Christine Waugh-Fleischmann, an art teacher who says she spends up to $200 a week on gas driving to see her grandchildren, is a Democratic voter in mid-Michigan’s 7th Congressional District. One of the most competitive seats in the country, it is currently held by Republican Rep. Tom Barrett and she believes the seat can be flipped, partly due to the high price of gas.
“I do see a lot of people in my conservative neighborhood here who are very upset,” she told Reuters. “It’s gas. It’s grocery prices, it’s health care costs.”
The arithmetic of her frustration is easy to trace. After war broke out with Iran in late February, the average price of gas in Michigan jumped roughly 32% in three weeks, from $2.99 to $3.95 a gallon. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer declared a formal energy emergency to let southeast Michigan stations sell cheaper summer-blend fuel, citing both the war and tariffs. Prices kept climbing anyway — including a 90-cent spike in a single week, among the sharpest in any midterm battleground — briefly topping $4 before coming down in recent months.
Crisis, emergency orders, persistent pain heading into the fall: That is the narrative spine of Michigan’s midterms, and both parties know it.
A Ground Shift
Republicans spent years circling Michigan as their best 2026 pickup opportunity. Now doubts are creeping in. A Democrat won a special state Senate election in May by nearly 20 points in a district Kamala Harris carried by less than one, and President Donald Trump’s economic approval fell even among Republicans, from 74% to 62%, between March and April.
In a Climate Power survey of 600 likely Michigan voters conducted in mid-June, 42% of those polled, including 44% of independents, said they would be less likely to vote for a congressional candidate who supports Trump’s energy policies, as opposed to 21% who said they’d be more likely. And 58% said Trump has made energy prices more expensive, while 63% rejected his claim that high gas prices are a “small price to pay” for the war in Iran. Since the war began, 45% said they had grown more supportive of diversifying America’s energy sources, including solar and wind.
“Trump’s energy agenda is costing Michigan families at the pump and on their power bills — and voters know it,” said Tom Lenard, Climate Power’s Michigan director, warning that candidates who back it “do so at their own political peril.”
Not every voter in Barrett’s district sees it that way. Alexander Melton, a 38-year-old heating and air conditioning technician, told Reuters that he still backs the Republican congressman. “We don’t dictate the price of gas,” he said.
Affordability vs. the ‘Green New Scam’
In the Democratic Senate primary, which takes place Aug. 4, Haley Stevens, Mallory McMorrow and Abdul El-Sayed have all tied affordability messaging to clean energy — McMorrow, before exiting the race, called it “a freedom issue, it’s a cost issue” and argued that Democrats are “on the precipice” of lowering bills. Republican Mike Rogers, who’s running for a U.S. Senate seat for the second time, countered that the push for renewables is itself what is driving up Michigan’s energy costs.
Underneath the messaging war sits real economic damage. Michigan lost $4.1 billion in planned clean manufacturing investment and roughly 11,700 jobs after the Trump-era rollbacks, while $540 million in climate grants were canceled or delayed — including $156 million meant to help low-income residents install solar panels. And the administration ordered Consumers Energy to keep the J.H. Campbell coal plant running past its planned retirement, a move the state’s attorney general and other critics said will cost ratepayers more than transitioning away from it.
The fallout has cut across party lines. In March of last year Rep. John James of Shelby Township and at least seven other House Republicans called on their colleagues to preserve the Biden-era clean energy tax credits. “We must not neglect the sector-wide energy tax provisions that manufacturers and job creators rely on in my district,” James said.
Divided Government, Divided Stakes
The starkest fight is in Lansing. Michigan’s 2023 Clean Energy and Jobs Act requires 100% renewable electricity by 2040, but the November elections could determine the law’s future. House Republicans last month passed “Project Lighthouse,” a package that would repeal the clean energy mandates; its sponsor, state Rep. Pauline Wendzel, called the 2023 requirements “arbitrary” and said they help large investor-owned utilities instead of everyday ratepayers. The legislation is likely dead in the Democratic-held Senate — for now. But DTE Energy and Consumers Energy, the state’s largest utilities, will submit integrated resource plans in 2026 for the first time under the new law, meaning the election will set the ground rules just as they take effect.
Ben Poulson, state government affairs director for the Michigan League of Conservation Voters, argued the repeal legislation reaches further than its sponsors let on. “It repeals a lot of programs that we have been using to lower energy waste and lessens the accountability that we have on utility companies here in the state,” he told Planet Detroit.
Denise Keele, executive director of the Michigan Climate Action Network, said that climate change is showing up on the campaign trail under a different name. “We’re seeing it show up as energy affordability,” she said, noting that Michiganders pay some of the highest residential electricity and gas rates in the country. House Republicans, she said, “are essentially blaming clean and renewable energy as [to] why those energy prices are going up” — even though renewables make up only about 11% of the state’s mix and wind and solar are cheaper and faster to build. Her frustration cuts both ways: Not enough Democrats, she argued, are running on renewable energy’s success, a reticence she likened to what acclaimed environmental activist and journalist Bill McKibben calls “climate hushing.” The honest case — that prices will rise less with renewables than with fossil fuels — “is apparently too hard to message.”
Data Centers and Utility Money
The hottest flashpoint may be data centers, which have driven up utility rates while promising jobs — and split traditional Democratic constituencies. Gubernatorial frontrunner Jocelyn Benson, endorsed by the Michigan League of Conservation Voters at a Grand Rapids riverfront event, has pledged enforceable guardrails on data centers and utilities and a moratorium on companies that violate environmental standards. Her platform centers on expanding clean energy to lower utility bills, replacing aging water infrastructure and reinstating polluter pay laws.
But some unions back the data center projects. “We respectfully urge policymakers to support a responsible path forward for data center development that protects communities, grows the tax base, strengthens our workforce and keeps Michigan competitive for decades to come,” Douglas W. Stockwell, business manager and general vice president of Operating Engineers 324, testified at a hearing in Michigan’s House of Representatives.
Voter anger at the utilities is reshaping the money race, too. More than 150 Michigan politicians from both parties have pledged to reject campaign funding from Consumers Energy and DTE, according to the Michigan League of Conservation Voters — even as Consumers Energy requested another rate hike for its electricity customers this week.
“This is disgusting what’s happening and it’s exploitative, it’s extractive, it’s unethical,” said Jerry Norris, a Lansing community activist who said he is following the money this cycle. “It might not own everybody when they accept money like that, but it influences it, and it creates an obligation and it creates a debt,” he told WILX10.
For voters like Alexis Jones of Lansing, the debate comes down to a number on an envelope. His utility bill is “almost $400,” he said.
“It’s terrible. And not only do I have to look out for me, but I’ve got little munchkins, grandkids, to look after. And things are out of control.”
