If you hadn’t already heard of Elissa Slotkin—the Michigan Democrat who delivered the party’s response to Donald Trump’s March 4 speech to Congress—now is the time to get familiar with her name. She even joked in her speech, “I won’t take it personally if you’ve never heard of me.”
This is Slotkin’s first term as a senator, but she’s been an important political figure for years now.
Before she was a politician herself, Slotkin was a CIA analyst, then worked in national security roles during both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, per her official website. Then, in 2018, she decided to run for Congress in a Michigan district that had been represented by a Republican since 2001, according to the Detroit Free Press. And, against all odds, she won. She was reelected to Congress in 2020 and again in 2022.
But her 2024 election to the Senate was, if possible, even more of a nail-biter. Michigan is one of the swingiest of swing states, and Slotkin was up against Republican Mike Rogers. Even though Trump won the state of Michigan in the presidential race, Slotkin beat her Senate opponent by a mere 19,000 votes, per The New York Times.
Slotkin rose to national prominence almost immediately after she was elected to Congress in 2018, in part because of her decision to vote to impeach Trump for his dealings with Ukraine. “President Trump used the power of the presidency for his own benefit, to give himself some advantage in the very election that would determine whether he remained in office,” she wrote in a Detroit Free Press op-ed in 2019. Her decision was greeted with major blowback in her home state, and there was a real danger she wouldn’t win reelection in 2020.
