Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) said Monday she was running for U.S. Senate in 2024.
Her announcement comes after Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) said in January that she would not seek reelection next year.
In a video to kick off her Senate campaign, Slotkin said the nation appears to be “living crisis to crisis”—but there are “certain things that should be really simple, like living a middle-class life in the state that invented the middle class.”
The 46-year-old Slotkin is a former CIA and Defense Department official currently in her third term in the House of Representatives.
Slotkin is the first Democrat to announce she’s running for a seat that will be crucial to the Democrats’ efforts to maintain control of the Senate; the party currently holds a two-seat majority in the upper chamber. The only other candidate in the race so far is Republican Nikki Snyder, a State Board of Education member.
Following the midterm elections, the current political climate in Michigan favors Democrats; however, the state is expected to maintain its position as one of the nation’s most hardened battlegrounds in 2024.
That said, only one Michigan Republican has held a seat in the Senate in the past 40 years. It was Stabenow who defeated Republican Sen. Spence Abraham in the year 2000.
