DETROIT, Michigan — Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) has apparently decided that the governor’s job is really just marketing. She has gone full force on advertising Michigan as a socially liberal state in the hope that this will attract social liberals to move to her state.
Whitmer this week announced a $20 million marketing campaign to get people to move to Michigan, whose population has been stagnant for decades. Many Michigan cities and counties are declining in population, most importantly Detroit, which lost more than 7,700 people in just two years.
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Is it simply bad marketing that is depopulating the city? A more likely suspect is the astronomical crime rate. Detroit has the second-highest rate of violent crime per capita of all U.S. cities. It's even twice as bad as crime-ridden Philadelphia.
Why fight crime in Belmont when you can put up billboards in Sarasota?
To date, Whitmer’s advertisements have looked less like an effort to bring in workers and employers and more like an effort to bring in Democratic voters. Her most famous marketing campaign for the state was about abortion. Whitmer spent taxpayer funds to advertise in conservative states — the kind of states people actually move to — that abortion is very legal in Michigan.
It's an odd campaign for a state seeking to increase its population. Michigan’s abortion rate has been climbing since 2009, which is also when its births started plummeting. Part of the reason Michigan isn’t growing is that it has fewer children today than it did 10 years ago. The number of children under age 5 in Michigan has fallen by about 8% in just a decade.
The most ill-fitting part of this campaign may have been claiming that Michigan is a rights-respecter:
Michigan, of course, has a horrible record when it comes to respecting people’s rights. Remember 2020 when Whitmer, through executive order, barred people from visiting their vacation homes or the gardening aisle, intrusions on individual liberty that had zero correlation to fighting the virus?
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This is also the state that illegally tried to shut down Catholic adoption agencies for the sin of adhering to Catholic teachings on marriage.
Whitmer’s new ads are less targeted to social liberals, but they still convey the odd belief that Michigan’s only problem is an image problem rather than a problem with the fundamentals of the state. If people who live in your state aren’t having kids, and if the people who have kids are moving out, it may not be a marketing issue.