Mike Duggan: Looking Back at His 12-Year Tenure as Detroit’s Mayor & Looking Forward to His Future

On a blistering late June afternoon, with a Sahara-like breeze sweeping through the small white tent erected on a tarmac at Coleman A. Young International Airport, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan looks crisp and cool in his typical attire, a tieless shirt and plaid jacket. He’s in his element, which is to say he is at another of his tenure’s countless groundbreakings to celebrate someone’s impressive investment in the long-moribund metropolis.

This time, it’s $5 million being spent by Avflight, an aviation company, on a new terminal and hangar. It comes two months after MyFlight Tours, which offers helicopter sightseeing jaunts, announced it would build a $4 million national headquarters at the Detroit-owned airfield known colloquially as City Airport.

“This isn’t just a business deal; it’s a declaration of ‘We believe in Detroit, we believe in this airport, and we believe aviation will help build on the remarkable progress Detroit has built through the years of strong leadership and vision,’” says Avflight Vice President of Operations Joe Meszaros in his speech.

When it’s Duggan’s turn at the mic, he notes a $12 million plan to bring an aviation-themed public high school back here and boasts that construction on a new air-traffic control tower will start next year.

But it’s the moment when he ties it all back to the seeds he sowed when he took the reins of the city that feels both effortlessly poetic and, inevitably, fated to become footage for an ad for his upcoming campaign for governor. With a flourish slightly muddled by a burst of chaotic noise from a helicopter, which Duggan gamely grins at as proof of the airport’s new life, he points to the southern horizon. “You can see Dan Gilbert’s 47-story building down there,” he says, referring to Hudson’s Detroit — the mixed-use high rise erected on the site of the former J.L. Hudson’s department store — the latest of dozens of developments that revived the city during Duggan’s 12 years in office. “We are building the kind of first-class airport that a recovering city deserves. So I know you’ve been patient, but we are heading the right direction now. It’s going to be one announcement after another.”

He means this about the airport, but with only a few months left in his third and final term, announcements of all sorts are coming fast and furiously. A week later, for example, Duggan is back at a podium to crow that Moody’s raised the city’s credit rating for the 11th consecutive time to Baa1, which means the city is considered a relatively lower-risk investment for institutional investors. “This is what happens when elected leaders set aside us-versus-them politics and work together,” he says.

Such moments — groundbreakings, ribbon cuttings, announcements about new investments or city spending — represent the fruition of an unparalleled effort to draw business and industry, to create programs that target improvements for low-income neighborhoods, to bolster public services that make the city safer, more interesting, and more fun. Detroit, which started Duggan’s term in 2014 in bankruptcy and was synonymous with decay and desperation, is on an upswing.

For the 67-year-old mayor, who is running for higher office as an independent after abruptly leaving the Democratic Party that had been his lifelong political home, these moments provide an invaluable stream of positive media attention. He’s already got sky-high approval ratings and name identification in Detroit and its vote-rich suburbs. In a poll of likely primary voters, 84% of Detroiters and 54% of metro Detroiters view him favorably — so he intends to spend the year ahead winning over voters across Michigan who don’t know him yet.

Surprisingly, there are many. A May poll found 68% of voters outside Macomb, Wayne, and Oakland counties have never heard of Duggan. The leading major-party candidates, Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Republican U.S. Rep. John James, have significantly higher name ID, having already run for statewide office multiple times.

“I thought more people knew the Detroit comeback story,” says Jer Staes, host of the Daily Detroit podcast. “What I’ve realized is, outside of metro Detroit, a lot of people don’t have that knowledge or connection with Detroit and Mike Duggan at this point.”

That could work to Duggan’s advantage, though, because they also don’t know him as a lifelong Democrat. It’s not hard to imagine voters in rural Michigan, exhausted by the viciousness of partisan politics but concerned about economic prosperity, taking a shine to an unassuming, plainspoken independent who rose above racial animus to become the first white mayor of America’s Blackest city since the 1970s — and then taking Detroit from bankruptcy to prosperity by persuading billionaires to bring back infrastructure and jobs.

