Michigan is surrounded by 84 percent of the surface freshwater in North America, and Michiganders are understandably pretty proud about that. Protecting the state’s water supply is a bipartisan issue, which is one reason why, after years of trying to zero out funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, Donald Trump was forced this year to cave and pretend that he’d been in support of it all along.

But things get controversial when the discussion shifts to how to protect that water, and who in the state has the right to it. The same water supply is home to leaking oil pipes, one of which led to the largest inland oil spill in US history. In warm weather, Lake Erie blooms with algae turbocharged by fertilizer runoff from farms and CAFOs. In 2018, statewide testing revealed that Michigan is an epicenter of PFAS contamination. After the 2009 recession, steep budget cuts and mismanagement of water infrastructure in Flint led to a massive epidemic of lead poisoning (and a subsequent cover-up). And thousands of households in Detroit lived through the critical early months of the COVID-19 pandemic without access to running water because they couldn’t afford to pay the unreasonably high rates they were being charged.

Meanwhile, Nestlé has a permit to pump 576,000 gallons of water per day from the headwaters of two cold-water trout streams in Osceola County, Michigan, to bottle and sell under its Ice Mountain brand, in exchange for paying the state $200 a year in permit fees per pumping facility.

The 2020 election will have an impact on all of these issues. Even though Michigan’s legislators have preserved funding for Great Lakes restoration, the EPA under the Trump administration has protected polluters in Michigan at the expense of everyone else. That’s true everywhere.

But the 2020 election, if Michigan continues to build on the progressive organizing that shifted the balance of power across the state during the 2018 midterm elections, could dramatically change how Michigan protects the environment and the health of its own residents. The 2018 midterms brought Governor Gretchen Whitmer into office (who halted water shutoffs across the state in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and tightened up manure rules for CAFOs) and Dana Nessel, the attorney general who is suing to shut down Enbridge’s Line 5, the Canadian-owned oil pipeline that cuts across the Straits of Mackinac. It also brought victory for a grassroots ballot initiative designed to replace a heavily gerrymandered Republican majority across the state with an independent, nonpartisan redistricting commission.

Michigan is still heavily gerrymandered—its districts won’t be redrawn by the nonpartisan commission until 2022. But an overwhelming turnout in 2020 could cause the state’s Supreme Court and the state legislature to flip from Republican to Democratic majorities. If that happens, it would have the largest implications for public health and the environment outside of the presidential election (there is an environmental initiative on the ballot, but it is about how funding for public parks should be apportioned and has a relatively narrow focus).

Here are a few potential consequences if the court and the legislature flip.

The state’s public health response to COVID-19 could change dramatically. 

This year the state legislature sued Gretchen Whitmer on the grounds that a 1945 law granting emergency powers to the governor did not actually grant Whitmer the authority to require mask-wearing in public spaces, or to tell businesses to implement safety measures for workers and customers, or to declare  a statewide moratorium on water shutoffs so that everyone could actually wash their hands to stop the spread of COVID-19. (Whitmer had done all of the above since the pandemic broke out.)

On October 3, the Michigan Supreme Court sided with the legislature, not Whitmer, throwing the state’s coordinated COVID response into chaos. "Freedom is messy," Michigan Senate majority leader Mike Shirkey said of the decision, adding that businesses should have the right to make their own decisions about how—or if—they protect employees and customers. "I think for the most part, people do make the right decisions. You can never, ever, ever pass enough laws ... to prevent people from making bad decisions. That's not the country that we love and embrace."

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services has tried to re-create some of Whitmer’s emergency orders. But since early October, when the Supreme Court invalidated Whitmer’s emergency mandates, the number of people hospitalized statewide because of COVID has more than doubled.

The state could seriously invest in water infrastructure and water affordability.

In 2017, Philadelphia became the first city in the United States to implement income-based water bills. The city’s plan was very similar to one that the People’s Water Board and a utilities expert named Roger Coulton developed years ago in Detroit—that plan was passed by the city council in 2005 but never funded.

One reason Michigan utilities give for having to charge such high water rates is that their water infrastructure is in really bad shape—most of it is long overdue for replacement. A progressive state legislature could use pre-existing tools like the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund to give low-interest loans for new infrastructure to utilities that agree to set up income-based utility programs. While Detroit is the most notorious for its water shutoffs (largely because Detroit protested and got the UN involved), a full 14 percent of Michigan residents live below the poverty line ($12,490 per year for a single person, $25,750 for a family of four) so an income-based water plan would help people across the state.

Michigan could also help finance that new water infrastructure by charging Nestlé and other bottling companies a fair price for the water that they are flipping for a profit.

Sample legislation already exists for something called the Public Water/Public Justice Act. The act, if passed, would charge 25 cents a gallon to anyone extracting from publicly owned water supplies and reselling it as bottled water. The money would be spent on infrastructure for utilities that provide income-based pricing, as well as conservation, health programs, and protection of water sources.

Rage against Nestlé also appears to be a bipartisan issue in Michigan, at least on the part of average residents. In April 2018, a few months before midterm elections, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality approved Nestlé’s request to pump up to 400 gallons of water per minute from one of its wells—an increase over the 250 gallons per minute it had been previously extracting. The DEQ did this despite the fact that Nestlé’s request attracted a record number of public comments—80,945 against approving the new permit and just 75 in favor. So this could happen. If it does, Michigan will have a whole new thing to brag about.

Paid for by the Sierra Club Voter Education Fund, which seeks to raise key environmental issues in the discussions around elections and encourage the public to find out more about candidates’ positions on key environmental issues.