Whitmer eventually won Oakland County by seventeen points, and, with it, the governorship. Her campaign had coincided with news of the Larry Nassar case, in which dozens of gymnasts came forward to say that the East Lansing doctor had abused them. Whitmer often told her aides at the time, “Women are angry.” But the Republicans kept control of the legislature. In the first year of her term, they defeated an expansive education plan and a gas tax that Whitmer had wanted to fund her roads program. “We were struggling,” a Whitmer aide said.

But the pandemic, which hit Detroit early and hard, reset Michigan’s politics. Garlin Gilchrist, the lieutenant governor and a Motor City native, kept a tally of the people he personally knew who had died of COVID-19, which eventually came to twenty-seven. I asked him how the Whitmer administration had balanced suppressing the disease and keeping the economy and the schools afloat. He said that was a false choice: “People who are dead can’t participate in economic activity.”

Whitmer had made a similar calculation. The medical historians, she told me, had emphasized that in the last pandemic, the 1918-20 flu, children had died at disproportionately high rates. “I gotta tell you,” she said, “all I could think about was: what if all the second to eighth graders were all of a sudden dying? Could I live with myself not having pulled the kids out of schools to keep them alive?” Whitmer issued nearly two hundred COVID-related emergency orders in 2020, and instituted one of the longest and most comprehensive lockdowns in the Midwest. Once the crisis receded, she admitted in a radio interview that, in many cases, her rules did not “make a lot of sense.” But she defended the approach: “I think that deaths were the right north star.”

Politically, Whitmer had developed an instinct for the tête-à-tête, which tended to both raise her profile and come at a cost. During a March, 2020, appearance on MSNBC, she’d pointedly criticized the Trump Administration’s response to the pandemic, and soon the President was sneering at “that woman from Michigan.” (He also instructed Mike Pence, then the chair of the White House coronavirus task force, not to take her calls.) As resistance to her executive orders grew, especially in rural Michigan, gym owners and barbers who defied the law and stayed open became folk heroes; by April, 2020, it was common for lawmakers to find armed men surrounding the state capitol. “Every day, when I came to do my job,” Gilchrist told me, “I had people standing along the sidewalks leading to the state capitol with guns raised, like I was going through a starting lineup at a basketball game.”

On April 30, 2020—eight months before the January 6th riot—armed protesters moved into the capitol in Lansing and gathered outside the doors of the House chamber, confronting the police who guarded the doors. Legislators could hear military boots in the hallways, and people chanting, “Let us in!” One representative recalled taking cover behind a colleague, who was a former cop and carried a gun. No one was injured, but, that October, the F.B.I. arrested thirteen militiamen affiliated with a group called the Wolverine Watchmen, who had conducted arms training and surveilled the Governor’s vacation home, in northern Michigan, with plans to kidnap her and abandon her in a boat in the middle of Lake Michigan. Nine days after the arrests, Trump held a rally in Muskegon, where he denounced Whitmer and his crowd chanted, “Lock her up!”

In person, Whitmer is highly rehearsed but she also jokes often, sometimes to lighten the darker moments of her political career. During a recent lunch in her offices, on the third floor of the capitol, she maintained steady eye contact over a kale salad that she hardly touched. At her public events these days, the audience has to be vetted beforehand. Her husband recently retired from his dental practice because of threats against the Governor and her family. “I’m not as carefree as I used to be, in terms of walking into a big room of people,” Whitmer told me. “I’m changed by it.”

Reporters eventually discovered that at least one of the lead conspirators in the kidnapping plot had appeared that summer at a political event with the Republican majority leader of the state senate, Mike Shirkey, who, in a speech at Hillsdale College, the conservative Christian liberal-arts school, had said that Whitmer was on “the batshit-crazy spectrum.” (Shirkey later suggested a willingness to fight the Governor on the capitol lawn and called the January 6th insurrection a “hoax.”) Whitmer told me that on Shirkey’s next birthday she sent him a cake decorated with a flying bat, to make light of the situation and to try to repair a relationship she needed. “Sometimes I want to be the mean cop,” she said, “but I gotta be the good cop.”

