Matt Shinners
LANSING, Mich. - Mike Duggan is out. The former Democratic mayor of Detroit announced Thursday that he is ending his independent bid for Michigan governor, withdrawing from the 2026 race less than six months before Election Day.
The decision, delivered in an open letter posted to his campaign website, brings a dramatic close to one of the higher profile independent campaigns this cycle.
With Duggan gone, the race takes a familiar shape. Democratic frontrunner Jocelyn Benson, the current secretary of state, now stands as the odds-on favorite heading into the general election, likely to face Republican US Rep. John James.
What had been a genuine three-way contest (Duggan led in some earlier polls) is now, once again, a conventional partisan showdown.
Duggan's concession note doesn’t mince words.
"I am so disappointed to have to write you this letter," he begins, before laying out the twin pressures that made his continued candidacy untenable: polling decline and a fundraising ceiling he simply could not break through.
He claims that the mood of the country "shifted suddenly and dramatically" in April as anger over the war in Iran and rising gas prices above $5 a gallon consolidated Democratic-leaning voters firmly back into their partisan home.
"Democrats (and many Independents) were unified in anger," he wrote, and that unity spelled problems for his campaign. He tried to adjust, but internal polling matched a recent Chamber poll, confirming that his support was slipping.
Duggan pointed to the 23% support he was still holding (1.6 million individuals) as representing the hunger voters have for something beyond party warfare (this number is higher than the estimated number of independent voters in the state, showing a broader coalition).
"I got into this race to try to change our politics, not to be a spoiler," he wrote.
Duggan was one of the most credible independent candidates in recent memory. He served three full four-year terms as Detroit's mayor, spending that time presiding over the city's long, complicated, and ultimately successful revival.
He won re-election in 2021 with over 75% of the vote.
He was, for most of his career, a Democrat. But, in December 2024, Duggan walked away from the party and launched an independent bid. His pitch was simple: Michigan's politics were broken, and the partisan machinery that grinds Lansing to a halt was the same machine that had once nearly destroyed Detroit.
"I'm not running to be the Democrats' governor or the Republicans' governor," he said at his announcement. "I'm running to be your governor."
The reality of that party machinery, however, extends outside of the governing process and to the infrastructure that the major parties have built up around campaigns. Those parties don't just offer candidates a ballot line; they offer a fully operational campaign apparatus that takes decades and billions of dollars to construct.
In particular, they have donor networks that are primed to activate the moment a candidate enters a race; data operations with voter files refined across election cycle after election cycle worth millions of dollars; volunteer recruitment pipelines; earned media relationships; and coordinated spending from state and national committees that can flood a race with resources in a matter of weeks.
A candidate running under a party banner inherits all of that on day one. An independent starts from zero.
Duggan understood this going in and spent much of his campaign trying to build a parallel version from scratch. He even kept pace for a time, raising over $5m.
But in a country where even local elections become national events, lacking the established infrastructure could take him only so far. He notes in his concession letter that he traveled the country meeting with national independent-minded donor groups, hoping to assemble the kind of outside funding network that could substitute for party money.
He got interest, but not results—the infrastructure for funding independent candidates at the gubernatorial level simply doesn't exist yet in any mature form, according to the candidate.
What he found instead was a ceiling: a loyal and generous Michigan donor base that took him only so far, and a wall of national party money on both sides that he had no mechanism to match.
Duggan’s story is not a new one. Independent candidates across the country have run into the same wall, with many never even making it to Election Day.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s 2024 independent presidential campaign is the most instructive recent example. Kennedy had genuine name recognition, a passionate donor base, and polling that at points put him in double-digits nationally.
But the campaign was consumed by the grinding, state-by-state fight for ballot access, draining money and momentum that could have gone toward persuading voters. He was excluded from the presidential debates. And as partisan fear of a second Trump term intensified, his numbers collapsed—the same consolidation dynamic that would later swallow Duggan in Michigan.
No Labels spent years and tens of millions of dollars trying to solve the infrastructure problem, securing ballot access in 21 states and building a donor network, but ultimately couldn't find a candidate to step in.
Joe Manchin, their top prospect, was blunt in a later exit interview about why many would pass on such a bid: "If we had a pathway forward to get on 50 ballots, oh, I'd have been a go."
The lesson was clarifying: the infrastructure the two parties have built carries a price tag that even tens of millions of dollars can't match.
A majority of Americans are at least somewhat interested in a new political party. Independents are now the largest voting bloc by registration, and they made up a larger vote share than Democrats in the ‘24 election. But independent candidates have failed to see electoral success, largely driven by the structural advantages held by partisans.
2026 is seeing many independent candidates for higher office, and some of them are gaining traction. But the specter of these failed independent bids always hangs over these campaigns, and the belief in the spoiler effect in our first-past-the-post voting system looms large, especially when the electorate’s sentiment about the country is so precarious.
Duggan saw the problem clearly enough. He just couldn't solve it in 2026. Many groups out there are attempting to build this infrastructure, but none have succeeded in making enough headway, even with millions of dollars invested.
With shifts in the electorate, it seems inevitable that an independent candidate will break through, proving viability and reframing the conversation around independents as spoilers. The biggest question, then, seems to be when this shift will happen.
Disclaimer: The author of this article worked as a senior member of the national Forward Party’s team and was part of conversations with the Duggan campaign.