Friend,

The results from yesterday’s primary are in. I will officially be running against Tom Barrett to represent Michigan’s new 7th district in Congress.

Even though my race was uncontested, we’re true data nerds here on Team Slotkin – and as such, we had our campaign war room up and running at our headquarters, working late into the night, parsing through election results. I wanted to share a few of our initial takeaways:

Going into the night, we expected that there would be more votes overall in the Republican primary in our race than in the Democratic primary – that was the natural assumption, since the Republicans had a hotly contested primary for Governor at the top of the ticket, and the Democratic ticket, from Governor on down, was all unopposed.

And yet, our campaign received more overall votes than our opponent did last night – 77,207 to his 74,902. 

Not surprisingly, we outran him in Ingham County, home to most of the city of Lansing. That’s an area that I currently represent in Michigan's 8th district.

But there was one county that really took us by surprise: in Eaton County, Tom Barrett’s home county that he currently represents in the Michigan Senate, I again got more votes than he did– and this is a county new to me in the re-drawn 7th district.

And it wasn’t just the more urban parts of Eaton County (the ones that fall within the city of Lansing) where I got more votes: I also outran my opponent in the city of Grand Ledge, and the more rural village of Dimondale.

We’re still going through the full results, but I wanted to at least share these initial results because they speak to what we’ve been hearing on the doors: voters are itching to get out to vote, to make their voices heard in some way, and our high turnout numbers point to that trajectory over the next 97 days. 

We saw this last night in Kansas, where an overwhelming majority voted not to criminalize abortion in their state constitution. We’ll have a very similar opportunity on our ballots in Michigan this November, where we’ll be voting on a ballot proposal to enshrine the standard of Roe in our state constitution – given that we currently have a 1931 law on the books outlawing abortion.

For now, I’ll leave you with this: service is the greatest love letter you can write to your country. I’m grateful for the opportunity to represent the folks of mid-Michigan, and I thank you for being along for this ride with me.