Inside Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's 'Long Busy Days' — and the Occasional Burst of Sun — in the Middle of a Plague

A lot of eyes have been on Gretchen Whitmer.

In the matter of months, she's gone from a relatively unknown governor to one of Joe Biden's potential picks for the vice presidency on the 2020 Democratic Party ticket. Along the way, Whitmer has been called out by President Donald Trump over her statewide shutdown because of the novel coronavirus and she's appeared dozens and dozens of times on national television.

But like most, the 48-year-old Michigan leader hasn’t left her home much in the past three months.

"When lives are on the line, as they are with a global pandemic, they are long days," Whitmer tells PEOPLE.

Often, those hours are "filled with Zoom calls and conference calls" due to social distancing. (Between a seemingly endless string of back-to-back briefings, she also walks her dog, Kevin, daily.)

Earlier this month, Whitmer defied the pandemic risk to walk in an anti-police brutality march in Detroit where she says she was inundated with hand sanitizer and a sense of communal unity — but no hugs.

Afterward, critics were quick to note she didn’t always keep a six-foot distance between herself and others while marching, which they called a hypocritical violation of the same public health standards she's championed.

“Of course people were pointing that out,” the governor says now, sounding only somewhat annoyed.

But she takes the point. So when she returned to Detroit on Thursday, to have lunch with Mayor Mike Duggan at the local eatery Good Times, she consulted with her team first.

“I said, ‘Exactly how am I supposed to do this so that no one accuses me of not following the rules?’ ” she tells PEOPLE, chuckling at what many have called “the new reality” in the time of COVID-19, the coronavirus disease.

For her meal with Duggan, Whitmer wore a customary face mask while waiting outside in line and, when she was seated, she removed it for her impossible burger (a “fantastic meal").

All around her people were distancing and washing their hands, wearing masks like hers — following some of the same guidelines that have made her and her state a flashpoint in debates about how to balance public health with a reopening of businesses to re-invigorate the economy.

Outside the sky quite literally brightened up to a sunny 72 degrees. “My perfect temperature,” Whitmer says.

It was, for a moment, a flash of what summer was like before the virus' spread.

While Whitmer is one of billions of people whose lives have been turned upside down by the deadly pandemic that led broad swaths of society to close for months, she’s also one of 50 U.S. governors who have had to personally weigh those choices.

"When you become governor of any state, but a state like Michigan, you’re governor 24/7," she says. "We have long busy days in the best of times. And in these challenging times, it certainly means there are additional pressures."

The Democrat's decisions haven’t always been welcomed: In late April, conservative protesters brandished assault-style weapons inside Michigan’s state capitol building to show how strongly they disagreed with Whitmer’s support of one of the strictest stay-home orders in the country, at a time when Michigan was one of the 10 states with the highest number of cases.

Her detractors argued her assertion of emergency powers was overly broad and some of the restrictions were needless, such as those on travel to secondary homes, on motorized boating and the sale of gardening and lawn supplies in order to enforce of sense a only "essential" activity to slow infections.

Some anti-shut down protesters have also waved Confederate flags and toured parade-like Donald Trump floats with their cars outside the statehouse, she remembers now. Though she doesn’t want to talk about it much, Whitmer recalls one depiction: a dark-haired doll hanging by a noose.

That’s where the Midwesterner politely draws the line.

“I’m not going to make decisions based on being bullied,” she says. “I’m not going to make decisions based on a tweet or a threat.”

'It Kind of Changed Everything'

Whitmer says she never expected to have a career in politics, despite the table being set for her since she was young.

Both of her parents were attorneys. Her father, Richard Whitmer, worked under former Gov. William Milliken. Mom Sherry Whitmer worked under former state Attorney General Frank Kelley. Despite what some might see as a paved path to follow behind them, the future governor had other plans as a teenager: sports broadcasting.

“There were no women on ESPN when I was a kid and I love sports and that was I thought my path was going to be when I went to college,” she says now, laughing. “When I was in college, I got a job at the capitol and it kind of changed everything for me.”

Whitmer graduated from Michigan State University in 1993 and, in the approximately quarter-century since, she's served in the both the state House and Senate before becoming its governor.

This year vaunted her further into the spotlight — thanks, in part, to President Trump.

Famous (and infamous) for his penchant for nicknaming rivals, Trump was speaking with Fox News in late March when he dismissively referenced Whitmer as “the young woman governor, you know who I’m talking about, from Michigan.”

She played off the jab. When she appeared on The Daily Show in early April, she wore a shirt beneath her blazer that read “That woman from Michigan.”

Whitmer "has a wicked sense of humor” and "privately swears like a sailor," Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel told NBC News in April.

It’s no surprise then that she still laughs at Cecily Strong’s be-wigged impression (complete with a beer) of her on Saturday Night Live — though, Whitmer notes, the accent was “a little Fargo-y.” (And “I like Labatt's, but I drink Michigan beer.”)

She sent Strong a care package afterward, filled with cases of the Kalamazoo-brewed Bell’s and loads of swag.

It didn't include any Vernor’s ginger soda — “the best pop in the world,” Whitmer says — but it was a small taste of Michigan that its governor wanted to share with someone from across the country.

Lately, Whitmer’s been asked repeatedly about moving on from state politics to a bigger stage.

Her name has reportedly been on the shortlist of Biden's potential running mates, along with Sens. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren and others. Biden has said he’ll pick a woman as his potential vice president, adding more fuel to the speculation about Whitmer. But the lifelong Michigander hasn’t overtly fanned the flames herself.

“I’ve been so focused on doing my job, and I think that’s what’s put me in the president’s line of sight. And I think it’s also what’s put me in the line of sight as one of the many phenomenal people that they are mentioning in regards to that possibility,” Whitmer tells PEOPLE.

She’s similarly brushed off questions about the vice presidency for weeks now, leaving one local TV station speculating the governor was trying to “sell the state” to the rest of the nation by avoiding laying the rumors to rest.

That’s not the case, she says.

“At the end of the day, I’m always going to keep staying focused on doing my job,” she says. “It’s been a lot bigger and more complicated than anyone could have imagined and yet that’s where every ounce of energy has gone.”

Life at Home

Whitmer says she and her family — husband Dr. Marc Mallory, a dentist, and her two daughters — try to have dinner together every night that they can at the governor’s mansion in Lansing. She also has three older stepsons, Alex, Mason and Winston, but they don’t live at the state residence.

On average, Whitmer is able to corral her husband, 18-year-old Sherry and 16-year-old Sydney for dinner together about three times a week.

Recently, the dinner table conversations with her daughters have centered more on politics and the world at large: Since late May, the months-long pandemic has overlapped with nationwide protests against police misconduct and racial inequality in the wake of George Floyd's killing in Minneapolis.

“They’re outraged,” Whitmer says of her girls. “They want to participate in demonstrations, which I think is great. I just, as a mom and as a governor, want to make sure they wear their mask when they do.”

She and her daughters watched together on June 1 as President Trump delivered a Rose Garden speech about the unrest while, outside the White House, federal agents cleared protesters from the streets. Months earlier, Sherry stood alongside her mom at East Lansing High School when Whitmer delivered the Democratic Party’s official rebuttal to Trump’s State of the Union speech.

Prior to the pandemic, some voting experts believed the November general election might see its highest turnout from first-time voters in more than a century, according to a report in The Atlantic.

Sherry will be among them.

Like a day of sunshine in the middle of a plague, Whitmer says: “That, in and of itself, gives me great hope, energy and inspiration.”