Elissa Slotkin receives violent threat amid Michigan’s tense political climate
Rep. Elissa Slotkin outside the U.S. Capitol Image by Getty Images
By Arno Rosenfeld October 27, 2020
Rep. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, reported receiving a voicemail with violent threats at her campaign headquarters over the weekend.
“This week, a caller left a voicemail at my campaign headquarters using threatening, sexually explicit, and violent language, including a threat to ‘shoot my way to victory,’” Slotkin said in a statement.
Law enforcement determined “the individual was unlikely to pose an actual threat,” the statement said.
Slotkin spokesman Gordon Trowbridge told The Forward that the message contained no antisemitic content and that authorities did not believe Slotkin’s religion was a motive for the caller, who they identified as a Michigan minor.
Michigan’s tense political climate was recently in the news after the FBI arrested 13 suspects accused of participating in a conspiracy to kidnap Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Slotkin is locked in a competitive reelection battle with Republican Paul Junge. Slotkin, who is Jewish and a former CIA analyst, was elected in 2018. She defeated the Republican incumbent in a district that President Donald Trump won by 7 points but Sabato’s Crystal Ball currently rates the seat as “Likely Democratic.”
Slotkin said that the voicemail was not the first threatening message her campaign has received.
“I am making this threat public because the climate has gotten significantly worse in the last few weeks,” Slotkin said. “I also want to make clear that law enforcement will be involved in each and every threat we receive. We cannot let it be normal that political differences are metered out with threats of violence.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
