President Whitmer: Could the Midwest Become the Center of U.S. Industrial Policy?

Hero photo: File:001 Car factory assembly line - Opel factory in Gliwice, Poland.jpg — Marek Ślusarczyk (Tupungato), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

01 The record and the scenario

Gretchen Whitmer's verifiable industrial-policy record is the most extensive of any governor in the 2028 conversation. After Ford chose Kentucky and Tennessee for a battery campus in 2021 — a snub that stunned Michigan lawmakers — she and the legislature built the $2 billion Strategic Outreach and Attraction Reserve (SOAR) fund, the state's first large-scale deal-closing subsidy pot. The deals followed: Ford's $3.5 billion BlueOval Battery Park in Marshall backed by roughly $1.7 billion in state incentives (including a $210 million Critical Industry Program grant and a Renaissance Zone worth $772 million over 15 years), GM's $7 billion / 4,000 jobs in Lansing and Orion Township, Stellantis' first new Detroit plant in 30 years (6,000 jobs), Hemlock Semiconductor expansions, and — the largest in state history — an OpenAI Stargate facility projected at nearly 2,000 permanent jobs. She signed the Michigan Innovation Fund and an R&D tax credit, and her 2022 Michigan COMPETES directives formalized a whole-of-government pitch to companies: one office, every agency, a single answer.

The record also contains its own audit. SOAR reported its first verifiable jobs — 1,846 — only in 2025, three years after launch, against $1.74 billion awarded and 19,599 jobs promised or retained; Ford cut Marshall's planned workforce from 2,500 to 1,700 and repurposed part of the plant toward energy-storage products; and a 2026 national study found the largest subsidy deals have generally underdelivered against their announcements. A June 2026 Upjohn Institute technical report still concluded Michigan's battery-factory incentives returned benefits exceeding costs by roughly $880 million across five projects — the honest summary is that the model works on paper, is unproven at scale, and is expensive to test.

Scenario analysis, not a prediction or endorsement: as of September 18, 2026, AP describes Gretchen Whitmer among the potential 2028 Democratic contenders, and she has not formally entered a presidential race. The scenario: assume a Whitmer administration takes office in January 2029 — what would Midwest-first federal industrial policy look like in its first 100 days?

02 Day 1: executive orders

Whitmer's Day 1 signature move is already visible in her record: coordination. Michigan COMPETES (executive directives of 2022) ordered every state agency to treat business attraction as a shared mission with the governor's office as the single point of contact. The federal translation is an executive order creating a similar one-door structure — an interagency supply-chain and manufacturing unit inside the White House, on the model of the current administration's AI-focused coordination, but aimed at plants rather than data centers.

The second Day-1 lever is procurement. The Buy-America rules for federal purchases are statute, but their enforcement posture is administrative — a Whitmer order could tighten waivers, favor domestic-content thresholds already in law, and direct the Defense Department and Transportation toward Midwest suppliers. Her record of winning an F-15EX fighter mission for Selfridge Air National Guard Base — a base-closure fight she won by treating a military asset as an industrial-policy asset — is the exact skill this requires, and it transfers to the Pentagon budget unchanged.

What she cannot do on Day 1 is write checks. SOAR worked because a governor with a compliant legislature got a $2 billion pot appropriated. A president's unappropriated industrial policy is limited to loan-guarantee authorities and unobligated CHIPS-Act and IRA balances — real money, but small next to the scale of the Michigan deals.

03 Days 2-30: agency changes

The first month would be personnel as policy. Whitmer's Michigan operation ran through the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) — a public-private body whose CEO sat next to her at every deal announcement. The federal analogue is Commerce: a Whitmer Commerce Department would be staffed from day one as the deal-closing shop, with the Manufacturing Extension Partnership and the CHIPS program office redirected toward a defined regional priority rather than open competition across all 50 states.

Her second-month instincts, per the record: a Technology Frontiers Consortium-style push (her own 2024 initiative to win federal tech investments) repurposed as a standing federal-state compact with Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Wisconsin — the battery-and-vehicle corridor where the plants already exist; workforce directives mirroring her Michigan Reconnect and Going PRO training programs, routed through existing Labor Department grants; and a Transformational Brownfield-style site-preparation push, since her state program for readying contaminated sites for investment is the piece of the Michigan model least dependent on new money.

The documented risk she would import: Michigan's deals changed after announcement as markets shifted — Ford's Marshall plant is the case study, scaled down and re-scoped toward energy storage as EV demand undershot. A federal deal book built on announcements has the same exposure, at ten times the size.

