State Sen. Jeremy Moss won Michigan’s 11th Congressional District on Tuesday, Nov. 3, when The Associated Press declared him the winner at 9:23 p.m. EST over Troy Mayor Ethan Baker, a Republican, MLive reported. The LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, which backed the Oakland County Democrat, said on its candidate page that “Jeremy will be the first out LGBTQ+ member of Congress from Michigan!”
“I’m a representative from my district, and I also happen to be gay,” Moss told the Michigan Advance, which also called him Michigan’s first openly gay member of Congress, in an interview published Thursday. He’ll join a Democratic House majority in January, after Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress, the AP reported, and Gayety has sized up what that majority could mean for the Equality Act.
“Tonight we broke barriers and made history as we send a new generation of leadership to Congress, who won’t back down from the fight,” Moss said in a statement to MLive on election night.
Jeremy Moss Takes the Oakland County Seat Haley Stevens Left
The 11th takes in Troy, Royal Oak, Farmington Hills, Pontiac and other parts of western Oakland County, WXYZ reported. “It is an extraordinary honor to earn the trust of Oakland County voters to represent Michigan’s 11th District in Congress,” Moss said in that statement.
Rep. Haley Stevens gave up the seat to run for the U.S. Senate, lost the August primary to Abdul El-Sayed and then endorsed Republican Mike Rogers two days before El-Sayed won the race. “I’m not a status quo kind of guy,” Moss said when he launched his campaign in May 2025, the Michigan Advance reported.
He’d been the youngest person elected to the Southfield City Council, MLive noted, before winning a state Senate seat in 2018. “It was disruptive when I ran to be the first out gay member of the Michigan Senate, but as a result, we enshrined LGBTQ protections in our state civil rights law, and it is disruptive now as I take on our institution and work to open up our records to public scrutiny and bring more transparency to state government,” he said at the launch.
“I really, truly don’t know any family in this district that sits at the dinner table lamenting about a trans athlete,” Moss told the Advance this week. He said families there lament grocery bills and gas prices instead.
“I’d love to cut through the chaos of Trump’s administration and really deliver for people back home,” he said.
How Moss Wrote Gender Identity Into Elliott-Larsen
Moss’s Senate Bill 4, adding sexual orientation and gender identity or expression to Michigan’s 1976 Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, passed the Senate 23-15 on March 1, 2023, and the House 64-45 a week later, legislative records show. “This moment is so long overdue and too many LGBTQ people suffered on this journey to get here,” Moss said when Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed it March 16, 2023, her office announced.
The Michigan Supreme Court had ruled the year before that the law already covered sexual orientation, the AP reported at the time. “This baton has been passed from generation to generation,” Moss said, according to the AP.
“I’m taking with me a record of leading some of the most defining victories in the Michigan Legislature, from expanding civil rights protections to safeguarding our voting systems,” he said Tuesday night.
Moss Took the Front Row as Josh Schriver Targeted Obergefell
On Feb. 25, 2025, Rep. Josh Schriver, R-Oxford, held a Lansing news conference on a resolution urging the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn its 2015 same-sex marriage ruling, and Moss, by his own account, took the seat right in front of the podium. “Any deviation from this definition undermines the legal and moral foundation of this republic,” Schriver said, the Michigan Advance reported.
Schriver didn’t take questions, so Moss talked to reporters instead. “This is just another hateful and harmful attack against the LGBTQ community and I don’t think people in Michigan are going to stand for it,” Moss said.
That November, he introduced a resolution to strip the state constitution’s language recognizing only “the union of one man and one woman in marriage,” the Advance reported. “Our constitution should reflect the values of our state,” Moss said in a release.
It needs two-thirds of both chambers to reach the ballot, and the Senate Civil Rights, Judiciary and Public Safety Committee took testimony on it in March, the Advance reported. “If Obergefell is overturned, Michigan snaps back to the language in our state constitution banning same sex unions,” Moss told the committee.
Jason Hoskins and Joanna Whaley Lead Unofficial Michigan Returns
Rep. Jason Hoskins, D-Southfield, led the race for the 7th District Senate seat Moss is leaving, with every precinct reporting in unofficial results on WDIV’s results page. “I didn’t think people would elect an openly gay Black person to office,” Hoskins, who once worked for Moss, told FOX 2 Detroit after his first House win in 2022.
Democrat Joanna Whaley led Republican Ron Kokinda in the Downriver 2nd House District with every precinct reporting, also in unofficial results, WDIV’s House results show. “You didn’t vote for who I am, but what I will do in our community,” she said in a Facebook video, FOX 2 reported.
Her podcast describes Whaley as a former evangelical pastor who “later came out as a transgender woman,” and in August she told the Detroit Free Press that “I understand in this moment in politics what it would mean to elect a trans woman could be monumental.” In May, she said a failed bid to knock her off the primary ballot was “a challenge targeting my legal name change associated with my transition,” the Michigan Advance reported.
“I’ve always said, you can’t be what you can’t see,” Moss told the Advance.
