Not long ago, a common critique on the left was that small business owners are just as bad as C-suite executives, petty tyrants who terrorize their workforce and who answer to Republicans alone.
But as the gulf between monopolies and small businesses grows and as Americans register for small businesses at a record clip, with 5.7 million applications just last year, that view is changing. Progressive Democrats across the country are courting small business owners, rhetorically and through new policies, such as the OPEN for Small Business policy package New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced on Monday, which rolls back red tape for the city’s 180,000 small businesses.
Ufford is imagining a world of policymaking that brings together workers, small business owners, and community members to develop new approaches to good governance.
Former auto engineer Don Ufford is among that group of politicians. He’s the leading candidate in the August 4 Democratic primary in Michigan’s 11th Congressional District, running on a platform of fighting Trump’s corruption and manufactured affordability crisis, building good jobs in Michigan, and creating a public health care option and Medicare for All. He’s against Trump’s forever war against Iran, blank-check spending for Israel, and believes Palestinians need their own state.
Ufford is also imagining a world of policymaking that brings together workers, small business owners, and community members to develop new approaches to good governance, including repairing the harm Trump is inflicting.
“We have lots of small and medium businesses, and they need to thrive,” Ufford told the Prospect, because with them, “the community thrives. We have grocery stores, retail stores, we can build parks. It shouldn’t just be a dream. This should be reality.”
Michiganders in the 11th District, about 26 miles northwest of Detroit, will consider Ufford alongside attorney and former prosecutor Aisha Farooqi, who is also a member of the Michigan Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Board; and state Sen. Jeremy Moss, who represents Bloomfield and is the Michigan Senate’s speaker pro tempore.
Ufford has raised more than $900,000 and had more than $435,000 cash on hand at the end of June, Federal Election Commission data shows, though he accepts no money from corporate or utility PACs, nor does he accept money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Farooqi likewise rejects money from corporate PACs or AIPAC; she has raised less than half that much and has a negative cash balance.
Moss, a democratic insider, has outraised both at 1.2 million and is the recipient of funding from AIPAC-shell Better Blue Fund, which is meant to distance candidates from the toxicity of the Israel lobby. But he has less liquid cash, with a balance of about $415,000.
Ufford is a former Republican who spent almost 30 years at Ford Motor Company, where was the director of global vehicle engineering and contributed to the development of the first Ford Escape and the redesign and reintroductions of the Mustang and F-150, the most popular model in the nearly 80-year running F-Series of trucks. His political viewpoint shifted about four years ago, when he undertook a bipartisan political leadership fellowship at Michigan State University. There, he befriended another fellow in the program, Democratic State Rep. Mai Xiong, for whom he later canvassed.
Unlike some of his opponents, Ufford is not a career politician, and he’s embraced descriptions of himself as a political outsider. But that characterization ignores that he would enter Congress with recent federal-level policymaking. As part of another fellowship in 2020, he worked in the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the Department of Commerce, and in the Office of Management and Budget’s Made in America Office, experiences he told the Prospect shaped how he would approach bringing good jobs back to Michigan. He helped develop and forecast what the U.S. needs for technology to thrive, including workforce development and ensuring that workers are taken care of. To him, this includes that workers need good training and that jobs need “good solid content.”
Speaking as an engineer, he said some of the most exciting developments in industry are ways that automation can help workers, such as equipment that can support a worker making physically heavy lifts. Such automation could offer new opportunities, but there must be the right policy framework so that Trump and his “billionaire buddies don’t just run over workers in their mad rush towards artificial intelligence, which scares me to death.” He’s also excited about ways to make a career in manufacturing possible for people.
“We need to have accessible ways for people to get that training,” he said, including through certificates, apprenticeships, and community college. His approach to policymaking includes working with organized labor to get workers’ guidance and feedback on strategies, which “is critical to make sure we understand what’s important as we go forward, that way we can ensure that as we develop technology we understand how that can be utilized by the worker and for the worker.”
He doesn’t see that happening now. What he sees is that the Trump administration is rushing to build data centers in communities that don’t want them and ignoring how they are harming regular people, including by increasing utility costs. He’s against tax breaks for data centers and other billionaire giveaways, and says that the accumulation of so much wealth and power in the hands of just a few means “normal, everyday Michiganders are being forced to try to figure out: how do we get things done?”
Asked what he makes of the current iteration of the Office of Management and Budget, directed by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, Uffort said, “It’s very different from the way we operated.” It’s mostly helping billionaires, he said, and “I can’t relate to that very well, I’m going to say.”
“Normal, everyday Michiganders are being forced to try to figure out: how do we get things done?”
Like other recent populist candidates, Ufford speaks to his community like they are intelligent adults, connecting the dots between an unforced forever war in Iran and funding for Israel with less money spent at home developing jobs and making life affordable. He wants to make sure that the Americans who have thrown their savings into being their own bosses have a chance to thrive. Already this year, about 3.1 million have filed paperwork to start their own businesses, 17 percent more than those who did during the same period last year, census data shows.
But Trump made it hard for everyone to thrive, by creating a global economic catastrophe with empire-building spending priorities. He’s hurting Michaganders along with the rest of Americans, and the people Ufford talks to in his district are aware of the link between foreign policy and unaffordability at home. They want political representatives who acknowledge that.
“They’re looking for some answers,” he told the Prospect, “and some honest feedback.”
