Platform Planks: Power to the People

Rural Co-ops vs. Wall Street Utilities

Prepared for: Abdul El-Sayed for Senate — Michigan

The Strategic Opening

Michigan’s rural and exurban counties are not monolithically hostile to progressive economics. They are hostile to progressives who campaign on cultural identity and never show up to talk about the price of electricity, the reliability of the grid, or the broadband that never arrived. There is a live populist seam running through every county north of I-69 and most of the ones south of it: working people on both sides of the aisle are furious at DTE, Consumers Energy, and the cable monopolies. They pay some of the highest rates in the Midwest and sit in the dark more often than almost any ratepayers in the country.

Possible video reel (reply with feedback)

The opportunity is to run not against conservatism but against corporate extraction — and to point at an institution that already exists in red Michigan, that conservatives already like, and that works: the rural electric cooperative. Cherryland, Great Lakes Energy, HomeWorks Tri-County, Presque Isle, Alger Delta, Cloverland, Midwest Energy — these are member-owned utilities, governed by locally elected boards, that return capital credits to their members and keep the lights on better than the for-profits do. Every rural broadband fiber build of the last five years has either been a co-op or a municipal project; the incumbents took the subsidies and did not string the wire.

This memo lays out five platform planks built around that frame, each tied to available public opinion data showing majority support among independents and a meaningful slice of Republicans. The planks are written so they can be delivered at a township hall in Sanilac County without apology — and at a Labor Hall in Macomb the same evening.

What the Polling Actually Shows

The numbers below are drawn from publicly available surveys. Recent state-level and national polling should be re-verified by the research team before any of these figures are used in public-facing material; the political climate moves fast, and campaign-grade citations need to be current.

On utility monopolies and public/cooperative alternatives

• Data for Progress (national, 2022 and 2023 waves): majorities of likely voters — including pluralities of Republicans — support expanding publicly-owned and cooperatively-owned electric utilities, and oppose investor-owned utilities shutting off power for non-payment.
• Pew Research, recurring polling on corporate power: roughly seven in ten Americans — including a majority of Republicans — say large corporations have too much power, and the figure is highest when respondents are asked specifically about energy and telecom.
• University of Michigan Ford School / Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy (CLOSUP) state-of-the-state surveys have repeatedly shown Michigan residents rating DTE and Consumers Energy reliability and trust below the national utility average.
• J.D. Power annual electric utility residential customer satisfaction studies have ranked DTE and Consumers near the bottom of the Midwest Large segment for multiple years.

On rural broadband

• Pew Research, rural broadband tracking: roughly 70 to 80 percent of rural Americans — across parties — support public investment in rural broadband, and a majority support municipal and cooperative broadband networks over incumbent ISPs.
• Benton Institute and ILSR state-level tracking has documented that where rural electric cooperatives have entered the broadband market in Michigan, satisfaction and speeds exceed the incumbent.

On Wall Street and private equity in essential services

• Data for Progress and Navigator Research have found majorities — including a plurality of Republicans — oppose private equity ownership of hospitals, nursing homes, and utilities. The frame of “Wall Street raiders buying up Main Street” polls strongly with non-college voters of both parties.

Bottom line: on the specific question of whether the people who use a utility should own it, or whether distant shareholders should, the red-blue split collapses. This is a super-majority position hiding in plain sight.

The Frame: Main Street vs. Wall Street

Issue	Wall Street Model (Investor-Owned)	Main Street Model (Co-op / Municipal)
Who owns it	Distant shareholders, often pension funds and private equity	The customers themselves — every member gets one vote
Where profits go	Dividends to Wall Street; executive bonuses	Capital credits back to members; reinvestment in local lines
Rate-setting	Utility proposes, regulators approve; customers have no vote	Member-elected board votes on rates in public meetings
Reliability incentive	Paid more for capital spending than for uptime	Board members lose power at their own homes when lines fail
Rural service	Often redlined or last in line for upgrades	Rural service is the mission, not the afterthought
Broadband record	Telecoms took subsidies for decades and left gaps	Co-ops now build fiber where the monopolies wouldn’t

The Five Platform Planks

Plank 1 — The Michigan Power Choice Act

The promise: Every Michigan community — township, city, or county — gets a real, funded, fast-tracked right to form or join an electric cooperative or municipal utility and buy out the investor-owned distribution system serving it. No more ten-year regulatory slow-walks from the Public Service Commission. No more eminent-domain fights the locals lose because they can’t out-lawyer DTE.

