Republican congressional candidates fight to reclaim west Michigan, a former stronghold

• Republicans Michael Markey, Paul Hudson locked in a bitter primary fight in Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District
• The winner is expected to face Democratic U.S. Rep. Hillary Scholten in the November general election
• Scholten is the first Democrat to represent the region in decades, but she won the seat by double digits in 2022

An acrimonious Republican primary in west Michigan will decide who takes on a first-term Democrat in a former conservative bastion only recently flipped blue. 

U.S. Rep. Hillary Scholten of Grand Rapids, the first Democrat in 46 years to represent her city in Congress, is seeking to hold her 3rd Congressional District seat as a new liberal foothold.

Businessman Michael Markey and attorney Paul Hudson are hoping for the chance to flip the seat, but a spate of attacks has left each bruised heading into the Aug. 6 primary. 

Among other things, a super political action committee closely linked to Hudson has claimed in ads that Markey supported the “Green New Deal,” a Democratic policy platform that has drawn derision from conservatives

Markey, in turn, has accused Hudson of having ties to the communist party. He's also lambasted Hudson for not fervently backing presidential nominee Donald Trump and being soft on immigration and other issues.

“If you can't endorse the president after he took a bullet, in our eyes you're not even a Republican, we're going to call you a RINO (Republican in name only),” Markey told Bridge Michigan in an interview.

While experts consider the seat competitive, the general election race could be decided by local moderate conservatives with a distaste for Trump, many of whom turned on the former president in 2020. 

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Democrats are welcoming those disillusioned Republicans as they attempt to hold the seat, said Kim Gates, the chair of the Kent County Democratic Party.

“They're saying ‘this is not the Republican Party we knew’ and they are refusing to vote for the MAGA Republicans,” Gates said. “So that's been an advantage for us as well here in this area … they can't align with the values or lack of values.”

In 2020, President Joe Biden carried Kent County, beating Trump by an 8 percentage-point margin — more than 22,000 votes, a good sign for Democrats’ fortunes with Trump again at the top of the ticket.

Scholten, however, lost that year in her first campaign for congress, falling to Republican Peter Meijer in the general election. 

Scholten won the seat in 2022 by defeating Republican John Gibbs, and she now faces only token opposition in the primary from entrepreneur Salim Al-Shatel, a member of the Grand Rapids planning commission who has raised just $5,000 to challenge the incumbent congresswoman.

A bitter primary

Markey and Hudson are two former statewide candidates who have engaged in an increasingly combative competition with unsubstantiated allegations flying from both sides.

Markey, a married father of three and financial advisor from Grand Haven, sought the GOP nomination for governor in 2022, but was disqualified amid a signature fraud scandal that saw half of Republican candidates blocked from the ballot.

Paul Hudson is an attorney and senior partner at the law firm Miller Canfield who has specialized in appellate work. He earned the Republican nomination to Michigan Supreme Court in 2022, only to come in fourth in that race, losing to the two incumbent justices with about 13% of the vote.

The candidates have remarkably similar platforms on many issues: They both emphasize the economy and immigration, promise to tackle inflation, cut taxes and oppose government overreach..

Husdon’s campaign, citing the close proximity to the primary election, declined to make Hudson available for an interview.

Markey has picked up some notable endorsements, including from 3rd Congressional District Republican Party Chair Chip Netzel and John Schaut, the current chair of the Kent County Republican Party.

Markey’s campaign has sent out mail penned by Netzel and Schaut arguing Hudson would be a disastrous choice, citing his former residency outside the district and 2015 work defending a Chinese auto parts supplier in litigation.

In a statement to Fox News, a spokesperson for Hudson’s campaign said Hudson has "represented a wide variety of clients in hundreds of cases in his 18 years of practicing law in Michigan."

Markey has slammed Hudson, claiming without evidence his work demonstrates his opponent has ties to China’s ruling communist party.

Hudson touts backing from Mike Hewitt, a former chair of Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District Republican Party, who criticized his successor for endorsing Markey. 

“I passionately do not believe that it's the proper role of a county or district organization to make primary endorsements,” Hewitt said. “That's not a healthy thing for the party to do.”

Hudson also touts endorsements from some high-profile Republicans outside the district, including U.S. Rep. Jack Bergman of Watersmeet and state Senate Minority Leader Aric Nesbitt of  Porter Township.

Hudson was met with some controversy earlier in his campaign when a super PAC set up to support him, West Michigan For Change, initially reported a sole $1 million donation from the Paul Hudson Revocable Trust. 

Direct coordination between super PACs and candidate campaigns is against federal election rules. But Hudson’s filing was later amended to say the donation came from a revocable trust for Ryan Hudson, the candidate’s brother and an entrepreneur in the tech sector. 

The PAC has spent nearly $700,000 in the primary supporting Hudson and opposing Markey.

Markey has raised a little more than $300,000, lent his campaign nearly $470,000 and spent all but $88,000 heading into the primary’s final weeks. Hudson meanwhile, has raised about $380,000 while lending his campaign about $250,000. He had about $300,000 in the bank as of July 17.

A ‘pretty centrist’ district

Just days after being sworn into Congress in 2021, Meijer cast a vote that would later seal his fate — he was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for fomenting supporters who violently stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.

That vote hurt Meijer in the 2022 primary. 

The Grand Rapids-area district that elected him two years earlier had also shifted dramatically through redistricting: it had previously included rural Ionia County stretched southward to comprise Battle Creek. 

Its new iteration is substantially more compact, and includes more of the Grand Rapids area. The district now reaches the coast of Lake Michigan and includes a majority of deeply conservative Ottawa County, along with the city of Muskegon, a Democratic stronghold.

The district is “pretty centrist,” said Hewitt, the former Republican congressional district chair. 

Hewitt watched as Meijer in 2022 faced a challenge from the right in former Trump administration officials John Gibbs, who received Trump’s endorsement and attacked Meijer for his impeachment vote.

Gibbs ousted Meijer in the primary, then lost in the general to Scholten by close to 13 percentage points, as she rode a blue wave that brought sweeping gains for Democrats in Michigan and won her 55% of the vote.

“What makes it difficult for the Republicans is you still have a lot of those very, very conservative people in the party structure and grassroots in the 3rd district,” Hewitt said in an interview. 

“So trying to win their support in a primary and then pivot back to the center — I wouldn't want to be a candidate in that district right now.”

The 3rd district that emerged from redistricting is more educated than Michigan and the rest of the country, on average, but also younger than the state as well.

Markey believes by targeting young voters with an economic message centered on affordability will be a winning strategy.

“I don't think Kent County has gone blue. I think Kent County has gone millennial,” Markey told Bridge. 

“The number one thing we have to focus on is how to make it affordable for you to start a family and expand the family. … It's the everyday middle class families that overwhelmingly make up the independents, so if we start bringing actual policy ideas to them, we're going to win them over.”

Scholten, the incumbent Democrat, made national news earlier this month when she became the first – and only – member of the Michigan delegation to join U.S. House colleagues calling on Biden to end his candidacy for reelection. 

Biden ended his campaign July 21, and Vice President Kamala Harris has since energized the ticket as the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, said Gates, the Kent County Democratic Party chair. 

“If we can get young people out, if we can get them registered to vote, and get them informed, they will get out and vote,” Gates said. “I think Kamala Harris is certainly going to be a motivating factor.”