Elissa Slotkin: The Senate Hopeful the World Is Quietly Rooting For (While Holding Its Breath)
Elissa Slotkin and the Quiet Art of Not Being Donald Trump
By our man in the cheap seats, watching America audition for a reboot no one asked for
Somewhere between the burnt-coffee smell of a Vienna train station and the faint whiff of tear gas drifting out of a Parisian banlieue, it’s easy to forget that the United States still believes its Senate races matter to the rest of us. Yet here we are, glancing up from our own dumpster fires to observe Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin—former CIA analyst, three-term congresswoman, and the latest contestant in the global game show called “Please, Not That Guy Again.”
Slotkin’s newly launched bid for the U.S. Senate is ostensibly a regional affair: one chilly Midwestern state deciding whether to re-up an 83-year-old Democrat who already speaks in fossilized soundbites, or to swap in a 47-year-old national-security technocrat whose greatest hits include impeaching Trump twice and once telling a roomful of farmers that the Chinese Communist Party is “not your friend.” The subtext, however, is planetary. If Slotkin wins in 2024, she becomes the tie-breaking vote on whether the world’s largest arsenal remains under adult supervision. If she loses, the gavel passes to a Republican caucus that still thinks climate change is a personal weakness best cured by owning more pickups.
From Seoul boardrooms to São Paulo favelas, the stakes feel oddly intimate. South Korean chip executives quietly track Slotkin’s polling averages the way gamblers watch rain clouds over a horse track; they know a GOP-run Senate could revive Trump-era tariffs faster than you can say “supply-chain resilience.” Meanwhile, Brazilian environmentalists—who’ve spent the last four years exhaling for the first time since Bolsonaro—worry that a Senate flip would embolden U.S. agribusiness lobbyists to treat the Amazon like an all-you-can-eat salad bar. When Slotkin promises to “stand up to authoritarians everywhere,” the line lands differently in Warsaw, where “everywhere” is code for the guys currently shelling next-door Ukraine.
Slotkin’s brand is calibrated for this global anxiety: part hawk, part wonk, with just enough Midwestern earnestness to make Europeans forget she once helped design drone strike protocols. She peppers town-hall answers with references to the World Health Organization and the Munich Security Conference, signaling fluency in the multilateral alphabet soup that keeps Davos Man from hyperventilating into his kirsch. It’s the political equivalent of carrying a tasteful tote bag: useful, understated, and slightly smug.
Of course, the universe enjoys a good punchline. Slotkin’s toughest primary opponent isn’t a fire-breathing socialist but actor Hill Harper, whose résumé includes “The Good Doctor” and cryptocurrency ads—proof that late-stage democracy now casts its legislators like Netflix originals. The Republican field, meanwhile, features a former Detroit police chief who once starred in a Chinese reality show about American law enforcement, because nothing says “tough on Beijing” like collecting yuan for letting strangers watch you handcuff jaywalkers.
International observers—especially the ones who’ve watched American democracy perform interpretive dance on a live minefield—find the whole spectacle morbidly reassuring. Slotkin’s rise suggests the empire still has a self-correcting mechanism, however arthritic. Sure, the machine runs on donor cash and cable-news panic, but occasionally it spits out someone who’s read a briefing longer than a tweet. In an age when strongmen from Ankara to Manila treat constitutions like terms-of-service agreements, even a flawed meritocrat looks refreshingly retro.
The betting markets currently give Slotkin a coin-flip’s chance in the general, which is Vegas-speak for “ask again after the next mass shooting or Supreme Court leak.” Still, for a planet that has to live with America’s mood swings, her campaign offers a modest proposal: competence as clickbait, expertise as insurgency. It won’t cure the world’s ills, but it might delay the apocalypse until after the Olympics—small mercies in an era when the bar for optimism is “not actively on fire.”
So raise a glass of whatever passes for affordable alcohol in your time zone and toast Elissa Slotkin: the woman who wants to replace a geriatric Democrat, contain a geriatric authoritarian, and reassure the rest of us that the United States hasn’t entirely given up on the concept of consequences. If she pulls it off, global markets will exhale, European diplomats will update their contact lists, and somewhere a Russian troll farm will order overtime. If she doesn’t, well, at least the memes will be multilingual.
