S5 E13 - Mike Duggan, The Last Democrat

Mike Duggan Drops Out: Why Independents Can’t Compete—and What It Signals for Democrats

Kevin Travis argues that Michigan swing-state politics reveal a deeper Democratic Party crisis after Detroit ex-mayor Mike Duggan, who left the party in December 2024 and ran for governor as an independent, dropped out despite raising $3.2M (mostly from Michigan donors) and earning 200+ bipartisan endorsements. Travis says Duggan didn’t lose to voters but to a party-finance system that blocks independents, and frames this as evidence of an impending Democratic Party division rather than a routine cycle. He links this to historical party collapses, criticizes Democratic redistricting and DCCC meddling in the 2022 Meijer primary, and claims the party is split between democratic-socialist figures and sidelined or expelled moderates like Fetterman, RFK Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard. He suggests a new center-left governing coalition could emerge.

00:00 Duggan Drops Out
02:19 Who Is Mike Duggan
04:00 Independent Can’t Compete
04:42 Do Parties Collapse
06:33 Parties Die Before
07:24 Canceling Andrew Jackson
10:37 Constitution and Parties
11:13 Redistricting Power Plays
13:36 Meddling in GOP Primaries
16:13 Democrats Already Split
17:36 Moderates Pushed Out
20:12 Fault Lines in GOP
22:38 Back to Duggan’s Lesson
24:23 What Happens Next
24:58 A New Center-Left Party
26:35 Democratic Republican Idea
26:59 Closing Thanks

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#DemocratCollapse #ThirdParty #PoliticalHomeless #PartySplit #BeyondTwoParties

#Fetterman #Mamdani #TulsiGabbard #RFKJr #Squad #BernieSanders

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#MAGA #DSA #Woke #AmericanPolitics #2026Elections

