Tudor Dixon Tells Us What It Will Take to Beat Gretchen Whitmer

BUCK: Joining us is the hopefully next governor of the great state of Michigan. Just won her primary last night, Tudor Dixon. Tudor, first time on the program. Thanks for calling in.

DIXON: Oh, thank you for having me.

BUCK: So, I know you are a businesswoman, working mom of four girls, breast cancer survivor, and you have a career in Michigan’s steel industry in the early 2000s. Why’d you want to get into this situation? Why’d you want to run?

DIXON: The state of Michigan needs to come back. This governor has really destroyed the state, whether it is education or business or even the safety of our cities. Everything under Gretchen Whitmer has gone downhill, and it’s time to bring it back. I have that private sector experience in the manufacturing industry. That’s the number one industry in Michigan. But every industry has been affected by the way Gretchen Whitmer has ruled in government. And she has made decisions that have been based on her own personal decisions rather than what is best for the state, and she’s gone after our businesses, she’s kept our kids out of school longer than any other state, and she has supported defund the police, which has used crime to skyrocket in the state of Michigan. And I believe we can bring it all back.

BUCK: Now, the lockdowns — I remember this when there were lockdowns happening in different states across the country — in Michigan, if I remember correctly, under Governor Whitmer, were among the most extreme and long lasting, at least in the earlier phase of the pandemic. And what has that done? I mean, do Michiganders look back at this and realize increasingly that this really hurt and even destroyed businesses with not a great outcome in terms of covid?

DIXON: Right. Exactly. It decimated our restaurant industry. We lost 3,000 restaurants. Our restaurants were closed from total of eight months when you add it all together. This is something that you just can’t come back from. But we also had this huge blunder with our unemployment system where $8 billion went out to people who shouldn’t have received unemployment. She kept — remember when some states said, we’re not gonna extend that federal unemployment, she did. We still have people that have not come back to work, and that’s hurt our restaurant industry too because they just don’t have anybody working there. Many of our restaurants that did stay around, they still are only open two to three days a week.

Now, she had these ridiculous lockdowns too where we could go to the grocery store and you could buy groceries but you couldn’t go to the seed section and buy seeds to plant seeds. You could go golfing if you walked but you couldn’t use a cart. It was ridiculous, the rules and regulations that she had. More executive orders than any other governor in the country. She had more executive orders and more vetoes. We were ruled by one woman, and there was no equal branches of government that had any say in anything. She refused to work with the legislature. It was an absolute destruction of the state of Michigan. And she kept kids out of school. And when parents begged to open the schools and at least let the kids play sports outside, she wouldn’t respond.

BUCK: She was among the very worst governors during the covid pandemic’s first year, first year and a half. She was among the people that I think even as a New Yorker I looked to and thought, I didn’t realize that Michigan could be as crazy as this place. But it pretty much was. It’s pretty close to it overall. What are the things that you would do going into this general if you win — and we certainly are rooting for you, Tudor? We’re speaking to Tudor Dixon, by the way, everybody. She won her Republican primary last night. Trump endorsed, MAGA supported candidate in Michigan. Critical governor’s race. Tudor, you get into that governor’s mansion, what are you gonna do for your state?

DIXON: Well, we have a huge opportunity right now because parents are very engaged in education. And Michigan has been trying to get choice in education for many years. So, we have the opportunity to pass education freedom and allow dollars to follow the child, so have our students funded instead of system funded. Parents are on board right now. They want to be involved in education and also get some of this radical stuff out of or schools. We have a Detroit public school superintendent come out and say they’re deeply using CRT. We just got our literacy exams back. Fifty percent of kids across the state failed, but in Detroit it was nearly 90% of those students in third grade failed their literacy exam. That’s atrocious, and when I talked to the teachers there, they say it’s directly related to the curriculum.