04 The first budget

A first Whitmer budget is where “Midwest industrial policy” becomes a number. The Michigan pattern says: lead with tax credits before grants (her R&D credit and the PA EDGE expansions came as the legislature's part of the deal-closing stack), pair site preparation (Transformational Brownfield) with workforce (Reconnect/Going PRO), and put the governor's face on the ribbon-cuttings. Federally: expand the Section 48D-style advanced-manufacturing credit, recapitalize CHIPS incentives, and create a national SOAR — a deal-closing fund for the handful of projects each decade that choose between U.S. regions.

The honest budget constraint is that the IRA's manufacturing credits are already the largest industrial-subsidy program in U.S. history, and the 2025-26 reconciliation fights showed those credits are contested. Whitmer's Michigan record also prices the trade: $1.74 billion in SOAR awards produced 1,846 first-year jobs — roughly $940,000 per delivered job so far — and the state's own 2026 Upjohn review is the defense she would cite (benefits exceeding costs on the battery projects specifically). Her first budget would need to survive exactly this argument: the evidence that targeted incentives work is mixed and recent, and she is the only 2028 contender who has run the experiment at scale.

05 First legislation and what requires Congress

The Michigan model has an under-appreciated feature: it was legislative. SOAR was created by the legislature in 2021-22, the Innovation Fund and R&D credit by statute, the brownfield program by statute. Whitmer did not govern industrial policy by decree; she brought a deal to a legislature and won it — with a Republican legislature for most of this period. That is the single best predictor of her first-100-days legislative strategy: a manufacturing package (deal fund + credits + workforce) introduced early, sold as jobs rather than ideology, and negotiated rather than rammed.

What requires Congress explicitly: new appropriated money (any national SOAR), tax-credit expansion (reconciliation or regular order), and any CHIPS-for-X reauthorization. What does not: enforcement of existing Buy-America statutes, deployment of already-appropriated CHIPS/IRA balances (subject to the Impoundment Control Act if she tried the reverse), and the bully-pulpit coordination of a federal-state compact, which is exactly what her COMPETES directives did in Michigan without new law.

The Senate math is the same for her as for any president in this series — 60 votes for ordinary legislation, 51 for reconciliation-germane items. The difference is that Whitmer's record is a record of winning cross-party votes on exactly this subject. Whether that transfers from Lansing to a broken Washington is the open question of the scenario.

06 Trade, China, and the industrial Midwest

The comparative section for a domestic-industrial piece is the trade fight that made the policy necessary. Whitmer has positioned herself as a tariff-skeptic within her party's post-2024 realignment — her repeated line that Michigan “gets the job done” is a competitiveness pitch, not a protectionist one — but her governorship rode a protectionist-era subsidy competition (the battery plants exist because of IRA credits plus state deals plus tariff walls). A Whitmer first 100 days would inherit the current tariffs and the China export-control regime and would face the same choice the Midwest forces on every president: the region wants the results of industrial policy (plants, jobs) without the costs (prices, retaliation against exports).

Her verifiable record on the China question is thin in one direction: Michigan approved a Gotion battery plant over ferocious local opposition, and Whitmer defended it — evidence that in the jobs-versus-China-politics tradeoff, she has chosen jobs. A first-100-days Whitmer would likely keep the export controls, keep the subsidies, and try to split the tariff question regionally. The Midwest is the center of that policy in a way no other region is: it is simultaneously the biggest beneficiary of reshoring subsidies and among the most tariff-exposed manufacturing export bases in the country. That dual identity is why the region — and this governor — would sit at the center of U.S. industrial policy under any of the plausible 2028 outcomes, including hers.

07 What courts could constrain

Industrial policy is less court-exposed than immigration or energy rulemaking, but the constraint map is real. Subsidy litigation: every major Michigan deal drew challenges — the Marshall plant faced ongoing litigation over local zoning and incentives, and Gotion drew state-court suits — evidence that a federal deal-closing fund would face taxpayer and competitor suits under the Constitution's Appropriations Clause logic and standing doctrines. Buy-America enforcement: procurement set-asides for domestic content live under U.S. treaty obligations (WTO Government Procurement Agreement) and existing statutory thresholds; an order exceeding them is litigable by trading partners and importers.

Credit-design: a Whitmer tax-credit package would be legislation, so the judicial fight would arrive later, as APA challenges to the implementing regulations — the same pattern the IRA credits faced. And the state-law backstop: her Michigan record shows the deals were litigated mostly in state court under state constitutions' gift-and-loan clauses; federally, the General Welfare Clause is far more permissive, which paradoxically means the constitutional guardrails that shaped her governorship would be weaker in Washington — a fact her critics would call a danger and her allies would call the point.