Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer wins re-election, defeating GOP challenger Tudor Dixon

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer defeated Republican challenger Tudor Dixon on Tuesday, securing her bid for re-election and keeping a Democrat atop the critical swing state, NBC News projects.

Whitmer, who gained a national following during the early days of the pandemic and is viewed as a future contender for higher office, had been seen as a top target for Republicans in 2022.

Polls tightened over the closing weeks. But Whitmer held on, boosted by tens of millions of dollars in ad spending that Dixon, a former right-wing commentator endorsed by former President Donald Trump, never matched.

Whitmer made the shortlist as President Joe Biden searched for a running mate in 2020 and has been the subject of future White House speculation. She also has been a frequent foil to Trump — “that woman in Michigan,” he called her dismissively during the Covid-19 lockdowns. And she was the target of a kidnapping plot by men unhappy with her restrictions during the pandemic.

Trump has given few states as much attention as he has given Michigan, which Biden won by about 154,000 votes, or 2.8 percentage points, in 2020. He endorsed a slate of candidates up and down the ballot, many of them outspoken election deniers, and in the closing days of the GOP primary for governor endorsed Dixon, who had tiptoed around the issue of 2020 while indulging in unfounded conspiracy theories that cast doubt on the results.

“I believe that there was enough fraud in the election that we have to be very concerned and we have to have the strong election laws that the legislature passed to make sure our elections are fair in the future,” she told MLive in July.

Dixon’s emergence from the primary field came after several more viable candidates were disqualified and Michigan’s influential DeVos family — including Betsy DeVos, Trump’s former education secretary who resigned after the Jan. 6 insurrection — threw their financial support to her.

Rather than tack to the center after clinching the nomination, Dixon leaned harder on her socially conservative positions and eagerness to fight the culture wars. On primary night, she poked at Whitmer’s support for transgender rights by calling the governor by the gender-neutral term “birthing parent” and questioning who the “real woman” in the race was.

Early general election polls showed Whitmer leading, aided by money that her campaign and an outside group affiliated with the Democratic Governors Association had put onto Michigan’s airwaves. Despite Michigan’s swing-state status, Republicans were slow to invest there and never caught up with the other side’s spending. Even so, polls showed a closer race brewing over the final week.