Around midday on a crisp Monday eight days before the 2018 midterm elections, Michigan Secretary of State candidate Jocelyn Benson was methodically pitching herself to a selection of potential voters at a coffee shop on Livernois Avenue in Detroit. Benson, 41, nearly always wears blue while campaigning, and her royal-hued dress seemed to glow as she swept the room.
“I’m running to shorten our wait times and to protect democracy,” Benson explained, her tone businesslike, to a dreadlocked 22-year-old woman who goes by Fey. “The secretary of state oversees all of our elections, so my goal is to make Michigan a place where it’s easier to vote and where more people have access to the ballot box.” After politely shifting the conversation to net neutrality, Fey pulled out a deck of Tarot cards.
“Do you want to draw a card?” she asked Benson.
Benson eyed the deck hesitantly. “All right,” she agreed.
“Oh, that’s a very good one,” Fey exclaimed, flashing “The Wheel of Fortune” card, which symbolizes change or destiny.
“Oh! Well, that’s encouraging.”
“Yeah. It’s like, ‘Take a spin on the Wheel of Fortune!’” Fey said, putting on a booming announcer voice. “You know? It’s a wild card.”
The exact role of secretary of state varies across the country, but the person in that job is largely responsible for making sure elections run smoothly, which gives them a fair amount of power that, in the past, has generally flown well under the radar. Though the secretary of state doesn’t pass laws and has additional responsibilities outside of running elections, it’s a relatively simple fact that the person who decides polling place locations, maintains voter rolls, promotes and implements election-related legislation, and helps determine the state’s election security measures can have significant influence in a system where a citizen’s right to vote is not guaranteed.
While several other Democratic secretary of state candidates in swing states are locked in tighter races, Benson is polling four points ahead of her Republican opponent, according to one poll, and 11 points ahead according to another. Name recognition for both candidates is quite low, however, and 17 percent of likely voters say they’re undecided. Besides, it’s bad luck these days to trust polls. “The only poll that matters is the one on election day,” Benson repeated like a mantra (though her campaign has run internally polling). And yet, while her political future will technically be determined by voters on Tuesday (who have in the past proven themselves unimpressed by hyper-qualified women candidates), it’s hard to imagine Jocelyn Benson’s destiny going anything other than exactly as planned.
When Benson speaks, her face scrunches earnestly and her hands punch the air in a precise, orderly rhythm, as if performing a sacred dance titled “Woman Who Knows What She’s Doing.” Benson has a master’s degree from Oxford University, where she researched the international sociological implications of the neo-Nazi movement, and a law degree from Harvard Law School, during which she worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and, upon graduating, clerked in Detroit for Judge Damon Keith, a civil rights icon. She wrote a book about the Secretary of State’s office in 2010 (which is referenced on the Wikipedia page for the role), the same year she narrowly lost out on the position to Republican Ruth Johnson, and in 2012, at age 35, became the youngest woman in U.S. history to lead an accredited law school after being named Dean of Wayne State University Law School. She recently served as CEO of the Ross Initiative in Sports for Equality and sits on the boards of the Southern Poverty Law Center and iCivics, a nonprofit founded by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
Her list of credentials is so long that they, as demonstrated, don’t fit in a single paragraph, and she seems to have mastered the art of speaking the absolute maximum number of words before taking a breath. She can passionately discuss the benefits of risk-limiting post-election audits until your eyes water. She was forcefully endorsed by the Michigan Free Press, whose last endorsement for the role eight years ago went to the aforementioned Johnson. In 2015, she became the second-youngest woman inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame (the youngest is Serena Williams). She ran the Boston Marathon while she was eight months pregnant. She tells a story that begins with her love for the HBO drama The Newsroom and ends with her becoming close friends with actor Amanda Seyfried, who came to Michigan to campaign for her. In her spare time, she is working on a novel.
To say Jocelyn Benson is prepared to step into the role of secretary of state in Michigan is perhaps an understatement. She seems fairly ready to run a country, or a mission to Pluto; the overwhelming tangle of election security and voting rights challenges facing the country in 2018 are tightly organized by bullet-point in her brain. But Benson is not the only formidable Democratic candidate hoping to reclaim the office—across the formerly sleepy, bureaucratic landscape of secretary of state races, Democratic candidates around the U.S. are mounting election security and anti-voter suppression campaigns in a political environment where those goals have become increasingly polarized by party, and where those threats may well impact their own chances of being elected. The secretary of state race, though still far from a marquee focus, is beginning to outgrow its tedious reputation. As many have noticed over the past few years, democracy is only boring when it’s functioning properly.
