The Democrat Apologizing for Nothing in a Must-Win Swing State
Five years ago, Dana Nessel pulled on a royal blue blazer, plopped herself in front of a fireplace, and made her pitch to voters with an anatomy lesson: Vote for her, the candidate who doesn’t have a penis.
“When you’re choosing Michigan’s next attorney general, ask yourself this: Who can you trust most to not show you their penis in a professional setting?” she said in a 2017 advertisement. “Is it the candidate who doesn’t have a penis? I’d say so.” It was (figuratively) ballsy but (literally) zeitgeisty at the bleeding edge of #MeToo. Headlines detailing the allegations against Charlie Rose and Harvey Weinstein flashed alongside Nessel as she promised to “not sexually harass my staff” nor “walk around in a half-open bathrobe.”
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The women employed by her campaign cheered the spot. All of the men, save for one, quit. “They said I’d completely torched my chances,” Nessel recalls. Instead, the ad went viral, Nessel won the Democratic nomination, and narrowly defeated her GOP opponent.
In instances when most Democrats wring their hands at the edges of the culture war, Nessel has attacked it at its center. “Hangers are for clothes,” not abortions, she declared in a 2018 general election ad. “If [Republicans] win, you may have to cross state lines just to legally have safe sex,” she says in a 2022 election video. “A drag queen for every school,” she joked amid amid homophobic accusations from the right of “grooming” by public school teachers in June. It was a remark that “was totally not poll-tested,” she conceded.
“I’ve never been great at waiting to see what other people think about something before I develop an opinion,” she tells me, “and I’ve never been great at disguising my opinion.”
Her frankness is informed, in part, by her own personal rights being on the line in this tenuous political moment. She’s a woman in a state with a pre-Roe abortion ban — and as the state’s top law-enforcement official, she controls over whether that’s enforced. She’s married to a woman at a time when moral panic over LGBTQ rights has animated social conservatives. “I said to my wife, ‘I don’t want to live in a country where we don’t have legal rights to each other — I worked too hard to let that happen,’” Nessel says.
Her Republican opponent as she seeks reelection this year presents a different kind of challenge. Attorney Matt DePerno is an aggressive, Trump-backed election denier whose nomination raises the stakes of Nessel’s bid to stay in office — given that office’s role in protecting fair elections. Suddenly, Nessel finds herself at the red-hot core of a fight not just to fight back against the culture wars, but to preserve democracy itself. Her pitch to voters this time around remains anatomical: Vote for her, the candidate who has a spine.
I met Nessel at one of her campaign offices, a spartan space in a suburban strip mall roughly 30 miles west of Detroit. We sit together alongside a wall papered with her campaign signs in several shades of blue, and Nessel complements them in a periwinkle blazer and black pants. She leans forward in a leather desk chair as she speaks — warmly, with the typical flattened Midwestern vowels — and her dark brown hair frames her square jaw. It’s the sort of jaw that would earn Nessel honorifics like “natural-born politician” if she were a man.
But, of course, Nessel is neither. The former prosecutor earned acclaim in private practice as as an attorney for same-sex couples who were denied marriage rights. Her work on behalf of a lesbian couple seeking to adopt children became part of the fight that eventually led to the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges and the legalization of same-sex marriage nationwide.
Then Donald Trump won the presidency, and Nessel joined the hordes of devastated Democrats who regularly registered outrage against their new president. “God, we didn’t even go to dinner anymore — we just went to rallies, like all day, every day,” she recalls. She was terrible at making signs — “I’m Gay For Science” scrawled onto posterboard for the 2017 March for Science represented a particular lowpoint — and it all started to feel futile.
“I just turned to my wife and I was like, ‘I don’t think Donald Trump cares that we’re out here.’” So the 49-year-old put away her lousy signs and decided to run for attorney general, the first elected office she ever sought.
Her first term saw an unprecedented shift from federal to state rights, thanks to several Supreme Court cases, and what those cases foreshadowed looms over her reelection campaign. In particular, LGBTQ rights, especially after Justice Clarence Thomas’ opinion in the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health that insinuated cases that guarantee their rights could fall next. Nessel recalls a time before the Obergefell decision — before she and her wife could be married and recognized as parents to both of their children — when the couple had two different health insurance plans, when only Nessel was legally allowed to make decisions for the children. “I just can’t imagine the government coming in and dissolving our marriage,” she says. “It’s a hateful thing to do. And for what?”
