“She can actually address things in a way that people can comprehend it,” said Mayor Sheldon Neeley of Flint, a Democrat who said the governor was skilled in speaking to voters who had lost faith in government. “She can reach and she can touch and she can articulate a message for those individuals to be able to re-engage.”
But where liberals described a leader tough enough to not back down to Republican demands, conservatives complained about an unwilling negotiator whose actions as governor have veered to the left of her campaign rhetoric.
“Governor Whitmer ran as a moderate who would fix the roads and build bridges,” said Tori Sachs, a former aide to Ms. Whitmer’s Republican predecessor who is now the executive director of Michigan Rising Action, a conservative advocacy group. But so far, Ms. Sachs said, Ms. Whitmer’s tenure has been defined by failure on the road issue and budget vetoes that she said displayed a level of “political vindictiveness” unfamiliar in Lansing.
Ms. Whitmer’s roughly 10-minute rebuttal to the president, to be delivered from East Lansing High School, carries both potential pitfalls and the opportunity to elevate her national profile.
Members of Congress frequently give the responses — including Representative Veronica Escobar, Democrat of Texas, who will give a Spanish-language rebuttal to the president on Tuesday. But both parties have at times tapped state-level politicians for the role, which is seen as an annual proving ground for up-and-coming politicians.
Nikki Haley, then the governor of South Carolina, gave the Republican response to President Barack Obama’s speech in 2016, a year before she became Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations. Kathleen Sebelius, who once gave the Democratic response to President George W. Bush when she was governor of Kansas, was later named to Mr. Obama’s cabinet. And Stacey Abrams, a former Georgia state legislator who narrowly lost the 2018 race for governor, gave the Democratic response last year.
But missteps in the speech can become a punchline for years, as Senator Marco Rubio of Florida learned when he reached for a sip of water during his 2013 response. And Ms. Whitmer’s speech comes at an especially fraught time, with an election looming, an impeachment trial fresh in mind and a president known for riffing. Ms. Whitmer said she was still considering having different pieces of material prepared for her speech, with the option of adding or subtracting based on what Mr. Trump says.