Devin Scillian, the debate’s moderator, noted early in the debate that both candidates are facing millions of dollars worth of attack ads being run against them. Both candidates were in agreement that there needs to be more civility in politics.

“Leadership climate is set from the top, and the leadership climate that has been set is a tone and tenor of vitriol that is unbecoming of the country that I served and the country that we all love,” Slotkin said. “I think that it’s the responsibility of anyone who’s in leadership to hold themselves to a higher standard of integrity and set a positive tone.”

Bishop responded that Slotkin’s critique of President Trump is exactly the strategy her campaign has employed: “spending millions of dollars – Washington, D.C. dollars, Hollywood dollars – against me with nothing but vitriol and incivility.”

Takeaway 2: Bishop not afraid to stand up to President Trump

Bishop said that, even as a Republican, he disagrees with President Trump on issues such as trade and tariffs, and challenged the White House to protect the Great Lakes.

“As you know, the executive budget boxed out the Great Lakes and the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. That’s important to me, it’s important to my family,” Bishop said. “It’s not a Republican or Democrat issue, it’s something that’s important to all of us. So we fought to get that funding back into the budget. That’s something that we had to take on the executive branch to do.”

Takeaway 3: Slotkin not your cookie-cutter Democrat

Slotkin distanced herself from several talking points that Democrats across the country have adopted recently.

On border security, Slotkin said that she does not support abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and believes that, while a wall does not make sense, we should increase border security using modern technologies. She also said that she would not support Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House and that she does not believe in a single-payer healthcare system due to high costs.

Takeaway 4: Healthcare hotly contested

After Bishop charged that Slotkin had been recruited by Nancy Pelosi to run against him this year, she responded that “Mike Bishop recruited me to run for this race the minute he voted to completely obliterate protections for people with preexisting conditions.”

Both candidates shared that they have relatives with preexisting conditions, and Bishop said that there was “no way” he would have voted for legislation that didn’t include protections for people with preexisting conditions.

While the bill that Bishop voted for does bar insurers from dropping patients with preexisting conditions, Slotkin said, it does not protect them from paying higher rates. To do this, she proposed allowing anyone to buy in to Medicare “so that young, healthy people can buy an affordable plan, so that employers don’t have to constrain the size of their business because they can’t afford to pay everyone’s health insurance.”

Bishop said that such a system would not work, as Medicare is already teetering on insolvency. He suggested “a patient-centered system, where our individuals, our families, our businesses, can pick their own healthcare, not a government-run template that’s forced upon them.”

Takeaway 5: Sparks fly over climate change

During her time at the Pentagon, Slotkin said she conducted one of the first studies on the effects that climate change would have on the military and believes in climate change because she "believes in science and believes in facts."

Bishop said that he does believe in climate change, but is unsure whether it is caused by humans, citing weather patterns the Earth has gone through in the past. He said that he is more concerned with local environmental issues, like protecting the Great Lakes, than international ones. 

“I know it’s Halloween season, but you can’t just put on a mask and become an environmentalist just because you’re in a tough election cycle, Mike,” Slotkin said. “Your voting record, for 21 years, has done nothing to protect our water, to protect our air, you’ve made it easier to do oil and gas drilling in our Great Lakes and you’ve made it harder to prosecute the companies that are moving gas and oil in our pipelines. You can’t just switch because you’re in a tough cycle and because it polls well for you.”

“In the immortal words of John McCain, you either don’t know the truth or you’re not telling the truth,” Bishop responded.