What it does

• Federal backstop financing (through USDA Rural Utilities Service and a new DOE Community Power Fund) for municipalization and cooperative buyouts, so the capital question stops being the blocker.
• A statutory 24-month shot clock on state-level proceedings to approve a community takeover, with a presumption in favor of the local petitioner.
• Technical assistance teams — lawyers, engineers, rate analysts — paid for federally and loaned to any community that votes to explore a buyout.

Why it lands in red counties

This is local control. This is the plain conservative principle that decisions about your town should be made in your town. The opponent is not a small business or a farmer — it is a Fortune 500 monopoly headquartered far away. Every township supervisor who has had to beg DTE to fix a transformer knows this story.

“If your co-op can run the lines in Emmet County better than DTE runs them in Oakland County, maybe Oakland County should get to vote on joining a co-op too.”

Plank 2 — Fiber to Every Farm: The Co-op Broadband Guarantee

The promise: Every address in Michigan gets symmetric fiber at co-op or municipal rates within this decade — and the build-out money flows first to the entities that have actually delivered, not to the incumbents that have collected subsidies for twenty years and left the back roads dark.

What it does

• Directs federal BEAD and RDOF-style funds preferentially to rural electric cooperatives, municipal networks, and nonprofit broadband authorities — with incumbent ISPs eligible only after co-ops and municipals have bid.
• Eliminates state-level preemption of municipal broadband. Michigan is one of the states where the incumbents have lobbied to make it hard for cities to build their own networks. That ends.
• Requires any federally-funded fiber built by an incumbent to be open-access, so local ISPs and co-ops can compete on the same wire.

Why it lands in red counties

Because the farmer in Huron County, the contractor in Iosco, and the kid trying to do homework in Ontonagon already know the story. They paid into the Universal Service Fund for thirty years. Frontier and AT&T took the money. The co-op electric utility down the road is the one that showed up with a fiber crew. This plank is not ideology — it is a thank-you note to the institution that actually delivered.

Plank 3 — The Circular Economy Dividend

The promise: Every dollar of federal clean-energy, broadband, or infrastructure money that lands in Michigan carries a local-circulation requirement: it has to be spent with Michigan workers, Michigan contractors, and Michigan-owned businesses first — and any long-term operating revenue from the asset has to stay local through cooperative or public ownership structures.

What it does

• A “Michigan Dollar” standard for federal infrastructure grants: priority scoring for projects that commit to in-state labor, in-state suppliers, and cooperative or public ownership of the finished asset.
• A Community Wealth Building office at the state level, modeled on the Preston (UK) and Cleveland Evergreen models, to help counties and townships structure co-ops around anchor institutions — hospitals, universities, utilities.
• Tax credits specifically for worker-owned cooperatives and for succession buyouts, so when a retiring small-business owner sells, her workers get first right of refusal — keeping Michigan businesses in Michigan hands instead of being rolled up by out-of-state private equity.

Why it lands in red counties

This is the plank that retires the word “socialism” before the incumbents can land it. Worker ownership and cooperative ownership are not redistribution — they are property rights, extended to the people who actually built the business. Farmers understand co-ops; they have been running them for a century. This is that model, applied to Main Street.

“When the paper mill closes in Escanaba, the answer isn’t a prayer that some out-of-state buyer takes pity on us. The answer is: the workers buy it, and we help them do it.”

Plank 4 — Break Up the Monopoly Utility Holding Companies

The promise: Use federal antitrust authority and the Public Utility Holding Company framework to force vertically-integrated, investor-owned monopoly utilities to divest their distribution arms — and to make private-equity ownership of essential monopoly infrastructure straightforwardly illegal.

What it does

• Federal legislation restoring and modernizing the Public Utility Holding Company Act protections gutted in 2005, with a flat ban on private-equity or hedge-fund controlling ownership of regulated monopoly utilities.
• A Wall Street extraction fee on utility holding companies whose reliability metrics fall below federal benchmarks, with the proceeds rebated directly to affected customers.
• Mandatory performance-based ratemaking tied to reliability, affordability, and community reinvestment — not to capital spending, which is the current perverse incentive.