More immediately, though, she’s focused on what the Supreme Court has already done. “I’ve been waiting for this moment — even a blind man could see it coming,” she tells me of the wait to overturn Roe. As attorney general, she has vowed not to prosecute anyone under Michigan’s 1931 law that bans abortion. State courts have, so far, sided with Nessel and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in their attempts to keep the law from being enforced, but Nessel has had to intervene at times when courts undercut her efforts. Earlier this month, she rushed to get a temporary stay to stop county prosecutors from charging doctors for performing abortions. “I made probably 100 phone calls to find someone who could contact the judge,” Nessel recalls. “Even the delay of a few days is very dangerous in the state,” she says. “People don’t know what the law is from moment to moment.”
Matt DePerno, the Trump-endorsed likely Republican attorney general nominee, has promised to uphold the 1931 law if he wins — and expects local prosecutors to enforce it. “They take an oath,” he told me last week.
But the prospect of doctors and patients being prosecuted isn’t the only concern DePerno poses for many Michiganders. Of equal note is DePerno’s notoriety for alleging that the 2020 election was rife with fraud and that Donald Trump was its true victor. He has been a key defender of the Big Lie, leading multiple failed lawsuits in Michigan to overturn the election results. Earlier this month, Nessel’s office announced an investigation into DePerno and some allies for allegedly stealing voting tabulators from the state to inspect for signs of voter fraud, and Nessel’s office has requested an independent special prosecutor take over the case, so as to avoid any conflict of interest around investigating a political opponent. (For his part, DePerno told me Nessel is a “corrupt attorney general,” has undertaken the investigation “against her political opponent to boost her campaign,” and should be “impeached.”)
There’s not much Nessel can say about the situation, given the risk of influencing an ongoing inquiry. She notes only that the investigation began in February, when it was clear that election equipment was coming into the hands of those who were legally unauthorized to have them. Nessel is nevertheless open about the threat she thinks DePerno poses to upholding democracy. “You’re not there to defend Donald Trump — you’re not his lawyer,” Nessel says.
The attorney general’s role in defending the outcome of the next presidential election weighs on Nessel — especially in a state like Michigan, where the margin of victory is nearly always narrow. “I constantly do the math in my head, over and over again,” she tells me. Nessel rattled off the states where Trump tried to undermine the election results: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and, of course, Michigan.
“The authority of my office is to make sure that the person who got the most votes in my state president receives our electoral votes,” she continues. Even if it’s Trump. “I will defend him receiving those electoral votes the best that I possibly can, because that’s what a democracy is.” Nessel pauses and chuckles. “I will leave the country the next day, but before that, I will make sure he is certified as the winner of the election.”
Nessel’s political opponents have strived to convert her candor into an electoral liability. Meshawn Maddock, the Michigan GOP co-chair who assisted Trump’s fake elector scheme, draws particular delight from dragging Nessel in her unfiltered moments. “She has reckless self control or maybe drinking again,” Maddock tweeted in response to Nessel’s “drag queen” comments in June. (Nessel’s Republican detractors often bring up drinking in their attacks on her, a reference to a tailgate last year at which Nessel drank too much and left.)
Nessel’s supporters, meanwhile, view how she handled that incident as an asset. “She disclosed it with humanity when others might have avoided it altogether,” says Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the Michigan GOP who’s been critical of the party and now works with Nessel. “She has a unique personality and humor that most politicians wish they had.” (As for Maddock, “she’s insane, stupid, and cruel,” Timmer texted, “and you can quote me on that.”)
“Authenticity” is a weird thing in politics. It’s a quality voters crave in candidates (see: Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman’s Carhartt-clad exterior — never mind his Harvard degree), but also one that’s hard to explain and measure. Nessel’s plainspokenness passes that test, explains Amy Chapman, a Michigan-based Democratic strategist. “In an era when people try to craft themselves to what voters might want to see or hear, she is what she is,” Chapman says. “She’s strong in her beliefs — she’s not going to BS you.”
Whatever her je ne sais quoi, it helped her come out of nowhere to win her race for attorney general in 2018. The stakes in her bid for reelection may be even higher than she could have imagined then, but as she readied for a showdown with one of the nation’s highest profile election deniers, she’s campaigning on the same thing she did four years ago: Herself.
“I’m not saying that I’m not open to changing my views,” Nessel explains. But if she does, “I’m never going to change my position based on poll testing. People will either vote for me because they like that, or they will reject my bid for reelection because they dislike it.”
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