Is Elissa Slotkin Leading the Angry Middle?

On January 3, 2025, Elissa Slotkin was sworn in as a senator of the 119th Congress. Dressed in a blue blazer, with her signature blunt bob, Slotkin placed her hand on The Torah: A Women’s Commentary—the first full Torah commentary to feature contributions only from women—held by her father Curt and took the oath given to her by Kamala Harris, in one of her last formal acts as vice president. 

It was something of an awkward moment. Michigan should have been fertile ground for the Harris presidential ticket in the 2024 election. But Harris had lost the state by about 80,000 votes out of 5.4 million cast, while Slotkin managed to squeeze through by roughly 19,000, making her one of only four Democratic senators to win in states that also went for Trump. 

In the Democratic Party’s soul-searching after the 2024 election, many landed on Slotkin as a key player in the party’s future. Throughout her House tenure, Slotkin had regularly ranked as one of Congress’s most bipartisan lawmakers. Her three terms representing Michigan’s 7th then 8th districts were marked by measures to bolster supply chains in the auto industry, restore healthcare access to low-to-middle income earners and get money out of politics.

As a former Central Intelligence Agency operative and Iraq war veteran who speaks fluent Arabic and Swahili, Slotkin also has enough national security cred to have earned her respect on both sides of the aisle. 

“I’m extremely focused on how we meet the momentum, given that this president is doing unprecedented things with the presidency and our Constitution.”

Now, at age 49, she is the youngest female Democratic senator and the fourth youngest Democrat overall in a Senate where the average Democrat is 66. She has at times broken with her party, including last year when she was among 12 Democrats who supported the GOP-backed Laken Riley Act, legislation that would require the detention of undocumented immigrants arrested for certain crimes, and was one of seven Democrats to vote to confirm Kristi Noem as the head of the Department of Homeland Security.

“She has done a good job of positioning herself as a pragmatic moderate, someone not from the progressive wing of her party, and that plays well in a state like Michigan,” says David Dulio, a political science professor at Oakland University in Michigan and director of its Center for Civic Engagement. “At a time when it is kitchen table issues that people are thinking about and talking about,” Dulio says, Slotkin’s positions have helped her attain national prominence. 

Slotkin has likewise become associated with what people are now calling the “angry middle,” says Matt Grossman, a professor of American politics at the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University. Speaking plainly and directly with a strong midwestern accent, Slotkin isn’t afraid to get mad and has been known to pepper her speech with profanities. In a September 5 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations discussing the ailing automobile sector and its tight supply chain, she told a roomful of policy wonks, “you need people who make shit.” She used the word again—twice—in an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The misuse of intelligence by the Trump administration, she said, is “dangerous bullshit.”

Her ability to speak frankly and directly to the American people likely was why she was tapped to give the response to Trump’s State of the Union address on March 5, 2025. Flanked by American flags, she went on national television calling Trump’s speech “chaotic” and “reckless.” 

She continued to call Trump out last summer as she made stops at various think tanks to unveil what she calls an “economic war plan” focused on reviving the middle class. “We need to treat economic security as a national security priority because it is,” she said at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). “I believe in my bones that the existential threat to the United States is not coming from abroad. It’s the shrinking middle class here at home.” Unlike some of her fellow Democrats, she isn’t afraid to give Trump credit for tapping into legitimate concerns regarding the cost of living. “He’s picking up on something that’s very real in the country,” Slotkin said at CFR, then adding, “My experience with Trump is that he usually has the wrong answer for the right question.”

Slotkin is also not afraid to go after her own party, echoing what voters have said in focus groups: that her own party is guilty of being “weak and woke.” In June at the Center for American Progress (CAP) she castigated fellow Democrats for losing their “alpha energy” and “bravado,” of taking an “elitist” approach to the climate crisis and having “a bias towards navel-gazing.” She painted a bleak picture of a leaderless party pulling in different directions, a solar system with no sun in the middle. “I don’t understand how to rally us into a coherent approach if we aren’t on the same page on where we’re going,” she told Politico last spring. 

For much of the past several years, Slotkin has been lumped together with four other centrist women who have backgrounds either in the military or the CIA. Two are now governors who won big in off-year elections: Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger (also a former CIA analyst). They, along with Slotkin, Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania and Elaine Luria of Virginia, all won congressional races in 2018. (“The bad-ass women, as we were called,” Slotkin says.)

More recently she has been casting her own political net more widely. In November, she dropped into Kansas City, MO to ask a group of Democrats why many of them did not vote last year. In an interview afterwards with Politico, Slotkin refused to rule out a run for the presidency in 2028.

 

Slotkin’s roots in Michigan go way back. Her great-grandfather Samuel was one of nine children of a Talmudic scholar in a small town near Minsk. At the age of 14, with virtually no money, he swam across a river to avoid German and Russian border police and then hitchhiked to Holland. In 1900, he arrived in the United States at Ellis Island. No passport or visa was required at the time. Ultimately, all but one of his siblings would join him, avoiding immigration restrictions and later the Holocaust. 

