One big thing is missing from the GOP campaign to reclaim Michigan's state House: Trump

WYOMING, Mich. — As he made his case for a Republican revival here at a neighborhood steakhouse, former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder abstained from red meat.

“We need to bring civility back and relentless positive action back,” Snyder, who is leading the party’s effort to reclaim the majority in the state House of Representatives, said as two dozen GOP operatives, some of them nibbling on locally famous windmill cookies, listened politely.

“I don’t believe we should call anyone names,” Snyder added. “Or yell at anyone.”

Snyder’s pitch for positivity is at odds with the political hostilities of the moment, particularly in a battleground state like Michigan. There’s none of the fiery “Fight! Fight! Fight!” rhetoric that Republicans have rallied around since the attempts to assassinate former President Donald Trump.

Snyder purposely avoided talking about him last week during an 11-city bus tour, worried that any mention of him might turn off swing voters here in the Grand Rapids suburbs and in other districts, from metro Detroit to Battle Creek and Traverse City. The base GOP voters Trump is most focused on aren’t necessarily the same voters who are key to the coalition Snyder is trying to build. In some places, there may be more overlap with the center-right voters Vice President Kamala Harris hopes to win over by touting an endorsement from Fred Upton, a Republican former congressman from southwest Michigan.

Follow live updates on the 2024 election

At a time when Trump holds a vise-like grip on the party, few of the Republicans who spoke to NBC News at Snyder’s events expressed enthusiasm for his third White House bid.

Some pointedly refused to say whether they are voting for Trump. Peter Meijer, a Republican former congressman who lost a primary in 2022 after he voted to impeach Trump and briefly ran for the Senate this year, winced when he was asked whether Trump had earned his vote.

“I’m not speaking on the presidential election,” he said at the steakhouse just outside Grand Rapids, where Snyder was promoting Tommy Brann, a candidate for state representative whose family has owned the restaurant for decades. “I’m here to support folks like Tommy Brann.”

Paul Hudson, the Republican congressional nominee aiming to unseat Rep. Hillary Scholten in the Grand Rapids-area congressional district that Meijer previously represented, also dodged.

“I’ve just made a decision early on in this race that I’m going to focus on my race and have stuck to that all the way through,” Hudson said after he praised Snyder’s effort for state House candidates and the “terrific campaign” by Michigan’s Republican U.S. Senate candidate, Mike Rogers.

Snyder and the Republicans are trying to chip away at Democrats’ “trifecta” in Michigan, where they have a lock on governing with Snyder’s successor, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and two-seat majorities in both the state House and the state Senate (Democrats also hold a majority on the state Supreme Court). The next elections for governor and the state Senate aren’t until 2026.

In their push to win back the state House, Snyder and the Republicans are emphasizing pocketbook issues and arguing that unchecked power by one political party in Lansing, the capital, has pulled Michigan too far to the left. They complain that Whitmer and the Democrats were wrong to allow an income tax cut triggered by higher tax revenues to expire this year.

Democrats, meanwhile, counter that their tax policies have brought relief to those who need it most. They also contend that new gun safety laws and a repeal of the state’s anti-union “right to work” law — signed by Snyder in 2012 — wouldn’t have happened under GOP rule.

“The only advantage they have is old notions,” Whitmer said last week at her own event to support state House candidates in Oakland County. “Because the facts are on our side.”

Snyder, who endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, also wouldn’t say how he is voting in the presidential election. In an interview on his “bus” — a sleeker commercial van with cans of Diet Pepsi chilling in a soft pack cooler — he said his goal is to reach voters who are disillusioned by the nasty tenor of politics at the national level.

All the districts he’s targeting “can swing either way,” Snyder said.

“That’s one reason I’ve stayed out” of the presidential race, he added as he prepared to call in to a local radio show en route to tape another interview at a TV station.

The hosts of both programs also asked whom he is voting for, and both got the same answer: He doesn’t want to dilute the positive message of his take-back-the-House campaign.

“If I said I was one way or another, then everyone coming to these House events would have a skewed view of where I’m coming from, versus me saying, ‘Hey ... I’m here to talk to you about this lane that is in our backyard,’” Snyder told NBC News. “This is all about Michigan.”

Snyder said he sees about “nine or 10” state House races being in play — a mix of pickup opportunities for the GOP and Republican seats at risk of falling to Democrats. His “Mission for Michigan” travels last week took him, among other places, to the steakhouse owned by Brann’s family; to a pool and hot tub retailer in Utica, where a City Council member, Ron Robinson, is running for a competitive seat; and to a beer and wine store in Troy, where he campaigned for state Rep. Tom Kuhn.

All struck the same conciliatory tones as Snyder.

“I think Gov. Whitmer has done some good things — I’m not against the gun laws that she did,” said Brann, who also heaped praise on Snyder’s expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which has long been a lightning rod for right-wing Republicans.

Democrats aren’t buying the kinder, gentler approach.

Tommy Kubitschek, a spokesperson for the Michigan Democratic Party, referred to the more tumultuous moments of Snyder’s governorship, including the Flint water crisis.

“It’s no surprise that disgraced former Gov. Rick Snyder is openly trying to get MAGA extremists elected to the state House,” Kubitschek said. “Not only was Snyder one of Michigan’s worst and most destructive governors, causing long-lasting damage to our great state, but he now seems determined to crawl back on the scene instead of fading quietly into the history books.”

State Rep. Jennifer Conlin, a Democrat whose Ann Arbor-area district isn’t among those Snyder visited last week, acknowledged that Snyder is “trying to ... separate himself from the politics at large and the Republican Party nationally.”

“But basically, there’s no way any Republican wins their primary here without having taken that fealty oath to the Trump part of the party,” she said. “So everybody who they’re kind of pushing for is actually part of that group, any way you can look at it, and so it’s not like you would get a normal Republican Party by backing the people who are running.”