Olive branch to a blue town? Barrett keeping congressional district office in Lansing

(Clarification: An earlier version of this story linked to endorsements of Tom Barrett, including one by former Vice President Mike Pence. However, those endorsements — which were found by searching online for Tom Barrett endorsements and were undated — were for his 2022 race for Congress. A Barrett spokesperson said Barrett's 2024 campaign website does not include endorsements. This story has been updated to remove references to those endorsements.)

THURSDAY, Nov. 7 — Tom Barrett, Ingham County’s new Republican congressman-elect, said today he will keep the 7^th Congressional District’s office in Lansing — an indication of his expressed desire to represent all of his constituents.

“It's a very important priority for me,” Barrett said today in an exclusive interview with City Pulse.

Barrett, a former state representative and senator, beat Democrat Curtis Hertel Jr. Tuesday 50%  to 46% to win the 7^th Congressional District seat being vacated by Democrat Elissa Slotkin, who won a U.S. Senate seat.

Slotkin returned the district office to Lansing after she beat Republican Mike Bishop in 2018. Bishop had upset area residents when he moved the office out of Lansing, a decidedly Democratic city, after he won the seat in 2014.

Barrett, 43, a Charlotte resident and U.S. Army veteran, told City Pulse he intends to represent all of his constituents, including the Democratic-leaning voters in Lansing and East Lansing, in his freshman term.

“We all feel the country is on the wrong track, even if many of us feel it for different reasons. So, I take it as a serious thing that, yes, I do need to be a representative of everybody in this district,” Barrett said.

“I'm not going about this job looking to instigate division with people, but I am going to carry out, certainly, the values that I campaigned on and the things that I said I was going to do.”

It was Barrett’s second attempt at winning the seat. He lost to Slotkin 52% to 46% in 2022. This time around, he believes his emphasis on issues like the economy, immigration, crime and national security led many dissatisfied voters who may not have been under the traditional Republican umbrella to switch sides.

“It's impossible to win this campaign with just Republican voters alone. There are a lot of different voter profiles and different motivations. I tried to present myself to the voters on the issues I care about and really be the person that I am throughout the campaign,” Barrett said.

With Hertel, 46, also a former state senator, in place of Slotkin on the Democratic ticket, Barrett saw an easier path forward than he faced in 2022, the first election after redistricting created the current 7^th District.

“I was running against an incumbent, and the timeline was also compressed because of the redistricting process. Not to make excuses, but that was the reality of the situation,” he said. “This time around, the circumstances were different in a number of ways. There was no incumbency advantage, and the fundraising advantage my opponent had, while it was significant, wasn’t a runaway differential like it was in the last race.”

Barrett’s numbers were favorable early and remained sizable throughout election night. Still, he said he held off from declaring victory until he saw the results out of Democratic Ingham County, which tipped for Hertel as expected but ultimately failed to offset Barrett’s early lead.

“Until numbers were settled, I wasn't going to breathe a sigh of relief. But once we got the returns from Ingham County, we knew that we were in very good shape to win. Very quickly thereafter, my opponent called me and graciously congratulated me, which I sincerely appreciated,” Barrett said.

Barrett notably earned an endorsement from president-elect Donald Trump. Barrett said he’s discussed the president-elect’s endorsement “candidly” on the campaign trail.

“I'm excited that President Trump carried the popular vote and won Michigan. I think that's a sign that people are frustrated with the status quo and the direction the country has taken,” he said. 

Barrett said his priorities lie in an “agenda of reform,” which will benefit from the GOP’s likely majority in both U.S. congressional chambers. Republicans won the Senate and appear headed to winning the House. Though he intends to follow his party’s direction in most cases, Barrett touted his tenure at the state level as proof that he’s not opposed to working across the aisle in Washington.

“When I was in the state Legislature, I voted against my own leadership over 300 times and was the lone Republican vote to oppose some bills on occasion. I also had 38 bipartisan bills that were signed into law where I was the lead sponsor,” he said. “I have a conservative record, and it's one that certainly I don't shy away from. But I also have an independent mind, and I'm not unwilling to be independent in many ways to get the right outcome for the country and for my district.”

He cited his commitment to preserving K-12 specific funding in Michigan as one example.

“There had been a movement since Governor Granholm was in office to move that money out of our K-12 budget and put it into other general fund priorities. The state budget was getting kind of out of hand, and that was a tradition that continued under Snyder and Whitmer. I voted against it every single time,” Barrett said.

Elsewhere during his time in Lansing, Barrett noted that he stood firmly against “corporate welfare.”

“There was a big bill my freshman term in the state House around luring a data center to the Grand Rapids area,” Barrett said. “They wanted to give them a huge incentive to do that which would eliminate all the taxes they were going to have to pay. Meanwhile, in my own district, there was a data center employing hundreds of people that never asked for a handout from the state. If we had just invited this other company in and given them all this money, they would have stripped resources and employees out of my own district. It just didn't feel fair to me to support that."

“Sometimes that would put me at odds with my leadership,” he added. “But if you look back and review my voting record, I was willing to be independent when I needed to. I didn't get elected to this job to just blindly follow some party. I got elected to represent my district, and I take that very, very seriously.”

When he was first elected to serve as a state representative in 2014, Barrett said he expected a greater divide between the two parties. He found the environment to be far more cordial when he arrived.

“You may not vote the way they do, and you may not support a bill that they support, but I really found it fascinating to learn other people's reasons for why they thought a certain way or why they did a certain thing. For me, it was a great experience to be exposed to people I may not have otherwise met in my life to kind of learn what is important to them,” Barrett said.

He hopes his time in Congress plays out similarly.

“One of the greatest lessons I've learned in politics is that it's hard to hate people up close. Some people might hate you from far away, they might hate you on TV, they might see an attack ad and infer a motivation for why you supported or opposed something."

"But if you're standing on their porch or at your local Rotary Club meeting, it's really hard to hate people 2 feet away from you. If you're in any way open minded, you can walk away from that respecting that other person, even if you don't agree with them,” Barrett said.

Barrett said his wife and four children will remain in Charlotte during his term while he commutes. He added that his children will take their first plane ride for the trip to Washington for his inauguration.

“This is the district that I come from, this is the district I'm going to represent. I’m not going to do that by moving my family to Washington. I'm going to do that by keeping my family here in this district, coming home, being a part of this community,” he said.