Samuel’s family was wildly successful in the New World, eventually settling in Michigan. According to a 1946 New Yorker profile, the Slotkins acquired 60 fresh and frozen all-beef plants under the banner of the Detroit-based Hygrade Food Products Corp. Samuel would later broker a deal for Hygrade to become the exclusive supplier of hot dogs at Tiger Stadium under the Ball Park Franks brand.

According to Samuel’s New York Times obituary, he sold processed food, cheese, cleansers, instant coffee and iced tea, animal feed, noodles and packaged soups. He lobbied the government for effective price controls and was conciliatory toward unions. “Labor doesn’t have horns,” he said. He also became interested in politics, serving as a delegate to the national and state Democratic conventions. “It’s just a question of time before Americans eat only prepared foods,” he said in the 1946 New Yorker interview. “We’ll get the women out of the kitchen.”” 

By the late 1980s, Hygrade was selling $222 million worth of Ball Park Franks that were eaten by an estimated 91 million Americans. In 1989, Hygrade was sold to Sara Lee, but the family loyalty to hot dogs lives on. At a National Hot Dog Day event this past July that Slotkin hosted, people lined the corridors of Congress waiting for franks and toppings. Wearing a gray T-shirt with a cartoon of an anthropomorphic hot dog under her blazer, Slotkin welcomed members and staffers from other states, even those who favored ketchup rather than mustard on their dogs. “I think it’s sort of sacrilegious but I’m trying to be open-minded,” she said. 

Elissa Slotkin was born in NYC and grew up, in part, on the family farm outside Holly, MI. When she was around 10, her mother, Judy, came out as a lesbian—“as much as anyone came out in 1986,” Slotkin has said—and her parents divorced. She has said she grew up on her father’s farm and in a “gay home” in suburban Detroit where her mother lived. 

She became a bat mitzvah in Temple Beth El, which at 175 years old is one of the oldest Reform Jewish congregations in the state of Michigan. Her grandparents had financially supported the construction of a new building, known for its distinct and  towering tent-like frame that provided a natural skylight. 

Slotkin attended Cornell University and later studied at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. The attacks on the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, came on her second day of classes at Columbia. Stirred to action, she later joined the CIA and did three tours of duty in Iraq over five years. (During one tour she met and later married David Moore, an Army colonel and helicopter pilot. They divorced 12 years later.)  

A breakthrough in her career came in 2007, when President George W. Bush was searching for ways to speed up progress in the Iraq war. Bush was weighing the possibility of a “surge” in the number of troops there. Worried that he was too insulated, he brought young analysts to the Oval Office to hear their thoughts—without their bosses present. One of those analysts was Slotkin. “So here I am,” Slotkin recalled in a podcast years later. “I’m like, oh yeah, this is why you sign up, right?” She briefed the president, Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and had what she characterized as a “healthy debate” with them about how to deal with a certain militia leader. “It was respectful and decent but we had a debate,” she says. “When I left, someone said to me, ‘If you can argue with the president and not piss him off, you should work here.’” A week later, Bush made her an Iraq analyst at the National Security Council. 

That same year, she also had her most profound Jewish experience while in Baghdad’s “Green Zone,” a seven-square-mile area surrounded by 17-foot walls where U.S. forces could guard the headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Slotkin, by then on her third tour in Iraq, would join about a dozen others from the State Department, Pentagon and CIA to hold weekly Shabbat dinners and lay-led Torah services to discuss what scripture meant “in a heightened violent environment.” When one of the group’s members was killed by a missile, other members prepared the body for transport and burial according to Jewish custom. “It was important to have some religious and spiritual guidance at the time,” Slotkin says. 

By then views of the war had changed, even among those who shared Slotkin’s initial enthusiasm. “Anyone who had worked in the Mideast, as I had, or who had studied the Mideast, [would] tell you that regime change in the Mideast is probably a bad idea,” she says. “I wanted to get out of it with as little lost as possible.” Slotkin says that most Americans she knows, regardless of political party, now feel that involvement in Iraq was not something that advanced U.S. interests. 

 

In 2018, Slotkin announced a congressional run for a traditionally Republican district of Michigan that included her hometown of Holly. She says that one key reason she ran for the House was to secure the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which she viewed as essential to Americans’ financial and health security. Ever since President Obama introduced the ACA, the healthcare issue, however flawed, had worked politically for the Democratic Party. Slotkin tapped into it and successfully flipped the seat.