The day moved quickly. After briefly paying respects to Bishop P.A. Brooks, a prominent leader in the Church of Christ in God and a supporter of Benson’s campaign, we stopped by her handsome brick house in Detroit’s affluent Sherwood Forest neighborhood to drop something off for the nanny (her son is now two, and Benson has benefited from a recent FEC ruling allowing campaign funds to cover childcare costs) and then moved on to Oakland County, where we visited an office for the state Democratic party.
“When we see and lament the challenges that are happening across our country, and even here in our state that we’ve experienced firsthand, from the water crisis in Flint, to the environmental crises around our state, to the inequality in our schools, to the challenges of driving on the roads, our ability to turn all of that around starts in eight days,” Benson told a group of about 20 phone banking volunteers. Applause rang out. An older male volunteer told Benson she was beautiful; she laughed politely.
“Are you worried about violence at the polls next week?” another volunteer asked. Some people had aired concerns while she was canvassing, she said.
“I’m always worried,” Benson replied calmly. “I started my career investigating violence and hate crimes in the south and throughout the country, and I grew up in Pittsburgh, by the way, so I think that’s an unfortunate reality of our world, and it always has been. But our democracy is a beautiful way of protecting against violence, and ensuring that people’s voices are really what determines who has power in our democracy, and so I believe in that.
“Look,” she added, “When I think about violence, I think about the people who stood at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 and faced violence so that everyone could have the right to vote. We all need to be courageous and brave in times like these. We’ve gotta be undeterred.” A few minutes later, the phone banking resumed.
Monday's campaign activities ended with a crowded meet and greet for Democratic candidates in Macomb County, one of the famed working class suburbs that flipped from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. A Republican campaign tracker (someone employed by the opposing party to film candidates in case they say something politically damaging) typed on his phone boredly, his camera firmly off, as Benson spoke animatedly about her history of “setting goals and meeting them.”
In the parking lot after her speech, as the setting sun turned our concrete surroundings a pleasant shade of golden-peach, Benson and two campaign staffers laughed. “He gave up on us a long time ago,” she remarked dryly. Though, as she’d mentioned, she began her career investigating white supremacists groups at the Southern Poverty Law Center, Benson is running a campaign that has been deliberately sapped of high-pitch emotional appeals, aggressive anti-Trump rhetoric, or overt progressivism.
“It can sometimes be isolating, because I'm not a traditional candidate,” Benson said, turning to face me in the back seat as her deputy campaign manager, a 22-year-old Harvard graduate named Sally, drove us back towards downtown Detroit. “I'm not always going to be the firebrand that says ‘down with Republicans,’ because I don't believe that. I think we're all in this together, I think no party has all the solutions—that's why I love democracy, because everyone gets their voice heard.
“But I'm not running for governor,” she added. “I'm running to run our elections. And I think that's exactly the type of leader you want.”
Benson’s brand of aggressive aisle-crossing competency stands in somewhat surreal contrast to the broader political reality. A few days before I joined her on the campaign trail, explosive devices were sent to various high-profile targets of Trump’s rhetoric and two black senior citizens were murdered by a racist gunman at a Kentucky grocery store. One day before I arrived, Brazil elected a militant fascist endorsed by the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and the following day, the President would announce he was sending 5,200 U.S. troops—no, 15,000 troops—to guard the border from the same “invasion” of impoverished asylum-seeking refugees that had inspired the massacre of Jewish congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday. On my way to Detroit, a man in the San Jose airport was yelling at an airline representative in the ticketing line as his wife sobbed. “He told us to ‘go back to our country,’” the man was saying, referring to another customer who’d evidently fled the scene. “I am an American citizen! I have my papers!”
It may feel like we’re in the early chapters of a poorly-written novel about the apocalyptic implosion of Western civilization, but that is almost certainly not the book Benson is writing. One could make the argument—as she implicitly does—that this particular officeholder, the one who certifies elections, needs to be seen as credible by the widest possible swathe of constituents. And though the question lingers as to whether credibility still exists on a bipartisan scale, her campaign appears poised for success. As long as voters remember her name—and what “secretary of state” means.
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Ellie Shechet is a reporter living in Brooklyn.
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