McDonald Rivet wins Michigan's 8th Congressional District race

Kristen McDonald Rivet won election to Michigan's 8th Congressional District, securing a seat for Democrats that was opened up by retiring Congressman Dan Kildee.

With an estimated 99% of votes counted, McDonald Rivet received 51.3% of the vote, while Republican Paul Junge has 44.6% of the vote, according to unofficial results compiled by the Associated Press, which called the race early Wednesday morning.

Michigan's 8th Congressional District includes the area in and around Bay City, Flint, Midland and Saginaw. The seat was considered a toss-up, even though the congressional district covering much of the region has been represented by Democrats for decades.

That was considered likely to have been the case again this year before U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Flint Township, announced last year he wouldn't run for a seventh two-year term. While the region has been trending more Republican in recent elections, Kildee had enormous name recognition; before he won the seat in 2012, his uncle, the late Dale Kildee, who died in 2021, had represented the area for 36 years.

The race pitted Junge, a Republican from Grand Blanc, who had lost to Kildee two years ago and lost in another district to U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Holly, in 2020, against McDonald Rivet, a first-term Democratic state senator from Bay City who earlier worked for the state education department, Michigan Head Start and nonprofit organizations.

During the campaign, Junge — a former assistant prosecutor, TV anchor and official with the Department of Homeland Security during former President Donald Trump's term, who largely self-funded his campaign through an inheritance from his father — relied on attack ads against his opponents, first in the GOP primary and then McDonald Rivet. He worked to characterize her as soft on crime and illegal immigration and present himself as a trusted ally of Trump's, who endorsed him.

McDonald Rivet, meanwhile, who had Kildee's endorsement, depicted herself as a pragmatist, willing to work with Republicans to cut taxes on working families and take steps to lower consumer prices and combat illegal immigration. She also argued that Junge is not to be trusted in his claims that he, like many other Republicans who had earlier established themselves as strict opponents of abortion rights, wouldn't vote in favor of restrictions on the practice now that Michigan voters have enshrined abortion protections into the state constitution.

Contact Todd Spangler: [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter@tsspangler.