first hundred days, we had moved some monumental legislation, including repealing right to work, reinstating prevailing wage, expanding the working family’s tax credit, and then dealing with things like repealing the criminal abortion ban and codifying the expansion of the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act and repealing the pension tax,” Pohutsky said. 

Duggan also received significant criticism after his comments at the Detroit Policy Conference from Democrats, specifically his claims that education funding was held up by lawmakers seeking to pass legislation to allow transgender students to play on girls’ sports teams — which Democratic members of the legislature say never happened. 

Brinks and Pohutsky both agreed that the criticism might have played a role in his decision to seemingly change his tune on the trifecta — but more than that, led them to be distrustful of his campaign stances.

“I think he deserves the pushback he got. Going after vulnerable kids is not something that most voters appreciate,” Brinks, who has endorsed Democrat Jocelyn Benson in the gubernatorial race, said. “If he’s trying to pivot away from a losing argument, that’s not new in politics.”

“It makes me very leery of just trusting him, period,” Pohutsky said. “He specifically noted that he was a long-term supporter of bodily autonomy and LGBTQ rights, and that wasn’t going to change. And then last week he’s taking shots at one of the most vulnerable populations in the state and repeating Republican talking points in the middle of sounding lies about trans people.”

Duggan has throughout his campaign poised himself as a candidate outside of partisan ping-pong politics — at a Michigan Education Association forum earlier in February, he said that the state would “be stuck in Groundhog Day forever unless we do something different and have leadership that says, let’s bring the Republicans and Democrats in good will together.”

But the inconsistencies in his statements on the trifecta and how effective they were makes that harder to buy into for Pohutsky.

“I think that he is still trying to appeal to a Republican base without painting himself as an outright bigot. And that’s a personal problem for him to work out on his own,” she continued. “I think that this is just a really desperate attempt to try and distance himself from his long track record of being a partisan Democrat. It’s cheap, it’s duplicitous, and it just underlines how untrustworthy he is as a candidate and how untrustworthy he would be as a governor.”