Michigan’s 8th Congressional District is among 30 nationwide that President Trump won in 2016 but voted in a Democratic House member two years later. Now, Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin is seeking a second term as Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden tries to return Michigan to the blue column.
Slotkin, 44, a former Defense Department official and intelligence briefer for the Central Intelligence Agency, will face Republican Paul Junge, a former news anchor and attorney, who was a Trump appointee at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service.
The district, which the Cook Partisan Voter Index rates as “R+4,” is in southeastern Michigan. It includes the suburbs and exurbs between Detroit and Lansing as well as Livingston and Ingham counties and part of Oakland County.
Slotkin defeated two-term Republican incumbent Mike Bishop in the last election cycle by 4 points. In 2018, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer won it by 4 points over her GOP opponent, 50% to 46%, and Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow almost tied her 2018 Republican challenger John James in the district.
Slotkin’s reelection bid comes as Biden tries to win Michigan’s 16 electoral votes. The state went Republican in 2016 for the first time in a presidential race since 1988. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin also fell narrowly, handing Trump the keys to the White House.
Until April, Slotkin’s House race appeared to be defined by her support of Trump’s impeachment over the winter and the criticism she received from her constituents over it. But the coronavirus changed the trajectory of the race, with Slotkin emerging as a critic of Trump over his handling of the COVID-19 crisis.
Slotkin, a national security aide to former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, serves on House Armed Services Committee and the Committee on Homeland Security. She is part of a group of seven 2018 freshmen Democrats with national security backgrounds who wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post that supported the impeachment of Trump.
Junge was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and California. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and earned his law degree from the University of San Diego, and he later became a deputy district attorney in the state. He returned to Michigan to help his family’s contracting business and later decided to become a broadcast news anchor on Fox47 in Lansing.