So, too, could testimonials from folks like Detroit City Council member Scott Benson on the tarmac at City Airport. In 2017, Duggan’s staff told me for a New York Times report that the administration believed the city might benefit from shutting down the airport and selling it off to manufacturers to build factories. Benson, who represents the airport’s area, argued at the time for its revival. After that Times piece, he says, he heard from an unhappy Duggan who didn’t like their disagreement aired in the national media. “He had a thinner skin than I thought,” Benson says.

Yet Duggan also kept an open mind when the City Council commissioned a study that found keen interest from aviators with private planes, shipping firms, and sightseeing tour operators in a revitalized airfield. The mayor and Benson struck a compromise in which they persuaded the Federal Aviation Administration to allow the closure of one runway so that 60 acres could be released for manufacturing. The city then set about investing millions in the facility.

“I’ve been able to benefit from his acumen when it comes to dealmaking by bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars of investment into my district and thousands of new jobs into my district as a direct result of our relationship and my willingness to support his vision of growth for the city of Detroit,” Benson says. “Because it’s really up to having someone like the mayor who can go get the resources. Councilman Scott Benson can say it all day long, but it’s up to someone like Mayor Duggan.”

Benson, a Democrat, stopped short of endorsing Duggan for governor, sloughing off the question because he says he’s focused on his current reelection campaign. But the fact that Benson didn’t dismiss the prospect outright suggests Duggan may have a chance to land endorsements from Democratic officeholders.

“I do see a more difficult path for him than certainly a Democrat or even a Republican to the governorship, but he’s the mayor of Detroit,” says Jessica Taylor of The Cook Political Report, which rates the 2026 gubernatorial race a toss-up. “When I’m looking at these races nationally, we see voters increasingly frustrated with both parties. Michigan is really an interesting test to me. Can he win? I think it’s one of the most fascinating, if not the most fascinating, governor’s races in the country.”

Mike Duggan has always been more fascinating than he seems. He doesn’t electrify; he doesn’t throw many big rhetorical bombs; he often seems grumpy or nonplussed when talking to journalists. He has a sheen of normality and common-man charm that overlays a record of real-world achievement that reflects his status as one of the savviest operators of his generation.

Duggan, who got his law degree at the University of Michigan in 1983, began a career of public service in 1986 — as Wayne County’s assistant corporation counsel — that quickly escalated. The following year, he became deputy county executive under political mastermind Edward McNamara, a role he remained in until he was elected in 2000 as Wayne County prosecutor.

In 2004, when Duggan became president and CEO of the Detroit Medical Center, the nonprofit eight-hospital system had lost $500 million in the prior six years. Duggan had earned a reputation as a turnaround specialist after having saved the SMART bus system from collapse in the 1990s by reorganizing its budget and routes, renegotiating its union contracts, and successfully pushing a millage in the 1995 election. Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat, hailed his hire by saying, “If anyone can fix the DMC, Mike Duggan can.”

He did. Applying similar budget and negotiation tactics, he willed DMC to six straight years of profitability and then negotiated its sale to for-profit Vanguard Health Systems in 2010 with a guarantee the company would invest $850 million in renovations and upgrades. That deal drew some heat — allegations about kickbacks to doctors by Vanguard led to a federal probe and $30 million settlement — but Duggan shrugged off the issues as “minor technical violations.”

Duggan’s DMC record became a calling card. Voters turned to him in 2013, disappointed in the city’s recent string of corrupt and ineffective mayors and the city’s spiraling financial descent. He was asked countless times in that campaign and the dozen years since how a white guy from Livonia could earn so many Black votes; he just shames the reporters who bring it up. “People in this city got past it almost a year ago, as people got to know me and we started to relate as individuals,” he told the Associated Press in 2013.

Locally, Duggan’s record as Detroit mayor is well known. Just in case, though, he’s ready to rattle off the firehose of data he’ll recite for at least the next 14 months. You can hear him fine-tuning and distilling the coming stump speech in real time during his sit-down interview with Hour Detroit in a private room at the Capital One Café near City Hall in April. “So you want to talk about Detroit’s record?” he asks me, winding up for delivery.

