Gretchen Whitmer has strengths that Joe Biden lacks and will believe she can beat Donald Trump if she is a late stand-in as Democrat nominee for president, according to her former top aide.
The Michigan governor’s name has been swirling for months as one of the possible candidates who could replace Mr Biden were he to pull out of the race for the White House.
The rising star of the Democrats was again being put forward by frantic Democrats after Thursday night’s disastrous debate which saw Mr Biden, 81, repeatedly stumble over his words and lose his train of thought.
After the catastrophic night, Ms Whitmer, 52, who garnered national attention for her strict pandemic laws and for being the victim of a kidnap plot, doubled down on her support for Mr Biden, saying the difference between the Democrat leader and his opponent “could not be clearer”.
But Mark Burton, who was Ms Whitmer’s top aide for more than a decade, said he thinks Ms Whitmer believes she could beat Trump in the 2024 election.
“I think she has always looked at her ascension over time in politics as an inherent comparison against the other candidate,” Mr Burton told The Telegraph, pointing to when she took on Rick Snyder, Michigan’s former Republican governor.
“I think she would view this similarly in terms of, she probably thinks ‘I’m capable of... first off, beating Donald Trump’,” he said.
“I think she looks at it that way, and says, ‘I can certainly, through a campaign, beat Donald Trump and secondly, I think govern better than Donald Trump could govern over the next four years’,” he added.
The popular Michigan politician last year trounced her Trump-backed Republican rival when she was re-elected as governor of the key battleground state, winning the vote of urban and suburban voters.
Ms Whitmer, who has been vilified by Trump himself, has become a bogeyman of the right after helping secure abortion access, expanding protections for LGBTQ+ residents and gun control measures.
The sweeping changes in the Great Lakes State and other pockets of the Midwest had been dubbed the “Tea Party in reverse” by one of Ms Whitmer’s advisers in the New Yorker.
Mr Burton said he couldn’t comment on whether Ms Whitmer thinks she would be a more effective candidate than Mr Biden, but said she’s “certainly got strengths that he doesn’t”.
He listed some of her strong points as being of the next generation, providing a greater contrast to Trump, her “disarming” sense of humour and her “superpower” of being able to communicate with anyone from CEOs to miners.
“Unfortunately, the electorate makes up its mind on certain issues very, very early and on the questions of age with the president, you know, I think, I think most people have already made up their mind on that point,” he said.
Responding to Mr Burton’s comments, a spokesperson for Governor Whitmer’s Fight Like Hell PAC said that Ms Whitmer “supports President Biden 100 percent” and that Mr Burton had not spoken to the Michigan governor in years.
A spokesperson for Ms Whitmer’s office added: “Mark Burton only served a brief stint in the administration and left our office in early 2020. He does not have any insight into the governor’s thinking now and she has not spoken to him in years.”
Ms Whitmer’s memoir, True Gretch: What I’ve Learned About Life, Leadership, and Everything in Between, will be released in July.
Publishing an autobiography is often seen as a natural move by politicians hoping to continue climbing the political ladder.
A child of a bipartisan family, Ms Whitmer learned from a young age how to move in circles with differing political beliefs.
The daughter of Sherry, a lawyer who worked for the state’s Democratic attorney general and her husband Richard, who served in the cabinet of a late Republican governor, Ms Whitmer and her two sisters grew up in Grand Rapids.
Ms Whitmer, who dreamed of becoming an ESPN anchor, worked in the football office at Michigan State University before her father urged her to intern with a Democratic house leader.
Political ladder
She climbed the political ladder, serving in the state’s house of representatives from 2001 to 2006 and in the Michigan senate from 2006 to 2015.
She first ran for governor in 2018 and won by a landslide, later assuming office in January 2019. She was re-elected in 2022 with 54 per cent of the vote.
Ms Whitmer issued one of the strictest stay-at-home orders in the nation during the coronavirus pandemic, making her deeply unpopular among conservatives, who drew up a petition for her impeachment. Trump called on his followers to “Liberate Michigan” from Gretchen “Half-Whitmer”.
On 30 April, 2020, armed protesters marched to the Michigan Capitol to protest Ms Whitmer’s stay-at-home order, and demanded police officers guarding the building let them in.
Months later a string of men were arrested for conspiring to kidnap Ms Whitmer. Nine were later sentenced or pleaded guilty of crimes connected to the plot which involved arms training and watching her holiday home.
“I’m not as carefree as I used to be, in terms of walking into a big room of people,” Ms Whitmer previously told the New Yorker. “I’m changed by it.”
