• Tens of thousands protest Donald Trump policies on Saturday in dozens of rallies statewide
• Even so, Democrats are struggling on how best to regain trust of voters and unify after crushing 2024 losses
• Few embody the split more than Attorney General Dana Nessel and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer

LANSING — Tens of thousands of Democrats across Michigan protested President Donald Trump on Saturday as part of a nationwide resistance that Attorney General Dana Nessel called "the only way we're going to take back our country" from "this wannabe tyrant king in the White House."

Notably absent from the widespread demonstrations: Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a second-term Democrat who has criticized some Trump policies but has also vowed to work with him to find "common ground" that benefits Michigan.

Six months into Trump's second term, Democratic officials are at odds over how to rehabilitate their party’s image and shape its response to Trump’s sweeping political project ahead of 2026 elections that will decide Michigan’s next governor, an open US Senate seat, the state Legislature, Congress and more. 

The identity crisis threatens the party’s ability to regain the trust of voters in a state Trump won last year — and salvage recent policy agendas advanced under Democrats like Whitmer and former President Joe Biden.  

“I don't think you can evaluate Michigan Democrats as a collective right now,” said Rep. Jason Morgan of Ann Arbor, who was recently a state party vice chair. 

“I think you see some Democrats out there fighting hard on every front, all the time, everywhere, in all the ways,” he said, “and you have others who are being quieter and not fighting that hard.”

At the onset of Trump’s first term, liberal activists quickly laid the groundwork for a coordinated grassroots opposition movement. There hasn’t been the same momentum in 2025, but they're hoping this weekend’s protests, held in more than 70 locations throughout Michigan, could portend a shift.

And activists are hoping the demonstrations send a message that moves the party as well: “Democrats have a vested interest in maintaining the system, adjusting it to make it a little better for them,” said Nathan Derusha, the founder of 50501 Michigan, which organized a protest at the state Capitol in Lansing. 

“But what we really need — and what they’re not gonna give us — is progress. The reason we’re here is because (Democrats) were not doing what we needed them to.”

Democratic officials find themselves caught between competing interests. Many in the party base want their leaders vocally and visibly resisting an administration they see as a threat to democracy. But there’s also the impulse to moderate in a battleground state with a very purple electorate.

“We need to energize our base … we need to feel like there's leaders in place fighting for us,” said Midland County Democratic Party chair Jennifer Austin. “But also, if you are a leader, you are going to have to find a way to work with this administration in some respects.”

‘What governing means’

Whitmer — a potential 2028 presidential candidate — has frustrated some members of her own party by sitting on the sidelines for much of the early resistance to Trump’s second term.

Whitmer is trying to find ways to work with Trump for the benefit of the state, she told Bridge Michigan earlier this year — days after she sat next to the president at a White House dinner. 

She has since returned to the White House, lobbying Trump alongside Republican state House Speaker Matt Hall to station fighter jets in Macomb County, battle Asian Carp and more. 

“That’s what governing means — you work with anyone to get things done,” Whitmer said in her February State of the State address.

She is not alone in her approach. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul convinced Trump to reverse his administration’s stop-work order on a multi-billion-dollar offshore wind farm by personally lobbying the president.

But some fellow Democrats have publicly challenged Whitmer’s tactics. 

“The reward you get for cozying up to Trump is him threatening to pardon the terrorists who plotted to kidnap and murder you,” Nessel wrote on social media two weeks ago after the president said he was considering pardons for men convicted on federal charges in the 2020 plot. 

Big turnout at the Michigan Capitol for a “No Kings” day protest. Organizer estimates at least 8,000. pic.twitter.com/cNxb82jKu3

— Simon D. Schuster (@Simon_Schuster) June 14, 2025

And when Whitmer said Trump had promised her he would not free the men from prison, Nessel responded on CNN: “If Gov. Whitmer thinks that his promise alone will be enough, then unfortunately, I got a bridge to sell her.

Saturday, at an anti-Trump protest in Midland, Nessel urged an aggressive approach, telling attendees they need to keep “putting pressure” on Trump’s cabinet, and Congress, to “impeach Trump.”

“We can't be quiet, we can't hide, we can't lay down,” Nessel said. “We have to stand up and be even stronger than we have ever been.”

Nessel is already part of at least 18 lawsuits challenging Trump’s actions in his second term —Including litigation that alleges Trump is attempting to "illegally coerce" states into sweeping immigration enforcement by threatening to withhold unrelated federal funding — even as Whitmer continues to seek assistance from his administration, including for a potential microchip facility in Michigan.

Few Democrats are interested in openly criticizing Whitmer by name, but the rebukes have been implicit, with some current and former party leaders questioning whether “appeasers” are normalizing the Trump administration. 

“To see Democratic leaders in various positions act as if this is just business as usual is very demoralizing to the Democratic Party,” said Austin, the Midland party chair. 

Whitmer, whose office did not respond to a request for comment on this story, has welcomed her recent dialogue with Trump. 

And she’s touted results: The president has committed to a new fighter jet mission at Selfridge Air National Guard Base, which he announced alongside Whitmer in April, and backed a Brandon Road Lock and Dam project to stop invasive Carp from reaching the Great Lakes.

"I'm going to take every opportunity to make the case for Michigan — and it's worked to our benefit," Whitmer said last month at the Mackinac Policy Conference.

