FOIA ONSLAUGHT FAILS
National effort by 2020 election deniers to try to disrupt the 2022 primary and general election by swamping election officials around the country with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have landed in Oakland County – largely to no avail, noted Oakland County Clerk Lisa Brown. Brown confirmed that Oakland County and many local clerks have received numerous public records requests, “but some of it is for information we do not have, such as for information on Dominion


DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL
Even as Macomb County continues to favor the ultimate election denier himself, former President Donald Trump, it’s still pretty remarkable that Genevieve Peters is now an employee in the Macomb County Clerk’s office, training election officials for the 2022 general election. Who’s Genevieve Peters, you ask? She worked hard in 2020 promoting the now-proven false claims that President Joe Biden stole the election from Trump, and even live-streamed a protest outside of Secretary


IN FOR A PENNY UPDATE
Last month, Oakland Confidential noted that Dem donors were all over Democratic members of the House for not ponying up their dues to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which works to elect Democrats to the House. At that time, none of the Michigan delegation was paid in full, and several had paid nothing for the year – but in an update, we can report that Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Birmingham) has paid her full $175,000 membership dues. In a posting by Punchb
CONSCIOUS UNCOUPLING
Speaking of Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Birmingham), the 11th District Democrat appears to have a strong lead in her race to return to Congress for a third term, but sadly, word has broken that the newlywed is newly-split. Stevens married for the first time on September 3, 2021, to Robert Gulley, a former Birmingham Seaholm classmate which she had reconnected with. While the proposal on an Oakland County lake and wedding in Shelby Township appeared to be fairy tale-like, it seems t


NEXT YEAR, BIRMINGHAM
As we look forward to the waning days of the 2022 campaign (wait, don’t you?), we’re already hearing rumblings of who may be in, and who may be out, in the Birmingham City Commission race for 2023, which has its elections in odd-years. Current commissioner Brad Host, in year three of his first four-year term, recently held a fundraiser at his new home on Ferndale for a commission re-election campaign in 2023 at which about 20-25 residents attended. There was no set dollar fig


PETERS MEETS THE MURDOCHS
When Michigan Democrat U.S. Senator Gary Peters was named in January of 2021 by Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer as chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee the assignment was to help get at least two more Senate seats filled with Democrats, giving that party firm control of that chamber. The campaign committee’s role is to work with local grassroots groups to meet this goal, which also entails bringing in cash for the 2022 election. So Peters, who turns 62 t


PUNCHING ABOVE WEIGHT CLASS
We were pleased and a bit surprised to see Oakland Confidential appearing as a reference in a recent piece in FiveThirtyEight (538), a polling aggregation website launched years ago by noted polling analyst Nate Silver. In 2010 538 became a licensed feature of The New York Times and was then acquired in 2013 by ESPN. The Oakland Confidential cameo was as a credited source in a piece detailing by state the names of election deniers running for office in the November 8 general
MOVING ON UP
The latest quarterly rankings of potential 2024 presidential contenders has just been issued by Aaron Blake at The Fix, part of The Washington Post. Although she has rebuffed past and current suggestions that she has any interest in running for the nation’s top political spot, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has moved up to the fourth position on the list from the eighth position last quarter. Blake says Whitmer is a “strong favorite to win reelection” and attributes that in


POLLING CHANGES
The accuracy of political polling has been a hot topic since the 2016 presidential election and remains so to this day. So while most recent polls have incumbent Gov. Gretchen Whitmer still ahead (albeit by a declining margin) over Republican contender Tudor Dixon, unpublished polls circulating among the GOP chattering class show a much tighter race with three weeks to go before final ballots are cast. An October 13 poll commissioned by the Detroit Free Press and conducted b
SCHOOL RACE POLITICS
Like others, we bemoan the increasing injection of partisan politics in the contests for local school boards but it is now a fact of life in 2022. As much as anyone might want to write off the couple of candidates who are entangled in this web as they make runs for the Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills school boards, the two candidates appear to gaining some traction. In the Birmingham race is Colleen Zammit, who has done two mailings of oversized postcards, one of which was pu