Healthcare is also an intensely personal issue for Slotkin. When her mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, Elissa and her brother Keith discovered that she had also had breast cancer five or six years earlier. The latter was a costly pre-existing condition, even under the ACA. By letting most of her insurance lapse, her mother had let thousands of dollars of unpaid bills pile up. Slotkin and her brother were able to arrange insurance that had large deductibles. But her mother’s cancer had advanced and she died in 2011. “Of all the hard things I’ve done,” Slotkin tells me, it was her mother’s illness “that has absolutely shaped who I am.”

This translates into her support for strengthening and expanding the Affordable Care Act, a key element of her opposition to Trump, who has consistently called for dismantling the ACA. Today, the Trump administration doesn’t “give a crap about the health of the middle class,” Slotkin has said.  

Like all politicians, particularly Jewish ones, Slotkin has spent the past two years dealing with the aftermath of October 7 and its effect on U.S. foreign policy. Slotkin has always had a solidly pro-Israel record, voting in favor of providing military aid to Israel and sanctioning the International Criminal Court over its decision to request arrest warrants for Israeli leaders.  Aside from pressure on that position from left-leaning Democrats generally, Michigan has the highest percentage of Arab Americans in the country. Arab Americans are more conservative socially and economically than Michiganders overall, says Grossman, the Michigan State University professor. Yet at least until recently, they voted overwhelmingly for Democrats. 

Anger over U.S. foreign policy positions regarding Gaza following the thousands of deaths and casualties there led some 13 percent of Arab American voters in Michigan to show their discontent in the 2024 presidential primary; instead of voting for a candidate, they marked their ballots “uncommitted.” This should have been a warning sign to the Biden and later the Harris campaigns, says Abdul El-Sayed, a physician and former director of the Department of Health, Human, and Veterans Services for Wayne County who is running as a Democrat for the other U.S. Senate seat in Michigan. In the final tally, Arab Americans in the state steered toward Trump or the Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Or they just stayed home. In the end, Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to win in the city of Dearborn since 2000.  

The dynamic presented a unique challenge for Slotkin. “A lot of folks ask: How did Slotkin win when the presidential ticket lost? She had the courage of showing up and having hard conversations,” says El-Sayed, referring to the outreach she did to the Arab-American community. “I respect the way she goes about behaving when her constituents are going to disagree.”

Slotkin has been vocal in her support for Israel since October 7, but as the months passed and casualty numbers in Gaza climbed, she joined other moderates in beginning to criticize Israel’s actions. Last summer, 27 Democrats voted to limit sales of offensive arms to Israel. Slotkin was out of town taping an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, but afterward, she said she would have voted for the measure. Slotkin linked her shifting opinions to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Although Israel’s government denied withholding food and medicine from Gaza and accused Hamas of disrupting deliveries, Slotkin saw it differently—and has expressed her frustration with the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayau. 

Slotkin tells me that Israeli interference with food delivery “often went way beyond what the U.S. would do in a conflict like that.” “More than anything,” she said, “what affected me was when Netanyahu made the decision to use food as a weapon.” Even in the worst moments in Fallujah, she said, recalling her experience in Iraq, when Defense Department contractors were captured and their bodies dragged in the street, “we still had an obligation to distribute food to civilians.” On October 21, Slotkin joined 45 other Democrats in calling on Trump to oppose Israeli annexation of the West Bank. 

 

The week before Thanksgiving, Slotkin organized an ad featuring her and five other Democratic members of Congress with military or intelligence experience. Facing the camera, the lawmakers addressed those currently serving and told them they need not obey illegal orders. “We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now,” they said. “This administration is pitting our uniform military and intelligence community against American citizens.” 

Trump’s response was fast and fiery on Truth Social: “This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS. LOCK THEM UP???” A follow-up message published about 40 minutes later contained only five words: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” He then reposted threats from other users on Truth Social, including one that said, “Hang them George Washington would.” Slotkin and the rest of lawmakers who participated were soon flooded with online threats. 

Slotkin has said the ad came after she pressed the Trump administration numerous times on questions of illegal orders without receiving a response. “How do I influence direction? I refuse to be quiet and sit on my hands and wait in the Senate,” Slotkin tells me. “I’m extremely focused on how we meet the momentum, given that this president is doing unprecedented things with the presidency and our Constitution.”

On January 14, Slotkin released another video. Looking somberly into the camera, she said that since Trump’s social media posts, she had received more than 1,000 threats, including a bomb threat to her house. Her parents’ house was “swatted” in the middle of the night and she is under 24-hour Capitol Police protection. More recently she said, she had gotten word that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia was investigating her. “This is the president’s playbook,” she said. “Truth doesn’t matter, facts don’t matter. And anyone who disagrees with him becomes an enemy, and he then weaponizes the federal government against them.”

For Slotkin, this is beyond Republican and Democratic politics and is an “existential fight.” “This president does not represent the views of the majority of Americans,” she says in the video. “Even if you voted for him, I do not believe that his vision of America is shared by a majority of Americans. Because this country is worth fighting for.”