When Mike Duggan, a Democrat, first ran for mayor of Detroit back in 2013, the city was a hot mess — a notorious symbol of urban decline.
With the auto industry in shambles and whites fleeing downtown for the suburbs in the wake of the nation's deadliest riots, the murder rate was soaring.
So was violent crime.
Factories were closing and buildings were being burned and abandoned. In the midst of the campaign, Detroit went broke — the largest municipal bankruptcy in the nation's history.
Few thought that Duggan, a former Wayne County executive and prosecutor who once headed the Detroit Medical Center, could win.
Thrown off the ballot for having filed his residency requirement too early, he ran as a write-in candidate. Another write-in candidate with virtually the same name — Dugan, with one "g" rather than two — was also on the ballot.
Defying the political odds, Duggan won — the first white to be elected mayor since 1969.
Now, three terms and 12 years later, Duggan, 66, presides over a revitalized city that his skillful stewardship helped save.
Once again, he is attempting to defy the political odds by running to succeed Gretchen Whitmer as governor in 2026 — not as a Democrat, but an independent.
No independent has ever won a statewide race for governor. But Duggan's decision late last year to run as an independent sent shock waves through Michigan politics, particularly among Democrats.
While many pollsters and political analysts doubt that an independent can win a gubernatorial contest in Michigan, Duggan disagrees.
In an interview with Newsmax, he said that because Americans, including Michiganders, were so polarized and suspicious of both political parties, "this is the time for an independent."
An increasing number of voters, he noted, no longer identify as either Democrats or Republicans.
According to a recent Gallup poll, some 27% of Michigan voters identified as Democrats, roughly the same percentage as those who identified as Republicans.
"But 43% of voters consider them-selves independents, and that number is growing," he said.
He claims to be undaunted by the fact that no independent has ever been elected to the state's top job. "I saw that nobody was dealing with the long-term problems of the state," he said.
"A white guy hadn't run for mayor [of Detroit] in anybody's memory either," he told a local TV station. "And nobody had ever run as a write-in for mayor." But he won — three times. Duggan is especially harsh on Democrats, the party with which he has traditionally identified for almost 40 years.
He didn't leave the party, he said. The party left him.
"I don't believe in identity politics," he said. "The working people of this country don't feel the Democrats relate to them. The only thing that unites Democrats is that they hate Republicans in general, and they hate Donald Trump specifically."
Bob Perkins, a political analyst at Sharp Arrow Consulting, said that while it was "theoretically possible" for an independent to win, polling conducted several years ago by Patrick Caddell and Scott Miller showed that to win, a third-party candidate would need to draw some 40% from both parties.
"An airplane needs two wings," Perkins said, quoting the late Caddell. "You must find issues on which both parties agree. That's politically complicated."
Doug Schoen, a former pollster for Bill Clinton, said that while Dug-gan has a 20% approval rating among voters — impressive, given that most Michiganders outside of Detroit do not yet know him — "Democratic candidates have 35% approval, and Republican candidates get 33%."
And while mayors tend to do well in the cities that know them, said Schoen, "they usually don't do well outside of those cities."
Duggan has asserted that the Democratic Party, specifically, the Democratic Governors Association, committed $3 million in ads "to smear me."
Opponents have deluged him and the mayor's office with Freedom of Information Act requests about his mayoral activities — or "looking for dirt," as Duggan called it.
Among other topics, the FOIA requests cover the renovation of his office — "there was none," he said; travel expenses charged to the city — Duggan said he paid for all his own travel; and communications about wide-ranging topics between him and his staff, and any of his emails or those of his staff containing swear words — specifically, the FOIA request states:
"the N-word, ICE, illegal, terrorism, socialism, towelhead, haji, acab, Palestinian, Israeli, Gaza, divest, boycott, sanction, idiot, and numerous other variations of racial and gender slurs."
Wavering between laughter, frustration, and outrage, he noted that opponents have not requested information about his accomplishments as mayor — including cutting Detroit's murder rate in half, attracting 10 auto-related companies to the city, or the addition of $1.2 billion worth of affordable housing.
Michigan, once among the bluest of states, has become decidedly less so in recent years.
Although Donald Trump lost Michigan to Joe Biden in 2020 by some 154,000 votes, Trump reclaimed the battleground state and its 15 electoral votes against Vice President Kamala Harris last year by 1.4%.
Though seven of Michigan's members of Congress are Republicans and six are Democrats, Michigan's two senators — Gary Peters and Elissa Slotkin — are Democrats.
So is the state Senate, though its house is narrowly controlled by Republicans. Whitmer, who is term-limited and cannot run again, is also a Democrat.
By running as an independent, Duggan will not have to raise money for what is expected to be a bruising Democratic Party primary in a crowded field. Jocelyn Benson, Michigan's state secretary, has already declared her candidacy, as have Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II and Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson, but the list of Democrat con-tenders could well grow.
Declared Republican candidates as of May include Rep. John James, state Sen. Aric Nesbitt, and former state Attorney General Mike Cox.
In addition to raising large sums of money from the state's business community, which has handsomely supported him as mayor, Duggan said he has already begun campaigning throughout the state, just as he initially did in Detroit.
He has already picked up some important support. In May, he got the endorsement of 150 pastors, many of them Black who had traditionally sup-ported Democrats. Several of them publicly praised him for reducing neighborhood blight and crime, and for bringing jobs to Michigan's largest city.
Duggan has defended Whitmer, whom some prominent Democrats have criticized for going to Washing-ton to try and persuade Trump to pro-vide emergency aid for Michigan and win assurances that a vital military base will not be shut down.
She, in turn, has taken no position on who should succeed her, refusing to endorse any of the Democrat contenders.