(Source: MIRS.news, Published 02/21/2025) The founder of a national group of roughly 200 wealthy progressives said Gov. Gretchen Whitmer “disqualified herself” from earning the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, if that's what she ends up seeking, by signing the bill that retains the tipped wage, SB 8.  

“An hour spent volunteering for her will be an hour wasted. A dollar donated to her political future might as well be set on fire," said Erica Payne, who founded the group Patriotic Millionaires in 2010 to protest President Barack Obama's support for extending the George W. Bush-era tax cuts on incomes of more than $1 million.  

“Make no mistake: if Gretchen Whitmer runs for president after what she did today, she will lose,” Payne continued. "In November, working people just gave the electoral middle finger to Democrats. Gretchen Whitmer’s decision in this matter makes it abundantly clear why voters don’t trust - and shouldn’t trust - Democrats. Her failure to raise and fortify the wage floor will trap workers in a cycle of poverty that undermines the American economy and threatens the foundation of democratic capitalism for us all.”  

Patriotic Millionaires' membership rose to 200 wealthy individuals by 2019, according to a New Yorker article.  Open Secrets has the group giving $287,436 to various political causes in 2024.  

Payne has her hands in several pots, including The Agenda Project, the Democracy Alliance and the Tesseract Group. 

The group is chaired by Morris Pearl, a former Managing Director at BlackRock who retired in 2014 after a long career on Wall Street to work with the Patriotic Millionaires full-time. Their membership includes investors, business owners and executives, lawyers, inheritors, filmmakers and authors, including Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Abigail Disney. 

“Once again, Democrats have thrown working people under the bus, this time in Michigan under the stewardship of Governor Gretchen Whitmer,” Disney said. “It doesn’t matter that only a few Democrats went along with this effort to tank the Court-ordered phaseout of the state’s sub-minimum wage for tipped workers. In its quest to rebrand itself and win back the working-class vote, Democrats needed to present a unified front in this pivotal moment in Michigan – and anything less than that, which this is, should be taken as an abysmal failure.” 

Whitmer's approval rating in Michigan has hovered around 53 percent since the COVID pandemic. She's been mentioned in numerous national outlets as a potential presidential candidate front-runner. 

Whitmer said in Friday’s announcement that “Michigan workers deserve fair wages and benefits so they can pay the bills and take care of their family, and small businesses needs our support to keep creating good jobs in Michigan.” 

She said she was proud to sign the bipartisan tipped wage and paid sick leave bills, which she called a “commonsense compromise.” 

“I hope we can build on this momentum to keep passing commonsense, bipartisan legislation that makes a real difference in people’s lives. I’ll keep working with anyone to protect working families and make sure our economy is competitive," the Governor said. 

Another voice in a press release sent out on the topic was Magnit chair John Driscoll. Contrary to what restaurant associations claim, “everybody lost” when Whitmer signed SB 8.  

“Tipped workers lost. Businesses lost. And the Democrats lost too when they sacrificed the most vulnerable workers in Michigan to lobbyists,” Driscoll said.