In August, Michigan Democrats picked a Sunrise Movement co-founder over a former ambassador and a former Navy SEAL. Will Lawrence has never held office. Until recently, he was a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America. 

Now he’s running in Michigan’s 7th District, which includes Lansing, East Lansing, and the farm counties and exurbs around them, out to Livingston County and the edge of Oakland. Sen. Bernie Sanders endorsed him in the race.

It is a seat Republican Rep. Tom Barrett won by under four points, in a district that narrowly backed President Trump in 2016 and former President Biden in 2020. 

Lawrence is running on universal health care, taxing the very rich to pay for child care and elder care, and a freeze on new data centers and the most advanced AI. Whether a campaign like that can win a district this close is a question Democrats have been arguing about for years. 

He spoke with host Robyn Vincent about Medicare for All, data centers, Trump’s tariffs on Canada, and whether a progressive can win a swing seat. Barrett joins The Metro next week.

Hear the full conversation using the media player above.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or NPR, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org.

More stories from The Metro

At least 19 Michigan cities and townships have voted to pause new data centers — more than in any other state — and power is the common thread.

The data center going up south of Ann Arbor will use more electricity than a million homes, and it will never shut off. DTE says serving that single project raises the company’s demand by a quarter, while insisting customers won’t pay more or lose power — a claim the state attorney general has asked regulators to reexamine, and one that landed differently last week when storms left more than 450,000 homes in the dark for days.

Lansing hasn’t moved. A bipartisan bill that would freeze data center approvals statewide has sat in committee since February.

State Rep. Jennifer Wortz, a Republican from Quincy, is one of its sponsors. She represents Branch and Hillsdale counties along the Indiana border, where she and her husband run a chicken farm. She joined host Robyn Vincent on The Metro to talk about who gets to say no when a data center comes to town.

Hear the full conversation using the media player above.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or NPR, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org.

More stories from The Metro

What should we make of the climate movement’s accomplishments over the last decade?

On one side, the Inflation Reduction Act and Chips and Science Act helped distribute clean energy across the country. Those policies dropped solar prices — 90% over the last decade. Battery storage costs fell by the same amount from 2010 to 2020. 

But the Green New Deal never passed, and many Republicans in Michigan and across the U.S. are against a clean energy transition. President Donald Trump has consistently said climate change isn’t real and the world continues to warm at a rapid clip. 

Jay Inslee has been at the center of the climate movement. He was governor of Washington for three terms, and a presidential candidate in 2020 when he pushed Democrats to take climate change more seriously. 

What does he make of our climate politics today? And where should the climate movement go next?

The Metro’s Sam Corey recently spoke with Inslee when he was in town stumping for Jocelyn Benson in her bid for governor.

The Metro has reached out multiple times to the campaign for Republican John James for governor. They have not yet given us a time when the candidate is available to join us.

A few notes about this conversation:

Inslee mentioned a Washington ballot measure on climate that won 62 percent of the vote. That was a 2024 vote on whether to scrap the state’s climate program — the one that makes big polluters pay for what they emit. Voters chose to keep it.

He also cited a Washington vote on electric school buses. That wasn’t a ballot measure — it was a bill, passed by the Legislature in 2024.

He said President Trump’s White House construction and renovation projects will cost $800 million. According to Reuters, those projects are now more than $900 million.

Inslee said that 80% of rural voters supported a clean energy ballot initiative in Washington. We could not verify that.

Hear the full conversation using the media player above.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and stream on-demand.

Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, NPR, or wherever you get your podcasts.

More stories from The Metro

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed says he saw it coming.

“When you launch a campaign and you’re trying to get money out of politics,” he told The Metro, “that invites record amounts of spending against you.”

More than $60 million in outside money went into last week’s Michigan Senate primary, most of it aimed at stopping him. The largest single source was AIPAC, whose super PAC spent about $30 million backing U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens — the most the pro-Israel group has ever put into a congressional primary.

El-Sayed won by fewer than 15,000 votes.

He ran health departments in Detroit and Wayne County, and he now faces Republican Mike Rogers for a seat that could decide control of the Senate. If he wins, he would be the first Muslim to serve there.

He sat down with The Metro’s Robyn Vincent — in the same studio where he announced his run in April of last year.

The money that defined the race

El Sayed came back to the spending repeatedly, including when asked why he lost Detroit. “Ask yourself, if there was no outside spending in this campaign, where do we think votes would have gone?”

He won’t stop saying genocide

Did calling the war in Gaza a genocide drown out his message on health care? He said it isn’t a trade he’ll make: “The job’s not worth it. The work is worth it.”

To Jewish voters who hear his criticism of Israel as criticism of them: “Judaism and the Jewish people are a light unto the world. But Judaism and the Jewish people are different than AIPAC and the Israeli government.”

Black Democrats and the ‘uncommitted’ vote

Many Black Democrats in Michigan blame the 2024 “uncommitted” protest vote, which El-Sayed backed, for costing Kamala Harris the state. Keith Williams, who chairs the state party’s Black Caucus, endorsed Stevens and said El-Sayed was with uncommitted only when it suited him.

“Convenience would have been to say nothing and stay quiet,” El-Sayed said. He noted that Harris endorsed him Friday. “I don’t think she thinks I’m the reason that she lost.”

On mistrust between Black and Arab Detroit, he said Arab and Muslim Michiganders can’t object to anti-Arab racism while tolerating racism toward Black Detroiters. “Standing up against racism is about principle. It’s not about tribalism.”

Data centers and health care

El-Sayed said what he’d write into federal law on data centers, after campaigning against the Oracle and OpenAI project in Saline Township: protections for local water, no utility rate increases, guaranteed union jobs, and money held in escrow before construction begins.

On Medicare for All, he acknowledged a freshman senator can’t deliver it alone. “You can’t get it all in one shot. But politics, as all of us know, doesn’t just move linearly.”

The Metro has invited Republican candidate Mike Rogers on the program several times and has not heard back.

Hear the full conversation using the media player above.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or NPR, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org.

More stories from The Metro