“Unemployment has been cut in half. The crime rate is as low as it’s been in 60 years. We’ve got plant after plant coming into the city and locating here because we are the easiest city in the country to site and build something. … Detroit hadn’t had a new auto plant in 20 years when we landed Flex-N-Gate. We landed Lear, and we landed a 4,000-employee Jeep plant, and we got [General Motors’] Factory Zero to double in size. We got Bill Ford to invest in the train station, and we got Dan Gilbert to build on the Hudson’s site, and we got the Roxbury Group to renovate Lee Plaza, and we got Henry Ford to put $2 billion into its hospital system.”

He takes a breath, then concludes: “There is a pattern through all of those things, which is, if we had gotten any one of those things, it would have been a big deal. The fact is that because we built partnerships, all of those people have contributed to Detroit’s recovery.”

Fact-check: All of those claims are true.

There is, however, an alternate theory about Detroit’s success in which Dan Gilbert, the Rocket Mortgage co-founder, is the real catalyst. After all, he moved the mortgage behemoth then known as Quicken Loans back to Detroit and began buying up and restoring classic buildings years before Duggan became mayor. Would the city be where it is now without Gilbert? “No,” Duggan says. “No question. Dan sped it up. Bill Ford sped it up. Chris Ilitch sped it up. But Dan sped it up more than anybody.”

Who, then, deserves the credit? “I don’t care,” he says. “Not my concern.”

Except, of course, it is. Without the Detroit comeback story, he doesn’t get outlandish approval polls. He might not even get reelected twice.

And he doesn’t start out running for governor as an independent in a three-way race with a remarkable 21.5% of the vote.

THE CONVENTIONAL wisdom from the day Duggan announced his gubernatorial bid in a five-minute YouTube video released last December was that his independent run would most harm the Democratic nominee and could hand Lansing back to the GOP. Yet as with most things related to Duggan’s political life, there have been surprises. The poll, taken by the Detroit Regional Chamber, that determined Duggan had 21.5% of the vote found he drew evenly from both Democratic and Republican voters — a sign that there could be broad interest in a third choice. “I don’t think you can say with certainty that he helps one party or the other, because for as unpopular as the Democratic brand is right now, it’s not as though the Republican brand is super popular,” says Adrian Hemond, CEO of Grassroots Midwest and a veteran Democratic strategist. “It’s just less unpopular than the Democratic brand right now.”

That’s the bet Duggan made in his opening video, a masterstroke in triangulation. He wove into his Detroit comeback story some notes intended to satisfy both sides of the political spectrum. To reaffirm his progressive bona fides, he talks about how he “fought hard for civil rights, reproductive rights, and rights for our LGBTQ community.” But then he brags about not just opposing the “defund the police” movement but hiring 300 new cops and giving them $10,000 raises. In a bit about improving school performance, he says it’s important to respect the “voice of parents in their children’s education,” a seemingly innocuous and obvious goal but also a dog whistle by Republican candidates.

“What would happen if we upended the system and gave Michigan voters a new choice?” Duggan asks in last year’s announcement video. “I’m not running to be the Democratic governor or the Republican governor. I’m running to be your governor.”

There’s evidence he might be onto something. His midsummer campaign finance report showed he’d raised the most money from direct donors of any gubernatorial candidate. What’s more, in August, Duggan unveiled a list of more than 200 “Michigan leaders” who are endorsing him for governor, a diverse and bipartisan collection that includes dozens of current and former mayors, state legislators, and university regents, plus one previous member of Congress — former Republican Dave Trott.

So far, Republicans have said little about Duggan; the Michigan GOP and the Republican Governors Association didn’t respond to Hour Detroit’s requests to discuss him. Scott Greenlee, a consultant who worked in 2020 on now-Rep. Lisa McClain’s first campaign, says he believes an independent could win in Michigan — but probably not the governor. This is, after all, the state that has switched off parties in the governorship every 8 years for more than three decades and gave 19.3% of its vote to Ross Perot in the 1992 presidential race.

Still, Duggan “has a very real challenge in defining himself because he’s known as a lifelong Democrat,” Greenlee says. Republicans will remind voters of that and, also, work to undermine his narrative as Detroit’s savior. Former Gov. Rick Snyder and the GOP legislature, Greenlee insists, deserve that credit. “People will try and rewrite history on that at this point, but those of us that were around understand it wasn’t a unilateral effort and that the state, led by Rick Snyder, did more than any individual mayor did.”

