LANSING, Mich. — Both sitting justices on Michigan’s Supreme Court ballot kept their seats Tuesday. Voters returned the chief justice, Megan Cavanagh, and her colleague Noah Hood to the state’s highest court.
The winners each get eight more years on the bench. Court races in Michigan appear on the nonpartisan part of the ballot, but candidates are chosen at party conventions, and Cavanagh and Hood were the Democratic nominees. With both reelected, justices nominated by Democrats hold six of the court’s seven seats.
Republicans had nominated Michael Warren, a Sixth Circuit Court judge in Oakland County appointed by former Gov. John Engler, and Casandra Morse-Bills, who presides over the 23rd Judicial Circuit Court covering Alcona, Arenac, Iosco and Oscoda counties. Two other candidates, Thomas Howe and Jody White, ran as U.S. Taxpayers Party nominees; neither of whom is a licensed Michigan attorney, which state rules require for the job.
Cavanagh joined the court after winning election in 2018, and her colleagues later picked her unanimously to replace Elizabeth Clement as chief justice. Her father, Michael Cavanagh, served on the court from 1983 to 2015, and her uncle Jerome Cavanagh was mayor of Detroit.
Hood, born in 1986, was seeking his first full term. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer named him in April 2025 to the seat Clement left. A Detroit native, he worked as an assistant U.S. attorney from 2014 to 2019, including in Toledo, then served on the Third Circuit Court in Detroit and handled a veterans treatment court docket. Whitmer put him on the Michigan Court of Appeals in February 2022, and voters kept him there in a special election later in 2022. His mother, Denise Page Hood, is a senior federal judge in the Eastern District of Michigan.
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