Conservative politics in Michigan is thick with temporary exiles and early retirees. Caught out by the turn toward MAGA-ism, they spend most of the year in Florida, work with corporate clients on political messaging, and pass around news articles about loopy things people do in Macomb County. (“Man charged with assault after hitting Warren store clerk with frozen fish,” ran the headline on one I was forwarded.) In 2020, Snyder, who remains a Republican, said publicly that he would vote for Joe Biden. Few have faith that the Party as they knew it will return. One former state Party official told me that he held out hope that Peter Meijer, a moderate, wealthy former G.O.P. congressman from Grand Rapids, would run for the U.S. Senate next year, but, if he didn’t, “it could be ten years or more until we’re competitive in Michigan again. It just might need the passage of time.”

One afternoon this spring, I drove to a biker bar in Cement City, in rural Hillsdale County, to meet with Susy Avery, a renowned fund-raiser who is close to the DeVoses and had been the state Republican Party chair under Snyder. (“We’ll have some adult beverages,” Avery had told me cheerily, over the phone.) When I arrived, she was in a corner booth, upbeat and effusive, nursing a Crown Royal and ginger ale. “This is not my first rodeo—I’ve lived through a lot,” Avery said. “This time in Michigan politics is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It’s very challenging.”

The challenge had to do with cash. As the rich suburbs had turned toward Whitmer, Avery went on, they had taken with them much of the state G.O.P.’s donor base, leaving the Party ever more dependent on a few billionaires and the business community, which Democrats were busy wooing with a sanity-and-stability pitch. Younger Republican candidates, Avery said, “are very good at social media, but you just cannot raise money on social media.” In the 2022 cycle, this had led to an unusual situation in which the G.O.P. chairmanship in Michigan was shared by a wealthy real-estate developer from Ann Arbor named Ron Weiser, who had been George W. Bush’s Ambassador to Slovakia, and a MAGA activist named Meshawn Maddock.

That was an obviously unstable pairing. The Republicans failed to gather enough signatures to get their top two choices on the gubernatorial ballot, and wound up nominating a conservative media personality named Tudor Dixon. After the Dobbs decision, Dixon was asked about a hypothetical case in which a fourteen-year-old victim of incest would not be able to get an abortion. She called this the “perfect example” of why it had been correct to overturn Roe; the statement soon became the centerpiece of an avalanche of pro-Whitmer ads. Some fact checkers in Michigan concluded that the Democrats had taken Dixon’s quote out of context, but Whitmer saw an opportunity.

“I remember thinking, I can’t believe this,” Whitmer said. “For the first month after she won the primary, that’s all we communicated on.” Whitmer had been preparing for a post-Roe campaign since the night that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, in September, 2020. Her administration had already sued to force the state Supreme Court to clarify whether a 1931 Michigan law banning abortion would go into effect if Roe were overturned. The court ruled that it would not, but the decision was open to appeal. In response, the Governor’s liberal allies launched a campaign to include on the November ballot a question about establishing a state constitutional right to abortion. Whitmer held roundtables across the state. “It was one of those things where we always said that the overwhelming majority of people support reproductive rights, but who’s really polled it, right?” she said. Now, she went on, women were seated next to her, saying, “ ‘I’ve never voted for a Democrat, but I’m out knocking on doors for you.’ ” In the fall, the amendment passed by thirteen points, three more than Whitmer’s own double-digit victory. Whitmer said, “I do think we built a different kind of coalition than Democrats have relied on before.”

After the Republicans lost badly in the midterms, the two chairs resigned and were replaced by a right-wing grassroots activist, Kristina Karamo, who just months earlier had been rejected for a paid position as a canvasser over concerns about her podcast appearances, in which she argued that Beyoncé and yoga were satanic. (“And you should see her divorce filings,” Whitmer said to me over a conference table in the capitol, raising her eyebrows; in 2014, during a car ride with her ex-husband, Karamo, in the passenger seat, allegedly reached for the wheel and yelled, “Fuck it, I’ll kill us all!” Karamo has denied that this happened.) As the new head of the state Party, Karamo announced plans to shutter the longtime G.O.P. headquarters in Lansing and operate instead with only a post-office box in Grand Rapids. Avery and two other former chairs, as trustees, had to help close down the old headquarters, taking a long look around an emptied-out building that they no longer had anything to do with.