Why it lands in red counties

Because the grid is falling apart and everyone knows it. The January ice storms, the August derechos, the rolling outages in July — none of this is normal, and none of it is because of the weather alone. It is the predictable consequence of a business model that pays executives more when they spend more, and pays shareholders more when costs get passed to customers. Red-county voters do not need to be taught to distrust that model. They already do.

Plank 5 — The Rural Energy Independence Act

The promise: Every Michigan farm, small business, and rural household gets the financing, the interconnection rights, and the net-metering terms to put their own energy on the grid — with their co-op as the default aggregator and buyer, not the IOU.

What it does

• USDA REAP-plus grants and zero-interest loans for on-farm solar, wind, methane digesters, and battery storage — with streamlined interconnection if the host utility is a cooperative.
• Federal pre-emption of anti-net-metering state policies that let investor-owned utilities shrink the credit rural generators get for the power they export.
• A right to form a virtual power plant through your local co-op, so a thousand farms with solar-plus-storage can collectively bid into the wholesale market and capture revenue that currently goes to the utility.

Why it lands in red counties

Energy independence is a red-county value before it is a climate policy. This plank is about letting a farmer in Tuscola County make money on his barn roof instead of renting it to a landman from out of state. Climate is a co-benefit; the core pitch is economic sovereignty for rural producers.

Delivery: How to Talk About This

Language to use

• “Member-owned,” “locally elected,” “capital credits back to you,” “cooperative,” “your co-op,” “one member, one vote.”
• “Wall Street,” “private equity,” “out-of-state shareholders,” “extractive,” “monopoly,” “absentee ownership.”
• “Reliability,” “uptime,” “keeping the lights on,” “fiber to the farm,” “property rights for workers,” “energy independence.”

Language to avoid

• “Public ownership” as a first-line phrase — true, but carries baggage. Say “community-owned” or “member-owned” first and let the listener arrive at public ownership themselves.
• “Socialist,” “democratic socialist,” even in the abstract — there is no upside to reintroducing the frame the other side will use against you.
• “Green New Deal” as a framing container — use the specific provisions, not the branded bundle. The policy is popular; the brand is contested.

Validators to recruit

• Rural electric co-op general managers — they are apolitical, trusted, and they can confirm on camera that the co-op model outperforms the IOU model on reliability and affordability.
• Michigan Farm Bureau county chapters, especially in counties where co-op broadband builds are underway. They have already fought this fight.
• IBEW locals — the linemen know exactly why the outages happen and who is responsible. Their endorsement on reliability-framed material is worth more than any consultant’s focus group.
• Faith leaders in rural counties talking about community and neighbors, not policy. The frame is relational, not technocratic.

Appendix: Proof Points to Assemble

Before deploying any of these planks, the research team should pull and fact-check the following so every claim on the stump is defensible:

• Current Michigan rankings on electricity reliability (SAIDI/SAIFI) from the EIA and MPSC — DTE and Consumers figures vs. national median and vs. in-state co-ops.
• Current average residential rate per kWh: DTE, Consumers, and each of the major Michigan co-ops (Cherryland, Great Lakes Energy, HomeWorks, Presque Isle, Alger Delta, Cloverland, Midwest Energy).
• Capital credits returned to Michigan co-op members over the last five years (each co-op publishes this).
• Specific rural broadband builds by Michigan co-ops — mileage of fiber, households passed, speeds delivered, price points — vs. the incumbent’s coverage in the same census tracts.
• Shareholder dividend payouts and executive compensation at DTE Energy and CMS Energy, compared side-by-side with co-op capital credit returns.
• The 2023 Michigan ice storm and August 2024 derecho outage durations by service territory, segmented IOU vs. co-op.
• Current public polling on utility trust, broadband expansion, and private-equity ownership, re-run within the last 90 days of any major speech.

Every one of these numbers exists. Gathered into a single one-pager, they are the most persuasive campaign document a Senate candidate can carry into a township hall in a county Trump won by thirty points.

— END MEMO —