DECISION 2022: Race for Michigan’s 7th Congressional District

LANSING, Mich. (WILX) - In Michigan’s 7th congressional district, incumbent Democrat Elissa Slotkin is running against Republican and former state Senator Tom Barrett.

The district spans seven counties and includes the City of Lansing.

Before she was elected to Congress in 2018, Elissa Slotkin was a Middle East analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and worked in national security under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Slotkin says she wants to lower healthcare costs, focus on veteran affairs, and bring improve our supply chain.

“It’s a continuation of service that I was doing in the national security world,” Slotkin said. “It’s direct you get to help individuals, you get to help by writing laws that affect a lot of people.”

Her challenger, Tom Barrett, says he would focus on corporate welfare, reducing crime, and illegal immigration.

“We should be taking our investment that people send to Lansing in the form of the taxes that we pay and investing in those things that matter far more,” Barrett said.

On the economy, Slotkin wants to do away with the federal gas tax.

“I am the lead sponsor of the legislation to suspend the federal gas tax, which would save us about 19 cents per gallon on all of our gas,” Slotkin said. “I’ve been pushing the president to open up, again, the strategic national reserve of oil. So that there’s more oil in the market.”

Barrett believes that controlling inflation starts with less spending at a national level.

“We’ve got to stop the trillions of spending that has been going on in Washington, that have led to the 40-year high of inflation,” Barrett said. “Inflation is now high enough in the United States to rob every American of an entire month’s pay in a course of a year.”

Another hot-button issue is border control.

“They don’t have to walk a thousand miles to the southern border,” Slotkin said. “Let them apply from their home country get properly vetted and then have them work here legally to work in our economy, that to me is central to fixing our system.”

“We absolutely have to secure our border that means physical structures along our border to prevent illegal border crossings,” said Barrett. “It means additional border patrol agents to enforce the laws that we have.”

The two candidates also differ on abortion. Barrett says he is pro-life, while Slotkin says if she’s re-elected, she would pass legislation to uphold a woman’s right to abortion.

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