As for the Democrats? They’re apoplectic. Michigan Democratic Party Chair Curtis Hertel vivisects the mayor, who, as he notes, stumped for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election only weeks before she lost and he gave up on the party. “We would call him a disloyal Democrat,” Hertel says. “The mayor has very thin skin and he realized he couldn’t win the Democratic primary, and so this is a matter of convenience.” Democratic state Rep. Jason Morgan of Ann Arbor, a party vice chair, calls the mayor’s reasons for going independent “dishonest because he has claimed to be a Democrat for all of his professional political career so far.” And the Democratic Governors Association, which paid for anti-Duggan billboards along northbound I-75 during the Mackinac Policy Conference in May as well as a series of digital ads, provides a cheat sheet of recent failed attempts by independents in Oregon and Kansas to win governorships to prove Duggan’s lack of viability.

His 21.5% draw, then, is what Hertel predicts will be Duggan’s “high-water mark.” When Democrats fully unload their attacks on him — that he’s too cozy with big business, that he’s made nice with conservative bogeyman Elon Musk on social media, that he let some areas of Detroit fester in ruins, that he was a crony of convicted former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick — his support will sink, they say. A preview came with those billboards, including one that read: “Michigan doesn’t need a corrupt mayor as governor.”

Taylor, The Cook Political Report analyst, sees ways Duggan can defy the fates of those failed independent candidates. In Oregon and Kansas, the candidates were both state senators elected to their jobs by fewer people than Duggan. “Duggan represents the largest area in the state, so he has a larger base of built-in voters,” she says. “I mean, you can’t win on Detroit alone. Certainly it helps, but he’s going to have to broaden his appeal.”

Meanwhile, Duggan’s response to every attack is to deflect its substance and instead use it to say this is the sort of negative, divisive politics he’s running to defeat. “The more time I spent in Lansing, the more I realized transformation was impossible within the partisan model, in which the primary defining characteristic of Republicans is they hate Democrats, and the primary defining characteristics of Democrats is they hate Republicans,” he says. “All you have to do is watch the TV ads last fall. 90% of the ads were to demonize the other side. ‘Vote for me because the other side is worse.’”

As for his abrupt departure from the Democratic Party after trying to help Harris win the White House, Duggan says the outcome “confirmed what I thought, which is the Democratic Party has completely lost the confidence of working-class voters in this country. So I thought maybe there’s a chance to do two things. One is change the direction of the state, but maybe change the direction of politics to show the partisans that they don’t own the voters.”

Of course, politics can be, like crime, a combination of motive and opportunity. Had Harris won Michigan and the White House, Duggan might still see the party as a viable vehicle for progress on the issues he cares about.

Duggan, unsurprisingly, is typically uninterested in such speculation. “I don’t know. That’s not what happened,” he huffs. “This is where we are. This is what happened.”

DUGGAN HAS good reason to believe he can pull off a miracle — he’s done the politically impossible before. In 2013, after a judge threw him off the Democratic primary ballot because he hadn’t been registered to vote in Detroit long enough to be eligible, he mounted a write-in campaign. He got 52% of the vote that way, a feat that continues to be studied and emulated today.

“He’s had one of the more unusual political trajectories in modern Michigan political history, right?” asks Hemond, who says he followed the Duggan write-in playbook to get Kurt Heise elected to Plymouth Township supervisor in 2016. “This is a white guy who moved to Detroit from Livonia to run for mayor, ran as a write-in, and won. He’s obviously a super talented politician to be able to achieve something like that, both in terms of his individual skills as a politician but also his ability to organize a political operation.”

The technical aspects of winning as a write-in, Hemond says, speak to someone who really knows how to run a complex operation. “You need a really sophisticated messaging effort that is going to get people to remember each of the discrete steps that you need them to do in order for their write-in ballot to be counted: how you spell the candidate’s name, the fact that you have to fill in the oval next to the name that you wrote in, all of it. … And you really have to invest in conversations with voters.”

And Duggan has another big advantage: unemployment. Come January, he won’t have a day job. He’ll have more than 10 months to crisscross the state improving his name identification and retelling the Detroit turnaround story. And for the first eight months of 2026, while the Republican and Democratic candidates will duke it out for their party’s nominations, he’ll have the field to himself.