It’s not being focused on getting those core teachings done in those first four years of grade school. That’s what we can change immediately. We can get into our education system. We can also go back to supporting rule of law. Make sure that we are holding these prosecutors accountable to these people they are just letting back out on the streets and make sure our police officers feel supported in the state of Michigan. And then like I said, our businesses, they feel as though they are under attack by state government constantly. She has this bureaucracy that is just weaponized against our local businesses. And they feel like they’re being cited, they’re being fined, they’re constantly being overregulated. The guidance in all of our different departments has been reinterpreted so that they can target our businesses.

I come from a private sector background. I understand that you don’t want to be targeted by your government, and I also understand the government only works well if business is working well. And right now, our business is being, like I said, targeted by state government, put out of business, they’re a strain on business. We have people leaving the state now. We are in a population decline because of the attack on the average person in the state of Michigan. That’s something we can change right away. We want to reduce regulations in the state by 40% in the first four years. And we can do that. We can also start looking at ways to come around businesses and help them to expand and help them to prosper quicker and easier in the state of Michigan.

BUCK: How has the crime situation in the last couple of years played out in your state? Obviously, Detroit, unfortunately, has a long-standing history as a place of pretty high crime overall. Has it seen a spike in — you mentioned the prosecutors, do you also have to deal with and would you have to deal with as the governor Soros-backed progressive prosecutors in some of your main cities?

DIXON: Yes, we do. And our crime rates have skyrocketed. We’re twice as much as the national average. It’s outrageous, but we have seen this in other states where you see the elected officials and certainly the highest elected officials, if they come out and they support defund the police, then you have police officers that don’t feel safe, they quit their jobs, they leave their jobs, and it’s hard to recruit new ones. Gretchen Whitmer has come out and said she supports the spirit of defund the police. We now have record crime rates across the nation. We’re spiking higher than other similar states. We also have the third highest homicide rate in Detroit. We were getting Detroit back on track, getting Detroit to be one of the great places to visit in the nation, and then Gretchen Whitmer took office, and now we’re seeing those crime rates and homicide rates spike in the city of Detroit. But we can fix that, and I —

BUCK: — Can you? In the state of New York, I know it’s possible. This varies state to state. In New York, though, and it’s become a big part of the gubernatorial race here with Lee Zeldin trying to — Hochul I think is maybe the only governor who’s worse than Whitmer, although Brown in Oregon’s pretty terrible too. So Brown, Whitmer, Hochul, I think are in a special category of terrible governors. But, anyway, you can remove a prosecutor as the governor. Is that something that’s in your power in Michigan? Or if not, what are the things that you would do to try to turn the crime rise around?

DIXON: One of the things that we must do in the state, it’s not just the governor’s race, we have the attorney general’s race as well, and we need to make sure that we get Dana Nessel out. Our attorney general is one of the most radical attorney generals in the country. So, that’s key that voters come out for that as well so that we can get control back of the attorney general’s office and take a look at some of these prosecutors out there. But there are opportunities also as governor to, like I said, come around our law enforcement officers and make sure people understand that rule of law is very important in the state of Michigan and also come around these young people. Our highest number of issues interactions, negative interactions with police is at the average traffic stop.

And if we could just go back to educating. We don’t have that education right now in driver’s ed, but it’s a really quick thing to put in. Our secretary of state, she received that request from the Police Officers Association of Michigan. She ignored that request. It is time for us to say, no, we’re demanding that students are learning where their most dangerous interaction could occur and how to prevent it with just compliance with our police officers who are putting their lives on the line every day.

BUCK: Tudor Dixon running for governor in Michigan. Critical race, and I very much want to see you defeat Gretchen Whitmer. Tudor, if anybody wants to learn more about your campaign, get involved, where should they go?

DIXON: Please check out our website. It’s Tudor Dixon.com. That’s T-u-d-o-r, D-i-x-o-n.com. We’d love your support. We’ve gotta get her out. We need your help to do it.

BUCK: And can I just ask you, ’cause I have an unusual name. Where does the name — it’s such a cool name. Where does the name come from?

DIXON: My mom was just really into English history; and so the Tudors, I ended up with that name, and so far it’s actually been a real blessing on the campaign trail.

BUCK: I think so. Very good stuff. Tudor Dixon, thanks so much for calling in. Great to talk to you.

DIXON: Thank you.