If history holds true to form, I expect the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris to begin touting their support for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative as Election Day approaches.
The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, or GLRI, is a federal program that funds water and habitat protection and restoration for the Great Lakes, which contain over 20% of the world’s surface freshwater. While voters in some parts of the country may have never heard of it, it is a big deal in the eight states that border these inland seas.
A 2021 poll by the Great Lakes Water Quality Board found that 90% of U.S. and Canadian residents in the region support the lakes’ protection.
But the popularity of the Great Lakes would not have blossomed into such an ambitious and bipartisan conservation effort without another critical fact. Three of those eight surrounding states – Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – are critical swing states in 2024. And Ohio, although no longer considered a swing state, had been one until 2016.
I have seen how politicians and conservationists deftly use the region’s political battleground status to draw support for Great Lakes restoration from presidential candidates from both major parties. And I believe this is unlikely to change in 2024 and beyond.
But in 2000, when the Florida Everglades ecosystem – which sits in what was a key swing state at the time – received over US$4 billion in federal funding for a massive cleanup, the Great Lakes still didn’t have the resources for even basic remediation of toxic sites.
This led many in the region to suffer from what I heard many lawmakers and others describe as “Everglades envy.” They shared maps of how the entire Everglades ecosystem could fit into one corner of the Great Lakes. More importantly, they plotted how to get funding to clean up toxic hot spots, restore degraded habitats, expand recreational access and educate the next generation of Great Lakes leaders.
George W. Bush’s executive order
When President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection team wanted to secure the electoral college votes of Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, regional lawmakers and advocates helped them craft an executive order. It declared the lakes a “national treasure” and required federal agencies to work together on a “regional collaboration of national significance for the Great Lakes.”
After Bush’s reelection, his executive order was used to organize over 1,500 diverse stakeholders into eight strategy teams. These teams created a $20 billion plan for restoring the Great Lakes.
However, the plan existed only on paper – until the presidential campaigns of 2008, when advocates and political leaders leveraged the swing state status of Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin to garner support for funding the cleanup plan.
After winning all eight Great Lakes states in 2008, Obama used stimulus funds to launch the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative in 2010.
With an initial congressional appropriation of $475 million in 2010, and nearly $300 million in each of the following two years, it was one of the rare times Obama’s proposed budget aligned with Republican priorities in Congress.
In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, both Obama and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee whose father was a former governor of Michigan, declared their support for Great Lakes restoration. This came after the Healing Our Waters coalition pressed both campaigns to pledge to fund GLRI and to stop invasive species from reaching the Great Lakes via the Chicago River.
If history holds true to form, I expect the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris to begin touting their support for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative as Election Day approaches.
The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, or GLRI, is a federal program that funds water and habitat protection and restoration for the Great Lakes, which contain over 20% of the world’s surface freshwater. While voters in some parts of the country may have never heard of it, it is a big deal in the eight states that border these inland seas.
A 2021 poll by the Great Lakes Water Quality Board found that 90% of U.S. and Canadian residents in the region support the lakes’ protection.
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