Overview:

- Rep. Jaime Churches, (D-Wyandotte) is campaigning for re-election in Michigan's 27th House District, a crucial battleground that could determine which party controls the Michigan House in 2025.
- Churches is focusing on energy reliability and affordability, criticizing DTE's service and refusing campaign donations from the corporation.
- Her opponent, Rylee Linting, is a 22-year-old field representative for Turning Point Action, who supports "lower taxes, less government, and more freedom."

Rep. Jaime Churches (D-Wyandotte) made her way through the inflatable minions, plastic gravestones, and countless Trump signs in Wyandotte on Saturday, looking for the votes to secure another term representing Michigan’s 27th House District.

The largely working-class district running along the Detroit River from Gibraltar to Wyandotte is being watched as a crucial battleground that could determine which party controls the Michigan House in 2025. Churches, a 36-year-old former teacher, won her election here by just 660 votes in 2022, and many houses advertised their support for her opponent, Grosse Ile Republican Rylee Linting.

Churches is betting that the environment can be a winning issue in the district, telling voters she wants to hold companies like BASF accountable for pollution and touting her refusal to accept campaign donations from DTE Energy and other corporations.

She told Planet Detroit that DTE’s service is one of the district’s biggest issues.

“I’ve knocked on tens of thousands of doors…and this is one of the biggest concerns for my constituency: reliability of energy (and) cost of energy,” she said.

Linting has mostly avoided policy discussions. Although outlets like Politico and Salon have covered the race, she hasn’t agreed to interviews. Her campaign website offers little detail on her priorities beyond saying she supports “lower taxes,” “less government,” and “more freedom.”

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Linting, who is 22, works as a field representative for Turning Point Action, a conservative youth organization whose leader Charlie Kirk has trafficked in racism. She attended Grand Valley State University and the evangelical Christian Liberty University but did not graduate. While at GVSU, she said she “faced indoctrination, vaccination mandates and woke student culture.”

Linting did not respond to Planet Detroit’s requests for comment.

Churches puts energy reliability and affordability at the center of her campaign

Churches’ criticism of DTE’s rates and reliability may resonate with some voters in Wyandotte, even though the city has a municipally owned electric utility. During the 2023 ice storm that knocked out power to roughly half-a-million DTE customers, with some customers losing power for a week, Wyandotte was able to restore service to most of its customers within 24 hours.

Samantha Thomas-Weick, a social worker and political independent in Wyandotte, said that she was thankful for the city-owned utility, but that DTE’s outages still impacted her family.

“I grew up in New Boston, and it seems like every time there was a cloud in the sky, we lost power,” she said.

Thomas-Weick also relies on DTE for gas service, and she said rising energy costs prevented her from taking more trips with her children.

Churches has supported the Taking Back Our Power Coalition, a group of ratepayers and nonprofits that wants to bar monopolies like DTE and Consumers Energy and other corporations seeking state contracts from making political donations. Ratepayer advocates have frequently criticized DTE for its political spending, saying it uses its influence to avoid accountability.

Churches has also pushed back on another issue that could affect energy ratepayers: proposed tax incentives for companies like Google and Microsoft to build large data centers.

Advocates have warned that “offramp” provisions in Michigan’s recently passed clean energy legislation, which set a goal of 100% renewable energy by 2040, could allow fossil fuel generation to stay online if there’s insufficient capacity to meet the demand for power-hungry data centers.

This energy demand and the facilities’ potential to use vast quantities of water to cool servers could also drive up water and electricity rates for residential customers.

Churches abstained from voting on one of these bills and voted against another in September.  

“I would like to see stronger policies to make sure that the entities that are responsible for data centers are responsible for generating their own power,” Churches said.

Polluter pay may attract support in a competitive district

Melissa Britton, a Wyandotte resident, told Churches that “most of my values align with Republicans,” citing abortion as one of her top concerns. But when the issue of PFAS in Wyandotte’s drinking water was raised, Britton expressed concern.

“(Those) caught illegally dumping should face way more charges than they do,” she said. “It ends up being cheaper for them in the long run to just pay the fine than it would have been to properly clean it up.”

Churches said she was committed to “making sure we have businesses that are able to thrive here, like BASF, but also that they clean up the things that they do to make sure it’s not impacting our ecosystem.” 

A 2023 report found that BASF’s Wyandotte facility had dumped more than a billion gallons of wastewater contaminated with PFAS, mercury, benzene, cyanide and other chemicals into the Detroit River over the last 43 years.

Churches told Planet Detroit that she supports the polluter pay legislation sponsored by Sen. Jeff Irwin (D-Ann Arbor) and Rep. Jason Morgan (D-Ann Arbor). The legislation would strengthen cleanup criteria, require financial assurances from businesses that they can conduct cleanups and make it easier for those affected by pollution to sue for medical costs.

There’s some indication that this could be a winning message with both Republicans and Democrats. A 2023 poll from Public Policy Polling, a firm aligned with the Democratic Party, found that 85% of Michigan voters supported a return to strong polluter pay laws, like those that existed before they were rolled back under the leadership of former Governor John Engler. 

After raising the issue of Linting’s age and her ten years of experience as an educator, Churches appeared to secure Britton’s vote.

“It’ll probably end up being you then, because I will not vote for somebody who’s under 25,” Britton said.

Thomas-Weick declined to say who she would vote for but clarified that transitioning to renewable energy was a priority for her. She said residents needed help to afford rooftop solar and electric vehicles. Churches told a reporter she wanted to “safeguard” and “build upon” the renewable energy legislation passed last year.

And while issues like electric vehicles and renewable energy have been hot-button topics in this election, with Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers saying EVs could kill American jobs, Thomas-Weick expressed optimism that cleaner energy could reduce pollution and create economic opportunity.

“Change is always tough, but good things come from change,” she said. “We gotta take care of this place…I want my great-grandchildren to have cleaner air.”

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Brian Allnutt is a senior reporter and contributing editor at Planet Detroit. He covers the climate crisis, environmental justice, politics and open space.