Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer stopped at a bar to swig beer with Kamala Harris after the VP’s Saturday rally in Kalamazoo, where the duo were caught on a hot mic as they celebrated themselves.

“What are you having Madam Vice President?” the bartender called out as the two bellied up to the bar at Trak Houz Bar & Grill.

“I’m having what she’s having,” Harris shouted back.

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“It’s an Oberon, made right here in Kalamazoo, which many are calling Kamala-zoo,” Whitmer joked before the two raised their glasses to toast the campaign.

“Great rally,” Whitmer, Harris’ campaign co-chair, told the VP.

“Ya, really great,” Harris said, shifting to discuss her evolving approach to rallies.

“I’ve been bugging your whole team,” Whitmer said. “Like we’ve got to do this and this and this.”

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“We need to move ground among men,” Harris said as she turned and looked directly into the camera. “Oh, we have microphones in here just listening to everything. I didn’t realize that, adding, “Ok, so you’ll have to tell us. We just told all the family secrets, shit,” Harris said.

“You’ll bleep my f-words, I hope,” Whitmer added as they both laughed hysterically.

The two turned to discuss the University of Michigan-Michigan State University rivalry game, before a patron chimed in, asking whether the governor believes Harris will win in Michigan next week.

“I do,” Whitmer said.

“And how are you going to make that happen?” the person asked.

“We’re working our tails off. We’re doing everything we know to do,” Whitmer said.

“She’s been on the ground all over the state,” Harris added.

Whitmer’s focus on the election and her thirst for media attention have come at a cost to Michigan, where millions are struggling to afford basics like food, child care, transportation, and other necessities, much less luxuries like an Oberon and a night out.

Since Whitmer took office, about 200,000 more Michiganders are struggling to afford a survival budget, with the total now equating to 41% of residents, though that percentage is over half in 11 counties and nearly 80% in some cities.

That’s due in part to sky-high inflation under the Biden-Harris administration and an inflation adjusted household income that has tanked 3% in Michigan since Whitmer moved into the governor’s mansion in 2019.

“There’s a real concern that voters have with their financial situation,” University of Michigan economist Don Grimes recently told Bridge Michigan. “I think (the worries are) even more profound than the data shows.”

Per capita income – total income divided by the number of adult residents – hit $61,144 in 2023, which is now dead last among Great Lakes states and 40^th nationally, more than 12% below the national average of $69,815.

That means since Whitmer was reelected in 2022, per capita income has reached “the lowest we’ve ever been,” Lou Glazer, president of the think tank Michigan Future Inc., told Bridge Michigan.

The “enormous collapse,” Glazer said, is only expected to get worse.

He penned a report with Grimes earlier this year that predicts Michigan will become the third poorest state in the country in the next couple decades if nothing changes.

Michigan’s economy, however, is only one of several issues trending in the wrong direction.

Fourth-grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a key measure of the state’s education system, dropped from 32^nd in the nation in 2019 to 43^rd in 2022. More recently, results from the 2024 Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress hit the “lowest point in the 10-year history of the state assessment test,” according to The Detroit News.

At the same time, the state’s percentage of chronically absent students remains at 30.8% following Whitmer’s crushing pandemic edicts that kept students out of class for far longer than most states. That’s the seventh highest rate in the nation for a school system that ranked 41^st by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

There’s also Whitmer’s unfulfilled campaign promise to “fix the damn roads,” which the national transportation research nonprofit TRIP estimates “cost Michigan motorists a total of $17 billion statewide annually … due to higher vehicle operating costs, traffic crashes and congestion-related delays.”

The TRIP report largely echoed Michigan’s 2023 Road & Bridges Annual Report that found the state’s “roads are deteriorating faster than the agencies can repair them.”

Instead of investing in solving those problems, Whitmer and her Democratic allies that took control of the Michigan Legislature in 2022 for the first time in 40 years have focused on other priorities.

In back to back record budgets, Whitmer and her legislative allies have steered billions in taxpayer funds through secretly negotiated agreements to prop up the electric vehicle industry, including funding to companies with direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

Whitmer claimed those investments would generate 12,000 jobs, but a recent analysis by Bridge Michigan found that with $1 billion already spent, only 200 jobs have been created.

Billions more in funding has gone to pet projects for lawmakers, and incentives for “newcomers” that include asylum seekers, despite data that shows 97% of asylum claims in 2023 involved illegal immigrants who claimed asylum to avoid deportation.

The latter includes a $11.5 million Newcomer Rental Subsidy program that provides up to $600 per month for a year for “asylum seekers” to secure housing, $730,000 to “support newcomer integration,” $1 million to cover the legal fees of “asylum seekers,” and $6.4 million in additional Medicaid benefits for refugees and other immigrants to ensure Michigan is “the state of choice for many newcomer populations.”