Betsy DeVos is Donald Trump's pick for Secretary of Education
In November 2006. Republican Dick DeVos, the wealthy 51-year-old son of Amway co-founder Richard DeVos, lost a hard-fought battle for the governorship to Democrat Jennifer Granholm. He personally spent $35 million on the race.
The night he conceded the election at a Lansing hotel, wife Betsy DeVos, was by his side. As Zack Stanton of Politico writes, Betsy Devos was no stranger to politics, and the Devos family went on to become a powerful force in Michigan politics.
Now she's Donald Trump's nominee for education secretary, with a Senate confirmation hearing scheduled Tuesday.
“The DeVos family has been far more successful not having the governor’s seat than if they had won it,” Richard Czuba, the owner of the Glengariff Group, a bipartisan polling firm in Michigan, tells Politico. “They have, to some degree, created a shadow state party. And it’s been pretty darn effective.”
Stanton goes on to write about Betsy Devos the night her husband conceded the race:
Though dressed in a blue skirt-suit, the uniform of a first ladyship that was not to be, Betsy DeVos was never a political accessory. Anyone who understood Michigan politics knew she had long been the more political animal of the pair. It was Betsy, not Dick, who had chaired the Michigan Republican Party; Betsy, who had served as a member of the Republican National Committee; Betsy, whose name was once floated to succeed Haley Barbour as head of the RNC; Betsy, who had directed a statewide ballot campaign to legalize public funding of religious schools; Betsy, who, as a college freshman, traveled to Ohio and Indiana to volunteer for Gerald Ford’s presidential campaign. She was a skilled and seasoned operator, but as her husband conceded in an overwhelming defeat, she was utterly helpless.
At the time, it seemed like a dead end for a neophyte political candidate. In reality, it was the opening of a new avenue the DeVoses followed to far greater political influence, reshaping Michigan politics and the national Republican scene. “I think that loss really solidified the idea in the DeVoses’ minds that the real way to get what you want is to be behind the scenes,” says Susan Demas, publisher of Inside Michigan Politics.
In the decade since that loss, the DeVos family, with Dick and Betsy at the helm, has emerged as a political force without comparison in Michigan. Their politics are profoundly Christian and conservative—“God, America, Free Enterprise,” to borrow the subtitle of family patriarch Richard DeVos’ 1975 book, Believe!—and their vast resources (the family’s cumulative net worth is estimated at well over $5 billion) assure that they can steamroll their way to victory on issues ranging from education reform to workers’ rights.
