The Mackinac Policy Conference Is One of the Best Things Michigan Does. This Year It Has to Do More.
by Chris Moyer
Every year, roughly 1,500 of Michigan's most influential people board a ferry to an island with no cars and no easy exits. Business leaders and labor leaders. Republican legislators and Democratic governors. CEOs and nonprofit directors. Local officials and national figures. The Mackinac Policy Conference is one of the last genuinely bipartisan spaces in Michigan public life. That proximity produces things that do not happen anywhere else. It is worth showing up for. This year more than most.
This year's theme is A Quest for Common Ground. The Detroit Regional Chamber chose it as an acknowledgment that the solutions Michigan needs require people who disagree to work together. That is the right instinct. But the Chamber has also spent the last several months arguing that Michigan's economic house is on fire, that the state has fallen to 40th in per capita income, its lowest ranking ever, and that the window to act is closing.
These two messages are not in conflict. Common ground is how you put out a fire of this scale. But they require different things from the people in the room. Urgency asks you to leave with commitments. Common ground asks you to leave with relationships. The most productive version of Mackinac is when both happen at the same time. The problem is that this is an election year. And election year gravity is real.
What Election Year Gravity Does
Every major statewide office is on the ballot in November. The candidates are in the room or watching closely. The consultants are there. The donors are there. The incentive structure of an election year punishes candor and rewards positioning. The willingness to be specific, to commit to something hard, to say out loud that a policy is not working, shrinks the closer the election gets. The new WTF sessions, which stands for What's the Fix, are the Chamber's attempt to cut through this. Rapid-fire conversations asking leaders directly: here is the problem, what is your actual answer? The Chamber's February voter poll found that Michigan voters think the state ranks around 25th nationally on key economic measures. It ranks 40th to 45th. That gap exists because no one in authority has been willing to say clearly how far the state has fallen. The WTF sessions are a chance to change that. Whether the answers are specific enough to matter is the question.
What the Conference Can Accomplish And Why That Is Enough
The Chamber is not going to produce a bipartisan legislative agenda this week. The votes are not there, the political will is not fully aligned, and no one running in November is staking out positions their opponent can use against them. That is not a failure of the conference. It is the reality of the calendar.
What Mackinac can do is more foundational. It can produce a clear shared diagnosis of where Michigan stands. It can surface solutions with genuine cross-party support. It can give the people making decisions in January 2027, the new governor, the new legislature, the agencies under new leadership, a map of the common ground that already exists and is waiting to be built on.
That is not a consolation prize. Governors and legislatures that inherit a clear agenda move faster than ones that have to build consensus from scratch. The relationships formed on a carriage ride or at a dinner table are the ones that get called on when a hard vote needs to happen six months from now. The Chamber has redesigned this year's format to reflect that reality, cutting theatre time and building in more space for the conversations that actually matter.
Michigan has been having excellent conversations at Mackinac for decades. The documentation of problems is not the bottleneck. What has been missing is the sustained political will to act on what everyone in that room already knows.
The new governor and legislature taking office in January 2027 will inherit both the problems the Chamber has documented and, if this week goes well, a clear set of priorities with genuine bipartisan grounding. A state that has fallen from 18th to 40th in per capita income in twenty-five years does not have another generation to wait.
The conference is one of the best things Michigan does. This year its job is to set the table for what our state needs to accomplish in 2027.