Tudor Dixon, a conservative media personality with the political backing of Michigan’s powerful DeVos family, won the state’s Republican primary for governor on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press.
She will advance in the general election against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a first-term Democrat who was shortlisted for Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s summer 2020 vice presidential running mate.
In its final weeks, the primary has become a race to win the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump, who ended up endorsing Ms. Dixon. But she did not wait for his official endorsement to air a Mr. Trump television ad praising her at a campaign rally and to release an internal poll showing that half the primary electorate thought Mr. Trump had already endorsed her.
Ms. Dixon emerged victorious from a five-person field that lost its two best-funded candidates in May after they were disqualified by a state campaign committee for submitting fake petition signatures.
A former commentator for the conservative VOA media channel, Ms Dixon, 45, was previously an actress and an executive at her family’s steel company. She said she was prompted to run for office by her anger over Ms. Whitmer’s policies, particularly the pandemic shutdown orders that were among the strictest in the nation in the early months of Covid-19.
A mother of four school-aged children, Ms. Dixon favors per-pupil tuition funding to follow students to any school they choose, including private schools. The policy is in line with longtime priorities of the DeVos family, including Betsy DeVos, Mr. Trump’s former education secretary.
During a debate in May, Ms. Dixon raised her hand when asked if she believed Mr. Trump had won Michigan in 2020, a race he actually lost to President Biden by 154,000 votes. But on Sunday, after securing Mr Trump’s endorsement, Ms Dixon backed away from that position, saying instead she was concerned about “how the election was conducted”. A lengthy review by state Senate Republicans in 2021 debunked claims by Trump supporters that there was widespread fraud.
Ms. Dixon and the rest of the Republican field were relatively unknown in Michigan, with polls showing that two in five Republicans do not know or have no opinion about either candidate just two weeks before the election.
Her biggest rival, the self-funded former car dealership owner Kevin Rinke, attacked Ms. Dixon as a tool of the DeVos family when Ms. DeVos said in June that she had tried to invoke the 25th Amendment to removed Mr. Trump from office after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Ms. DeVos supported Ms. Dixon’s campaign and her family helped fund it, and a handwritten “Dear Mr. President” letter from Ms. DeVos to Mr. Trump last week appeared to have prompted his endorsement of Ms. Dixon.
Garrett Soldano, a chiropractor who gained political attention by organizing rallies against Ms. Whitmer’s pandemic mitigation efforts in 2020, urged Mr. Trump not to support Ms. Dixon. He said in a video message to Mr. Trump that after Jan. 6, the DeVos family “virtually abandoned you, sir.”
And Ryan Kelly, a real estate broker, was arrested in June and charged with four felonies for his actions at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Mr Kelly pleaded not guilty and said he joined the rioters outside but did not enter the building. At the time, he predicted that the publicity surrounding his arrest would help his campaign, even though he did not raise enough money to air television ads.
Of the four front-runners, three — Ms. Dixon, Mr. Kelly and Mr. Soldano — falsely said during the May debate that Mr. Trump carried Michigan in 2020. Mr. Rinke said he there was fraud, but that maybe I’m not sure it was enough to turn the country over to Mr. Trump.
Trip Gabriel contributed reporting.
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