After 16 months without representation in the state Senate, Michigan voters in a competitive central Michigan district will choose control of the chamber on Tuesday in a special election for state Senate District 35. The seat became vacant when Democrat Kristen McDonald Rivet left office after being elected to Congress, leaving the district with an election to determine who will finish out the remaining eight months of the term.
The decision matters because Democrats enter the special election holding a 19-18 majority in the 38-seat Senate. If Republicans win the District 35 seat, the Senate would be tied 19-19, setting up a series of vote-counting and procedural stakes around how legislation advances.
Michigan’s constitution allows Democratic Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II to break ties. Even so, Republicans could still block measures by withholding votes and preventing Democrats from reaching the 20-vote threshold needed to pass legislation, according to the Associated Press’ decision notes.
The special election ballot features three candidates: Democrat Chedrick Greene, Republican Jason Tunney and Libertarian Ali Sledz. Greene, described as a firefighter and a former state Senate aide to McDonald Rivet, won the Democratic special primary on Feb. 3 with 60% of the vote. Tunney, described as an attorney and a former executive at his family’s roofing company, won the Republican special primary with 51% of the vote, and Sledz, described as a graduate student and an Army spouse, received the Libertarian nomination in January at a local party convention.
District 35 includes parts of Bay, Midland and Saginaw counties and borders Lake Huron. The Associated Press notes that while Republican Donald Trump carried all three counties in the 2024 presidential race, the portions of each county within District 35 are more competitive, including that McDonald Rivet won the seat in 2022 with 53% of the vote. In the 2024 presidential vote within the district, Kamala Harris barely edged Trump, 49.7% to 48.9%, supported by a 17-percentage-point margin in the Saginaw portion of the district, while Trump posted smaller leads in the parts of Bay and Midland counties.
Voters will cast ballots in a contest with no write-in option. The Associated Press said any voter registered in Senate District 35 may participate and that voters may register on Election Day. The AP also said polls close at 8 p.m. ET, and that the AP will provide results and declare a winner in the special election for the state Senate seat.
In its election monitoring notes, the Associated Press said Michigan’s mandatory recount law does not apply to state Senate races. Instead, candidates may request and pay for a recount, with the payment refunded if the recount changes the outcome, and the AP may declare a winner in a race that is subject to a recount if it determines the lead is too large for a recount or legal challenge to change the result.
The AP said nearly 46,000 voters cast ballots in the Feb. 3 special primary in District 35, with slightly more than 17,000 votes from Saginaw County, just under 17,000 from Bay County and about 11,000 from Midland County. The AP also said early and absentee voting comprised about 43% of the total Democratic primary vote and about 29% of the Republican vote, compared with about 60% of the vote cast before Election Day in the 2024 presidential general election.
As of Friday, the Associated Press said about 32,000 ballots had already been cast in the special election. It added that Bay, Midland and Saginaw counties tend to release relatively small amounts of the vote in their first update, with Bay County tending to release pre-Election Day voting results later in the tabulation process while Midland and Saginaw release results throughout the night alongside Election Day totals.
The Associated Press said that, in the last time the seat was up in 2022, it first reported results in Senate District 35 at 8:53 p.m. ET, about 53 minutes after polls closed. The AP said that in that 2022 cycle, it had tallied about 89% of the vote by 2:23 a.m. ET and reached about 99.9% of total votes counted by the final update at 5:33 a.m. ET.
Finally, the AP said the winner will complete the remaining eight months of the term, and both Greene and Tunney have filed to run in Aug. 4 primaries for nomination to a full term. The AP also said it does not make projections and will declare a winner only when there is no scenario that would allow a trailing candidate to close the gap, while continuing to report newsworthy developments such as concessions or declarations of victory until the race is called.
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