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Transcript

The Tenth Man 0:11

Detroit's most successful mayor just dropped out of the Michigan governor's race, not because he lost, but because the system wouldn't let him compete. What that tells us about the Democrat party today on The Tenth Man. Welcome to The Tenth Man. I'm Kevin Travis, and let's start in the state of Michigan. Michigan is not a red state, and it's not a blue state, but it is the state, one of the states, that decides. A swing state. It has elected governors from both parties for as long as most of us have been alive. Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat, John Engler, a Republican, Jim Blanchard, another Democrat, Rick Snyder, a Republican, Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, and a swing state in the truest sense, the kind of place where elections are decided by people who are not particularly ideological, who want competent government, and who will vote for whoever seems most likely to deliver it. And last week, Mike Duggan dropped out of the twenty twenty-six governor's race This caught a lot of people by surprise, and I'm one of them. In fact, The Tenth Man normally drops on Mondays these days, and originally we were, we were doing Monday and Fridays, and life got in the way, as it sometimes does. And we're going to bring back the Friday episode whenever we can, and when we do, we're calling it a bonus episode. And this was supposed to be one of those. We wrote it up about Mike Duggan, Detroit's former Democrat mayor, running for governor as an independent. Then he dropped out of the race Thursday. So we rewrote it in that context, pushed everything back, and now it's the Monday episode. So maybe this Friday we'll do better. So back on pace. If you don't follow Michigan politics closely, here's what you need to know about Mike Duggan. He served three terms as mayor of Detroit, the city that went through the largest mu- municipal bankruptcy in American history, and he did not preside over the decline. He ran for office after the bankruptcy. He took the keys to a city that had already hit rock bottom, and he made it functional. He's not a dreamer, not an ideologue. He's the kind of politician who gets roads fixed and keeps the lights on and measures success by whether the ci- city works, not by whether his donors are satisfied. In that sense, he's cut from the same cloth as Donald Trump and Perry Johnson, the Republican candidate for, for governor. Uh, that's my guy. And he has a businessman's instincts applied to government, results over rhetoric, and outcomes over ideology. Well, he left the Democrat Party in December 2024 and declared himself an independent. His argument was simple and devastating. The parties had become more interested in protecting their own majorities than in governing for the people who elected them. He raised three point two million dollars in six months, ninety-three percent of it from Michigan donors and outside contributions. That's a big controversial issue. And more than two hundred current and former elected officials from both parties endorsed him before a single vote was cast. Now he's just dropped out. And not because voters didn't respond. We didn't get a chance to vote. And not because his argument was wrong. He dropped out because an independent candidate in America, no matter how qualified, no matter how well-funded by ordinary people, cannot compete with the financial machinery of the major parties. That's where we're going today because what happened to Mike Duggan last week is not a Michigan story. It is a Democrat Party story. And the Democrat Party story right now is one of the most consequential things happening in American politics, even if most people haven't named it yet What we are watching may be the collapse of the Democrat Party as we know it. And I don't know, you might be thinking, because you've seen other YouTube thumbnails, 'cause it seems like every conservative channel there is has been running that headline for three years, that the party's collapsing. People like, uh, oh, Dr. Steve Thurley, Kari Lake, uh, maybe the Hodge twins. But then you click on the story and you find out it's really just talking about two congressmen disagreeing at a press conference. It starts to feel like, I don't know if you've seen this story, the one where Alberta is going to break away from Canada. You keep seeing, if you, if you follow that one, it's about to happen any day now, and it's been any day now for months and months. But this time, they're not exaggerating, 'cause what we're watching right now is not a bad election cycle. It's a political implosion, and the people most responsible for it are the ones who call themselves the conscience of the Democrat Party Now here's something the civics textbooks might have left out, and something that ought to reassure you that what we're about to discuss is actually not as dramatic as it sounds. Because political parties do die. It's happened before. It's happened many times. And the, the republic we call the United States has managed to survive every time. Now, if this episode makes you think, and I hope it will, do me one favor. Tell a friend. You can post, you can share, or just tell somebody and say, "Have you heard The Tenth Man with Kevin Travis?" Because that's how we grow, and that's how the conversation spreads to people who need to hear it. The very first political party in America was the Federalist Party. Hm, and where are they? That was Hamilton's party, John Adams' party. It was the party of strong central government and a skeptical view of popular democracy. It produced just one president, and then it collapsed. Federalists opposed the War of 1812, and the voters never forgave them for it, so by 1820, they were gone. What replaced them? Well, it was the Democratic Republican Party, Jefferson's party, which itself split under Andrew Jackson. Andrew Jackson's faction became the Democratic Party. And here, before we go any further, is the first example of the Democrat Party turning on its own The Democrats of 2026 have spent considerable energy tearing down statues of Andrew Jackson, renaming buildings, scrubbing his name from their annual fundraising dinner, the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, a Democrat institution for nearly a century, but it's quietly been rebranded in state after state. And the reason given is always the same. Jackson owned slaves. Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act. Jackson represents values the modern party can no longer endorse. Well, FYI, slavery was legal here at one time, and they used to put cocaine in Coca-Cola too, so, so what? And no one is asking the Party to celebrate the Trail of Tears. But consider what is actually happening here. The Democrat Party was literally created by Andrew Jackson. He is not a figure they inherited or tolerated. He is their founder. And rather than grapple with that complexity, rather than hold the full truth of a complicated man in another time who also expanded voting rights and who challenged entrenched financial power, the billionaires of the day, instead, the party has simply erased him, canceled their own founder. Not because history demanded it, but because the loudest voices in the room demanded it. This is not some historic reckoning. It's merely performance. And it's the first entry in a very long list of Democrats who discovered that no amount of prior service protects you when the party decides you are no longer useful The opposition to Jackson became the Whigs. The Whig Party ran four presidents, then it dissolved in the 1850s, literally came apart over an issue its leadership could not resolve. Its remnants merged with anti-slavery factions and formed a brand-new party, the Republican Party, which six years later put Abraham Lincoln in the White House. What is now the oldest continuous political party in the world, the, the Democrats, was born out of one party splitting in two. What is now the other major party, the Republicans, was assembled from the wreckage of a party that could not hold itself together. Every era eventually produces a contradiction the existing parties cannot contain. When that happens, the party landscape redraws itself. And the question worth asking today is whether we are watching it happening again and whether the change itself is long overdue. It's also worth noting that the very first party to combine both names was called the Democratic Republican Party, and maybe we'll come back to that name before this episode is done. And one more thing before we move on. The Constitution does not mention political parties, not once. We have a two-party system, but surprise, there is no two-party system in the founding document. The two-party arrangement exists entirely by custom, and it has something to do with electoral math as well. But it's changed before. It can change again, and the Constitution will not only survive that change, it was designed to Now let's talk about what the Democrat Party has been doing with the power it still holds, because it tells you more about real priorities than any platform document ever could. Start with redistricting. The purpose of drawing congressional districts has always been simple: give the people a voice. Divide geography into units small enough that a representative actually represents something, a community, a county, a shared set of interests. The lines exist to connect voters to their government. That is the whole point. That is the only legitimate point. What they are not for is dividing people against each other. What they are not for is manufacturing outcomes for one party or another. The moment redistricting becomes a tool of party survival, it has stopped being representation and becomes something closer to the opposite of representation. And yet the Democrat Party has spent a decade doing exactly that. California passed a map its own analysts acknowledge was specifically designed to eliminate Republican seats. In a state where, listen to this number, barely forty-five percent of voters are registered Democrats, yet all the seats belong to Democrats. Whenever the maps favor Democrats, somehow those maps are fair, and when they don't, they're an attack on democracy. The party that claims to protect voting rights has spent a decade engineering districts that make voting irrelevant But redistricting is just one symptom of something larger and more troubling. The Democrat Party has made a consistent, deliberate choice. The survival of the party comes before the interests of the country, before the voters, and even before the candidates. Before the basic principle that the two parties are supposed to work together in service of the nation, competing, yes, disagreeing certainly, but ultimately both pulling toward the same goal. But in twenty twenty-two, Peter Meijer was a Republican congressman from the Grand Rapids area. Grandson of the founder of the Meijer chain, a name every Michigander, actually any Midwesterner knows. He had been in office for two years when he decided to, to vote to impeach Donald Trump, one of only ten House Republicans to do so. Now, whatever you think of that vote, it was a vote of conscience and across party lines. It was exactly the kind of moment that people who complain about partisan gridlock claim to want. Frankly, folks, statistically, we should expect-- we should demand that there be some feathering of votes across the aisle. It should not simply be red, blue. There should be people on both sides who occasionally vote the other way. That should be our statistical, mathematical demand, our expectation. But the Democrat Party's response was not to welcome his vote. Their response was to see a moment of weakness, a chance to destroy him from the inside using his own primary. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ran ads in the 2022 Republican primary in Michigan's third district, boosting Meijer's challenger. Not to elect the best candidate, understand. Why would they be meddling in a Republican primary anyway? It wasn't even to elect their preferred candidate in that primary. No, it was to deliberately install the weakest possible Republican opponent, one that they calculated could be beaten in November. Now, now think about what that means. This was the Democrat Party reaching into a Republican primary and corrupting it, denying Republican voters, actually all voters, a fair choice by engineering the field to suit the Democrat Party's interest and stripping the voters of any meaningful say in who represented them. Their doomed opponent then lost the general in, uh, to a Democrat in November. So they took the seat just as planned and eliminated the principled moderate in one move. Nobody who operates that way gets to lecture anyone else about the health of democracy. And that's just one example of Democrat cheating. I promise more in the future Here is what is actually happening to the Democrat Party. It's actually already split. The split's just not been formalized yet, and the fault lines actually run through both parties. But let's take them one group at a time. First and most amazing, this is something we should, should be talking about all the time, but we never do. There is a faction of the Democratic caucus that is not Democratic at all. Bernie Sanders is an independent who caucuses with Democrats as a choice. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, the members of the so-called Squad, they're members of the Democrat Socialists of America, a formal organization with its own platform and its own political identity. None of these people is actually a Democrat. They are not in the Democrat Party, and Pelosi in the past and Jeffries now only put up with them for their votes. They in turn exploit the Democrat label for the ballot line and the committee assignments. Ideologically, they are running a separate party inside the host. They're not even hiding it anymore, and they're not even pretending Then there are the Democrats who are in the party, but whom the party has effectively left behind. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania is a Democrat. He supported Bernie Sanders in twenty sixteen. He's voted with his party ninety-three percent of the time. He's a liberal by any reasonable measure, but because he supports Israel's right to defend itself, because he refused to join the government shutdown theatrics, and because he speaks to working-class men in a language they recognize, his own party has turned on him. He is polling at seventy-three percent appr- approval among Republicans in Pennsylvania and twenty-two percent among Democrats. His own state and his own party, seventy-three to twenty-two. But you have a true liberal with genuine crossover appeal. He should be the most valuable player in his party's roster. Instead, they treat him as a traitor, and that tells you everything you need to know about where the Democrat Party's priorities actually lie. Fetterman said it himself. He's not changed. The party changed around him. Well, maybe a little more change is due. And then there are the ones who didn't just get marginalized, they got pushed all the way out. