“Treat people, even your opposition — treat them with respect,” Kildee said in a recent interview with the Washington Examiner, days before lawmakers left Washington to campaign for reelection. 

“Somebody that you’re arguing with today could be the person that you need tomorrow for something that’s really important to your home community,” he added.

The note of collegiality is befitting the Kildee family, which has represented the Flint area in the House since 1977. When Dale Kildee, 92, died in 2021, his colleagues remembered him as a quiet, kind lawmaker who shied away from the bombast that has increasingly defined Washington politics.

Kildee joked that he’s not quite sure he met his uncle’s standard of niceness since taking over the seat in 2013. But in a wide-ranging interview, he hoped that civility would be his legacy and that of his family.

Kildee will retire on Jan. 3, handing the reins to someone without his last name for the first time in five decades.

“You know, the issues come and go. The contribution we make to the way this place works is, I think, the lasting legacy,” Kildee said of the House.

“It’s OK to not be a bomb-thrower, it’s OK to engage in civil dialogue, it’s OK to have friends across the aisle,” he added.

Kildee’s hope feels foreign in one of the most divided Congresses in recent memory. He admitted the partisan rancor makes his retirement easier, though it was not a deciding factor.

His musings also come against the backdrop of a bitter fight to replace him.

Kildee believes the Democrat nominated for his seat, state Sen. Kristen McDonald Rivet, will win in November. But his exit from the political stage has cast genuine uncertainty over the race for the first time in a generation.

Kildee beat Paul Junge, his Republican rival in 2022, by 10 points, but Michigan’s 8th District, which includes the bellwether county of Saginaw, is now among the most competitive in the country. 

Junge, a former staffer in the Trump administration, once again won the Republican nomination in the summer and will face Rivet on Nov. 5. Michigan’s 8th District is among the two dozen pure toss-up districts in the country that will determine control of the House.

“I think Democrats probably still have a slight edge in holding it,” said Erin Covey, the U.S. House editor for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, noting that President Joe Biden won the district by 2 points in 2020. “But it’s going to be quite close.”

More than anything else, the dynamic at the top of the ticket will decide whether Kildee’s seat stays in Democratic hands. Former President Donald Trump visited a rural part of Saginaw on Thursday to turn out voters up and down the ballot.

On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris will make the same trip, except to the urban center of Flint, where Kildee has traditionally run up the score.

Kildee acknowledged the race will be close, as it has been in previous cycles with Trump on the ticket. In 2016, Trump won Michigan by a mere 10,000 votes before losing it by almost 160,000 in 2020.

“Elections are won and lost on really thin margins, particularly in a place like Michigan,” he said.

But Kildee judged that Harris’s late entrance into the presidential race has energized the Democratic electorate in a way that will translate to a strong get-out-the-vote operation.

“I see that as a big advantage that came out of the decision of President Biden to step back,” Kildee said.

The question will be what level of turnout Republicans attract with Trump, whose appeals to the white working class have brought pockets of infrequent voters to the polls.

“Donald Trump has an incredible following — people who believe in him as a man who will fight for working-class Americans, who will stand up for American jobs,” Junge told the Washington Examiner at Trump’s Saginaw rally on Thursday.

Regarding the race to hold the House, Kildee’s message is that the Democratic Party does not need him to win. He alluded to another political dynasty in Michigan, the Levin family, that ended in 2022, when then-Rep. Andy Levin lost his House race to fellow incumbent Democrat Haley Stevens in the primary.

“Look, I’ve been fortunate that I grew up in a family that was involved in politics. And, you know, I first got elected to public office myself 47 years ago, when I was 18 years old,” Kildee said. “But none of us are irreplaceable.”

In the interview, Kildee seemed mindful of overstaying his welcome in Congress. He expressed how he and his wife had agreed at the outset that he would serve for a decade or so in the House.

But Kildee’s reasons for leaving at this particular moment are deeply personal. In announcing his retirement last November, he told constituents that he had been planning another run before he was diagnosed with cancer.

“It’s a bit of an unnatural life anyway, spending three or four days a week out of every week away from my home, away from my family,” Kildee said. “It was just time to go home, but it was a decision we made 13 years ago, not 13 months ago.”

Kildee is now cancer-free after undergoing surgery to remove a small tumor in his tonsil, but his final months in Congress have been turbulent. In March, his brother was killed by a family member.

“I had already made the decision to come home, but if I ever had even an ounce of doubt that that was the right decision, any of that doubt would have been erased by that moment,” he said.

Kildee told the Washington Examiner he looks forward to spending more time with his family in Michigan, noting that his mother is 90 years old. He’ll start work next year as president and CEO of the Community Foundation of Greater Flint.

Looking back at his tenure, he reflected on his negotiations with then-Speaker Paul Ryan to secure $170 million for the Flint water crisis a decade ago.

“It was a terrible tragedy, and still is, but I knew what my job was in that moment. I knew exactly why I was in Congress, and it was to make sure I got help for the people that I represent,” Kildee said.

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The other defining moment, he said, was his involvement in securing the release of several American prisoners from Iran in 2016, one of whom was from Flint.

“It was like one of those proud American moments that I’ll never forget,” he said.