WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, the first woman elected to the Senate from Michigan, says she won’t seek reelection and will retire when her fourth term ends in 2025.
In an exclusive interview, the Lansing Democrat told The Detroit News that her decision was inspired by the November election results — seeing the “energy” among young voters and a new generation of Democratic leaders in Michigan made her confident she can "pass the torch" to a Democratic successor.
“I’ve had a wonderful career and honor of breaking barriers and being the first woman to reach various historic milestones, but I never felt it was enough to be a first if there wasn’t a second and third and fourth and so on,” said Stabenow, who serves as the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate leadership.
“I think it’s important to know the time and place where you open doors again for others and pass the torch. I feel like this is really the right time for me, it’s the right time for Michigan,” she added.
“I’ve been incredibly honored in so many ways to serve Michigan both at the county level and the state and federal level, and very, very honored that I’ve had a chance to make a difference in people’s lives both in policy, as well as with the best staff team there is on the Hill.”
Stabenow, 72, also cited personal reasons contributing to her decision, including the chance to spend “precious” time with her 96-year-old mother and five grandchildren.
Her intended retirement will set off a succession scramble on both sides of the aisle for her seat in the Senate, which Stabenow has held for 22 years, starting in 2001. That tenure followed four years in the U.S. House and 15 years in the Michigan Legislature.
“I'm not going to certainly slow down, at all. I've always seen everything through the lens of Michigan, and I'm going to continue to work for Michigan through the next two years,” Stabenow said. “But it gives me an opportunity at that point, then, to be able to take the next chapter for me, in my life.”
Stabenow has spent much of her energy in Congress on issues related to protecting the Great Lakes, mental health funding, advanced manufacturing, agriculture and child nutrition. She was reelected last month as chair of the Senate Democrats’ policy and communications arm.
Stabenow said this week a top priority for her this year is shepherding another five-year farm bill into law in her role as chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee. The current legislation expires at the end of September.
“I’m going to run through the tape here up until 2025, and I don’t see myself running for elected office again,” Stabenow said. “I intend to be active and engaged in the community, as I always have been, and will continue to work on the issues I’m passionate about.”
Legislative legacy
Stabenow has spent the bulk of her life in public service and just became the Michigan delegation’s most senior member upon the retirement of longtime Republican U.S. Rep. Fred Upton of St. Joseph, whose term ended Tuesday.
She grew up in the mid-Michigan town of Clare, the daughter of a nursing director and Oldsmobile dealer, and attended Michigan State University, earning a master’s degree in social work.
She got her first taste of politics when she joined an effort to stop the planned closure of a local nursing home that was the only facility in the area that accepted Medicaid for low-income seniors, she said.
At age 24, Stabenow was elected to the Ingham County Commission in 1974, later becoming the youngest and first woman to chair the panel, she said.
She marveled at the sea change since her first days running for the state House in 1978 when only eight women served in that body, and none in the state Senate or in Michigan statewide offices. Now, there are 44 women in the state House, 15 in the state Senate — including the first female Senate majority leader — and women hold the top three elected statewide posts in Michigan.
Stabenow said she was the first woman in Michigan to have a baby while serving in the state Legislature when she had her daughter, Michelle, in 1980 while in the state House. She was also the first woman in the state House to preside over the chamber as an assistant speaker, she said.
“I remember the talk among the speaker and others at the time that — would I be able to get the attention of the House? Would I be able to call them to order and get their attention and be able to manage?” she recalled. “And so when I first got up there, I took the gavel and just whacked it so hard that a chip of it went flying across the room.”
In Lansing, much of her focus was on issues related to children and families, chairing the House Mental Health Committee and authoring the Children's Mental Health Act and legislation creating the nonprofit Children’s Trust Fund to prevent child abuse and neglect. She also wrote a first-of-its-kind bill to financially support families with the costs of raising children with severe intellectual and developmental disabilities at home, rather than having to put them in foster care, she said.
It was a theme that continued throughout her career. Years later, during the 2009 Senate debate over the Affordable Care Act, Stabenow fought to require insurers to cover basic maternity care as part of a standard benefits package. Her colleague, then-Sen. Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican, tried to strip it from the bill in committee, saying, “I don't need maternity care.”
Stabenow retorted with a smile: “I think your mom probably did.”
Stabenow also authored a provision of the 2010 Affordable Care Act that requires all plans in states’ health insurance marketplaces to offer mental health and substance abuse services at the same level as other health services.
She has spoken about how her father’s struggles with bipolar disorder prompted her career-long push to improve mental health access, funding and quality. Among her legacy bills she counts the Excellence in Mental Health Act introduced in 2013 with Republican Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri and others. The bill authorized funding through Medicaid to reimburse states for mental health and addiction services provided at federally qualified community health clinics that offer services including 24-hour crisis psychiatric care.
Stabenow’s goal was to alter the funding for community-based mental health and addiction treatment so it would not be limited to grants that "start and stop" but as part of the health care system.
Last year, eligibility for the model that she and Blunt crafted was expanded to all 50 states as part of the bipartisan gun reform law that President Joe Biden signed.
Stabenow also named her work on the Great Lakes as among her notable accomplishments, particularly authoring the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative in 2009 as part of a budget resolution. Last month, the program was funded with another $368 million for cleanup and fighting invasive species in the lakes over the next year.
Electoral history
Stabenow, regarded as a savvy and personable campaigner, was first elected to the Senate in 2000, defeating first-term Republican Sen. Spencer Abraham by 1.6 percentage points in an upset.
Republicans have since spent millions of dollars trying to unseat her, saying she’s a “nice lady” while painting her as too liberal, hyper-partisan, ineffective or out of touch — targeting her support for Democratic priorities like abortion rights and the Affordable Care Act, among other fronts.
Stabenow prevailed in 2006 against Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard by 16 percentage points, in 2012 against U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra by 21 points and in 2018 over businessman John James by 6.5 points.
Stabenow’s most high-profile political defeat is probably back in 1994, when she ran for the Democratic nomination for governor and lost to then-U.S. Rep. Howard Wolpe, who then chose her as his running mate for lieutenant governor. But the Democrats lost that year to then-Gov. John Engler, a Republican.
Among the first bills that Stabenow later got through the Senate was a ban on oil and gas drilling in the Great Lakes, which was in response to a plan by Engler to allow new drilling in the freshwater lakes, she said.
Stabenow was also in the middle of the bipartisan Michigan effort to bail out the auto industry in 2009. She has backed electric vehicle tax credits for consumers and in 2007 created the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Program that, years later, the Department of Energy is now using to help finance the construction of three battery cell plants in Ohio, Tennessee and Michigan.
She often says Michigan “makes things and grows things.” “You don't have an economy unless somebody makes something and somebody grows something.”
Stabenow noted in her work on the farm bills included creating new subtitles benefiting Michigan growers including sections on urban farming and also “specialty” crops — referring to fruits and vegetables — at a time when there was no “ongoing” support for those, she said.
Over the years, that’s helped ensure that crop insurance was available, made organic research permanent and expanded conservation programs, she said.
More recently, the year-end government funding bill passed before Christmas established permanent funding for a new debit card program that would provide low-income families with a $40-a-month grocery benefit per child during the summer months when school is out.
Stabenow called her provision the biggest nutrition and food assistance policy accomplishment of the last 10 years, noting an estimated 29 million children will benefit by having access to healthy food in the summers.
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