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., you know him. He carries one of the most storied names in Democrat politics. He ran for president as a Democrat, found no room for him in the party his family helped to build, ran as an independent, and ended up in a Republican administration Whatever you think of his positions, okay, the trajectory is remarkable. A Kennedy is received more warmly by Donald Trump than by the party his uncle and father both gave their lives to. Now Tulsi Gabbard is in the news, served in Congress as a Democrat, ran for president as a Democrat, and left the party in twenty twenty-two, saying it had been taken over by an elitist cabal who have no respect for the Constitution. She too ended up in a Republican administration. She too found more of a hearing on the other side of the aisle than in the party she came from. Now, these are not fringe figures. They're not people who drifted right. These are people the Democrat Party drove out and then watched walk into the arms of the opposition Now just cross the aisle with me for a moment, because the, uh, the borderlines run through the Republican Party as well, and what they reveal is actually an opportunity rather than a problem. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska are two Republican senators elected, reelected, and reelected again in states that could have sent someone else. They have spent entire careers to the left of their own party on abortion, healthcare, and other social issues. They cross the aisle. They find common ground. And in a properly calibrated political universe, those two women would have a natural home in a center-left party. They're frankly welcome in the Republican Party, but they could equally fit into a more moderate Democrat party, and they would bring their voters with them. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana voted to convict Donald Trump after January 6th, one of only seven Republican senators to do so, and he lost his primary for it. Thomas Massie of Kentucky just lost his primary after years of voting his conscience, regardless of what leadership demanded. He read the bills. He asked the questions nobody wanted asked. He votes no when he believes no is, is the right answer. And that habit, principle over party, is precisely what a new center coalition would need more of, not less. Now, I wouldn't support either of these men in a Republican primary, but I wouldn't cry if one of them beat Ilhan Omar in a Democrat primary either These are not people fleeing the Republican Party in defeat. These are people whose instincts were always pointed toward the center, toward governing, toward coalition, toward the country rather than the caucus. And the new party doesn't pull them away from those values. It gives those values a home where they are the majority, not the exception. And they would still cross the aisle just in the other direction What do Fetterman, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Collins, Murkowski, Cassidy, and Massey have in common? They are all, in their different ways, people who put something ahead of party loyalty, and every one of them has paid a price for it. Which brings us back to Michigan and back to Mike Duggan. He raised the money. He had the endorsements. He had the record, three terms turning around the most bankrupt city in American history. What he did not have was a party, and in American politics, the absence of a party is not an inconvenience, it's a death sentence. Duggan did not lose to a better candidate. He lost to a system, a system the Democrat Party helped build and continues to defend, the same party that talks about expanding democracy, protecting voters, and tearing down barriers to participation On the Republican side of the Michigan governor's race, Perry Johnson is running the same instinct from a different direction. A businessman, a self-made man, not a career politician. Donald Trump proved the model works at the national level, and Johnson is running it in Michigan. Well, Duggan was running the same play from the center-left, but the machine stopped Duggan. The voters will decide on Perry Johnson, but the fact that both men exist, that this is the kind of candidate Michigan is producing on both sides, tells you something about what voters actually want when the parties get out of the way. But the party won, and now the only Democrat choice will be a woman found cheating in the 2020 election, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, and she needs to stay right where she is, making license plates. That's the right job for her. But the man who turned Detroit around could not run for governor of Michigan because the machine said no. And that's not just a footnote. That's the whole thesis of this podcast. So what actually happens next? To the Democrat Party, probably not death, probably division. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should have their party. Let them have it. Let them run on Democratic Socialism. Let them carry the squad banner proudly. Let them stop pretending to be something they are not. Form the party, name it honestly, and then let the voters decide how many Americans actually want to live in the country those ideas produce. Because what most Americans want, what the Fetterman voters and the Tulsi voters and the Cassidy voters and the Massey voters and the people who gave Mike Duggan three million dollars and two hundred endorsements is something that doesn't currently exist. A party that is serious about governing, that competes for working-class voters, that talks to men, that argues for labor and manufacturing rather than grievances and identity, that believes in a role for government in economic life without believing government is the answer to every question. The country does not have to have a party called the Democrats. It needs a party that represents the thirty to forty percent of Americans who are center-left, who care about education and healthcare, who are not socialists, not activists, and not remotely interested in being lectured about the future by people who have no personal stake in it Do you realize the radical left's most reliable constituencies, the gender ideologues, the per- perpetually aggrieved, the academic activists share one quiet demographic truth? They got no kids. They are not raising the next generation of Americans. Parents are. Families are. Working people who hold a job that leaves marks on their hands and come home to children who will inherit whatever we build or destroy, and they are tired of being told by people with no children and no calluses how to think about the country those children will live in. The Whigs could not resolve their contradiction, and they dissolved. What replaced them changed the country. Perhaps it is time to try that name again, the one that started it, the one that managed to hold both words at once, the Democratic Republican Party. It has a certain ring to it, and the country could use what it once promised. Thank you for listening