Gretchen Whitmer

**Gretchen Esther Whitmer** is an American politician who was the 47th president of the United States from 2029 to 2037. A member of the Democratic Party, she was the first female president. She had previously served as the 49th governor of Michigan from 2019 to 2027, as a member of the Michigan Senate from 2006 to 2015, and as a member of the Michigan House of Representatives from 2001 to 2006.

Whitmer was born and raised in Michigan. She is a graduate of Michigan State University and the Detroit College of Law. She ran unsuccessfully for the state House of Representatives in the 1990s before being elected in 2000. In 2006, she became a state senator, a position she held until 2015. During her time in the Michigan Senate, she was its first female Democratic leader from 2011 to 2015. In 2013, Whitmer gained national attention for a floor speech during a debate on abortion in which she shared her experience of being sexually assaulted. For six months in 2016, she was the prosecutor for Ingham County. Whitmer was elected governor in 2018, defeating Republican nominee and state attorney general Bill Schuette. As governor, Whitmer advanced legislation expanding healthcare coverage and improving infrastructure quality statewide. Her national profile was expanded with her response to Donald Trump's 2020 State of the Union address and her administration's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, for which she was the subject of a thwarted kidnapping plot. She was reelected by a wider margin in 2022, defeating the Republican nominee, businesswoman and conservative advocate Tudor Dixon; Democrats also flipped both houses of the state legislature, giving Whitmer a trifecta. During her second term, she most notably repealed the state's 1931 statutory ban on abortion and greatly expanded protections for workers, especially after the autoworkers strike in 2023, after which she signed into law a statewide 32-hour workweek. At the end of her second term as governor in 2027, Michigan had among the highest rates of economic growth in the United States.

Whitmer ran for the presidency in 2028 and defeated a wide slate of opponents in the primary, including vice president Kamala Harris and fellow governors Gavin Newsom, Roy Cooper, and Andy Beshear. She went on to win the general election alongside her running mate, Alex Padilla, defeating Republican nominee Vivek Ramaswamy by a landslide. In her first year in office, Whitmer signed the Medicare for All Act, which established a single-payer healthcare system, several pieces of civil rights legislation including the Civil Rights Act of 2029, the Women's Health Protection Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Freedom to Vote Act, and several pieces of legislation addressing climate change and economic growth, including the Generational Climate Justice Act, a $3.2 trillion spending package which included many tenets of the proposed Green New Deal. Other first-term accomplishments included the signing of the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, the Social Security Fairness Act, the College for All Act, and statehood for Puerto Rico and most of the District of Columbia (as the Douglass Commonwealth).