In an interview, Michigan Democratic Party chair Curtis Hertel pushed back on the notion Democrats aren’t on the same page.

“I think it's positive that we have different approaches. … but I certainly see a pretty unified front,” he said. “The governor has always been somebody who would work across the aisle if it betters the people of Michigan's lives.”

At least one poll has suggested Whitmer’s approach remains popular in Michigan, a purple state that she and Trump have both won twice.

A May survey by Democratic pollster Impact Research suggested 63% of Michiganders think she is doing a good job as governor, and 61% say she's working well with both parties.

A separate May survey by Glengariff Inc. found Michigan voters more divided on Whitmer, with 52% giving her favorable ratings, compared to 40% negative.

‘Go on offense’

The debate extends beyond rhetoric and to the party’s platform. 

Democrats lost working class voters by a wide margin in 2024, with 54% of non-college voters backing Trump. About 57% of union households, long considered a bastion of Democratic support, voted for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research.

“Now, white college graduates outnumber both minority voters and white non-college voters in the Democratic Party electoral coalition,” said Matt Grossmann, a political science professor at Michigan State University. “That has made a difference to who the party is responsive to.”

Democrats, including Whitmer and US Sen. Elissa Slotkin, have united in opposition against federal legislation that threatens to cut spending on Medicaid, arguing it would destabilize the country’s healthcare system. 

“This bill means that everyone in this room and everyone watching is either at risk of losing their health care or paying more for their health care,” Slotkin said at a recent Democratic town hall, urging listeners to “make this a health care conversation.

Slotkin won a razor-thin election to the US Senate last year on a moderate platform. She was recently the lone Democrat to vote to block California’s 2035 phase-out of gasoline-powered cars — a resolution sponsored in the House by Republican US Rep. John James of Shelby Township, who recently joined the 2026 Michigan governor’s race. 

“It is my privilege to fight on your behalf,” Slotkin said at the town hall. “But make no mistake, the way that we change the country is when we turn those swing voters, those middle voters, those uninterested voters.”

Elected Michigan Democrats have also begun to stake out positions increasingly far from their party’s liberal flank.

Three state House Democrats joined Republicans to support a bill banning transgender students from school sports, and up to seven supported a Republican road-funding plan that would gut economic development funds appointed to electric vehicle manufacturing facilities.

Slotkin, who had argued Democrats have to prove to voters they are not “weak and woke,” has been pitching a new vision for the party that is as much a rebrand to a more masculine tone as it is a reorientation of priorities. 

She is expected to deliver a speech next week in Washington about the "need for Democrats to go on offense," her office announced Friday. 

That could help target a voting demographic Democrats saw slip away in 2024: young men, who Gretchen Whitmer has also focused on. Whitmer appealed to young men in her State of the State address and continues to reach out to them. 

But there remains a progressive contingent of the party that feels it needs to turn toward economic populism to win back voters it lost. Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate for Michigan’s open US Senate seat, spoke at a March rally headlined by Sen. Bernie Sanders in Warren that drew more than 10,000 supporters

Democrats have been too swayed by corporate interests, according to El-Sayed, who ran for governor in 2018 but finished second to Whitmer in the party’s primary.

“Right now, we have to choose between working people versus, unfortunately, the people who they work for,” El-Sayed said in an interview with Bridge. “And I think we’ve got to choose working people.”

If Democrats don’t realign themselves around policies meant to reduce economic inequality, El-Sayed said, Democrats are destined to lose in the midterms.

“We fail, because when we get power, we pull our punches out of fear of upsetting our corporate donors, and we don't deliver for people in the most meaningful ways they need,” Rep. Betsy Coffia, the state’s northernmost Democratic legislator, told Bridge in an interview.

‘We don’t have anything for normal people’

Michigan Democrats, for the time being, are attempting move beyond their identity crisis to focus on more pressing developments: 

Federal immigration authorities have staked out a Detroit court to detain migrants attending hearings, on-and-off again tariffs threaten automotive supply chains and Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and US Marines to quell protests in Los Angeles have all sparked concerns among Democrats. 

Whitmer has strongly criticized the possibility of Medicaid and food assistance cuts backed by Trump, albeit without naming the president. And she recently  joined in a Democratic Governor’s Association memo calling Trump’s move to deploy troops “ineffective and dangerous.” 

Those events invigorated attendance at protests that spread across the state Saturday, thanks to a constellation of liberal groups organizing a nationwide retort to Trump’s military parade in Washington, DC.

Among the thousands of protestors who congregated on the state Capitol lawn Saturday, attendees who spoke with Bridge had mixed reviews for how Democrats had handled things. 

Amanda Lawrence, a 35-year-old from Lansing, said what she has seen from the party is “a bit lackluster.”

“It’s really frustrating that the party isn’t stepping up and fighting back as strong as we need to be,” she said.

While Katherine Hanson, from East Lansing, had strong criticism for Democrats at the federal level and said they “need to do some soul-searching,” she praised Whitmer, who she said was “doing her job” by appealing to Trump.

Many, though, had reservations about the party as a whole, and felt it had lost its roots.

Democrats have become too “upper-class focused,” said Nikhil Vashee, who protested at the state Capitol. 

“We don’t have anything for normal people."