There’s a rich irony at the center of Jocelyn Benson’s campaign for governor.
The Democratic frontrunner promising to clean up Lansing’s gray areas has a record of operating squarely within them herself.
Benson recently announced a plan to reform transparency and ethics, making sunlight on political actors a cornerstone of her campaign.
Simple enough. “No more dark money, no more backroom deals, no more undisclosed influence,” Benson says.
She’s not wrong. But that argument gets harder to sustain when her own political and personal orbit has raised many of the same questions she now says need fixing.
Benson has benefitted from a system in Michigan that for years ranked among the weakest in the country on transparency and only recently adopted its first real personal financial disclosure requirements for top elected officials.
That tension is already visible.
As Michigan debates a wave of massive data center projects — developments that carry enormous implications for land use, energy consumption and taxpayer-backed incentives — Benson has positioned herself as a voice for stricter safeguards and public accountability.
Yet her husband, Ryan Friedrichs, is a vice president at Related Companies, whose affiliate has been involved in the controversial Washtenaw County project. Even if Benson has taken no official action to benefit from that project, the overlap raises obvious questions about conflict and disclosure as she runs for higher office.
And it doesn’t stop there.
Benson’s $9 million online transparency portal has been widely criticized for making campaign finance and disclosure data harder, not easier, for the public to use. Upon its rollout, Neil Thenadar of the Campaign Finance Network called it: “a failure at every level.”
In 2025, Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office concluded Benson violated the Michigan Campaign Finance Act by using the lobby of a public building to launch her governor’s bid — escaping penalty only because there was no enforcement mechanism in the law.
In 2024, a PAC controlled by Benson donated to Michigan Supreme Court Justice Kyra Harris Bolden reelection campaign while the court was being asked to resolve cases involving Benson’s office — creating at a minimum the appearance of the very kind of problem Benson now claims she wants to root out.
In 2022, a court ordered Benson’s office to release internal records it had withheld on how it handled campaign finance violations by a group that backed Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2018.
And Benson has accepted support from groups connected to “dark money” networks — including an endorsement from the Michigan Association for Justice, a group of trial lawyers with ties to the Super PAC Justice for All.
These conflicts aren’t necessarily unique to Benson. Michigan’s weak transparency laws have allowed officials of both parties to operate this way for years.
But Benson is now campaigning on fixing a system she has comfortably navigated and at time benefited from without having first demonstrated a willingness to hold herself to the higher standard.
Voters may agree the system needs to change — and many candidates have diagnosed the problem. But they are still entitled to ask whether Benson is capable of executing those reforms.
kbuss@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Buss: Can Jocelyn Benson walk the transparency talk?
Reporting by Kaitlyn Buss, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
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