Online commentator Tudor Dixon was recently the subject of a Bridge Michigan profile breaking down her campaign and background as she angles to take her extremist agenda all the way to the governor’s office.
Dixon, who in the absence of both the previous frontrunner and top spender has “emerged a favorite of the old-guard GOP establishment,” has positioned her campaign “on the frontlines” embracing whatever conspiracy theory she needs to to justify the “aggressively conservative” stances she’s taken on several issues.
Most recently, she got caught claiming that Planned Parenthood has employed a “business model” to “introduce sex” to “7th graders” so they can profit off of “plenty of abortions in high school.”
See excerpts below from Bridge Michigan on Dixon’s “struggle” with distinguishing herself among the crowded and extreme Republican gubernatorial field and read the full report here.
Bridge Michigan: Drag Queens And MAGA: Tudor Dixon Fights Culture Wars in Michigan Governor Bid
By Jonathan Oosting
Fighting what she calls liberal “indoctrination” in public schools isn’t just a talking point for Michigan Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon.
It’s a business model that launched her second career in conservative media and a swift ascent in statewide politics for the Norton Shores resident, who has emerged a favorite of the old-guard GOP establishment. […]
With absentee voting underway in what is suddenly a wide-open primary, Dixon appears to be the traditional Republican establishment’s pick to take on Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer […]
Dixon has racked up major endorsements from the powerful DeVos family, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce and GOP lawmakers like state Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, and U.S. Reps. Bill Huizenga and Lisa McClain.
Right to Life of Michigan is also supporting Dixon, who…celebrated the fall of Roe v. Wade, supports a dormant 1931 law that would make most abortions illegal in the state and has argued sex education programs run by Planned Parenthood are part of “business model” to ensure student abortions. […]
Despite her high-profile backers, Dixon has so far posted sluggish poll numbers in a race against real estate broker Ryan Kelley, chiropractor Garrett Soldano, businessman Kevin Rinke and pastor Ralph Rebandt.
She has “struggled with an identity” in a primary that will be decided by voters increasingly unlikely to care about endorsements from traditional power brokers, said GOP strategist Dennis Lennox.
Dixon launched her campaign last year with appeals to the “MAGA, Brietbart hard-right base of the Republican Party,” but has since “morphed into an establishmentarian candidate who has the full support of DeVos world,” Lennox said
“It’s quite a metamorphosis on her part.”
Dixon, a political outsider in a field of political outsiders, has taken aggressively conservative positions in her bid for Michigan governor.
She wants to “phase out” Michigan’s personal income tax, make it a “constitutional carry” state by eliminating the need for concealed pistol permits and “pardon” business owners penalized during what she calls “illegal lockdown policies” by Whitmer. Echoing Trump’s false claims he won Michigan in 2020, Dixon has also proposed tightening voter ID laws and voter fraud penalties. […]
GOP candidates across the country are vowing to limit classroom conversations on race and sexuality, and Dixon has positioned herself on the frontlines of that culture war. […]
She supports a DeVos-backed plan for student scholarships to private schools and told Bridge she would support a Michigan-version of Florida’s Parents Rights in Education law, which would prohibit any instruction related to sexual orientation or gender identity before fourth grade.
Critics have labeled it the “Don’t Say Gay” law. […]
Critics contend Dixon and other Republicans are stoking divisions by making classroom discussions about race or sexual identity an election-year wedge issue. […]
Dixon was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in suburban Chicago before attending the University of Kentucky. She moved to Michigan in 2002, when she took a job at a Muskegon steel foundry her dad had purchased.
There, at her dad’s firm, Dixon worked her way up from customer service to running sales and human resources, helping handle “everything that had to do with our largest deals with customers across the globe,” she said.
Dixon left Michigan Steel Inc. to start a family in 2009, three years before the company collapsed. Facing millions of dollars in tax liens and unpaid property taxes, her dad closed the foundry and laid off the entire workforce in 2012, according to a local news report from the time. […]
Dixon has also worked as an actor, which she has called a “hobby” to help a group of aspiring filmmakers in Kalamazoo. Between 2008 and 2012, she co-starred in a locally-filmed drama called “Lexibaby,” played a teen “bopper” eaten by zombies in “Buddy BeBop vs the Living Dead” and was a leading vampire in a web series called “Transitions.”
Critics contend those films undermine Dixon’s public persona as a family values candidate. The Michigan Democratic Party said her participation in a zombie film whose own creators called it “disgusting” “complicates (her) own crusade to demonize public schools” and Planned Parenthood.
A trailer for her first film shows Dixon’s character lifting up her shirt in a romantic scene with a man who had just snorted cocaine. The horror film includes other actors in graphic sexual scenes. In the vampire series, her character uses a sword to slash someone’s neck. […]
“They’re bringing up movies that were made — obviously — for adults,” [Dixon] said. “These are not movies that are pornographic in any way.” […]
In prior years, a candidate backed the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, Right to Life and former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos might have been a clear frontrunner for the Republican gubernatorial nomination.
But Dixon, who enjoys support from all three, has been stuck in the single digits of most public opinion surveys of the GOP field, which thinned considerably in recent weeks with the signature fraud disqualifications of early frontrunner James Craig and big spender Perry Johnson. […]
In each poll, “undecided” was by far the most popular option, which suggests there is still a path for Dixon to win the nomination, said pollster Bernie Porn, whose EPIC-MRA survey indicated nearly half of all primary voters do not yet know who Dixon is. […]
In tweets following the 2020 contest, Dixon claimed the election was stolen and accused Democrats of “obvious” and “sloppy” voter fraud.
In a recent gubernatorial debate, Dixon said she believes Trump actually won Michigan despite his 154,188-vote loss to Biden, contradicting findings from former U.S. Attorney General William Barr and the state Senate Oversight Committee, both of whom investigated claims but found no evidence of widespread fraud. […]
