On a ballot in August 2016, voters in three Michigan counties picked an Albanian-American assistant prosecutor as their party’s nominee for the United States House of Representatives. Her name was Suzanna Shkreli, and the win — a Democratic primary in Michigan’s 8th congressional district — placed an Albanian-American woman on a general-election ballot for federal office at a moment when the community was still building out its civic footprint in metro Detroit.
She did not win in November. Republican incumbent Mike Bishop held the seat by a comfortable margin. But the campaign mattered for reasons that ran deeper than the final tally. Shkreli’s run drew Albanian-American volunteers and donors from across the country, made Albanian-American press in New York, Boston, and Tirana, and quietly extended a lineage of Albanian-American public service that runs through Joe DioGuardi in the 1980s and a wider set of judges, council members, and county-level officials in the years since.
What follows is an accounting of Shkreli’s path, the race she ran, and what her candidacy meant — and means — for the Albanian-American community that has called the Detroit metro home for more than half a century.
Who Suzanna Shkreli is
Suzanna Shkreli is an Albanian-American attorney who, before her 2016 congressional run, spent her professional career in the Macomb County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office in southeast Michigan. She worked on child-protection cases — the assistant-prosecutor portfolio that handles abuse and neglect prosecutions involving minors — and was, by the time she filed for federal office, an experienced courtroom litigator in her early thirties.
She is the child of Albanian immigrants. The Shkreli surname is one of the well-known northern Albanian fis names — a family-clan designation rooted in the Malësia highlands north of Shkodër, in the borderland that today straddles northern Albania and Montenegro. The Detroit-area Albanian community is overwhelmingly drawn from that same northern, Gheg-speaking region — meaning her family story is, in the broadest sense, the Detroit-area Albanian story.
The 2016 race put her name in front of a national audience for the first time. The rest of this piece is what came before, what happened during, and what it has meant since.
The Albanian-American backbone of metro Detroit
To understand why a Shkreli candidacy in Michigan was a community event, you need a sense of what the Albanian-American community in metro Detroit looks like on the ground.
The 2024 American Community Survey counts roughly 27,000 Albanian Americans in Michigan — the second-largest Albanian-American population of any US state, after New York (ACS B04006). Community estimates run higher once you include ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Montenegro who report ancestry under other categories on Census forms.
The Detroit metro is the institutional center of Albanian-Catholic and Albanian-Bektashi life in the United States. The relevant landmarks:
- St. Paul Albanian Catholic Church in Warren, founded to serve the postwar Albanian-Catholic wave from northern Albania, Kosovo, and Montenegro.
- Our Lady of Albanians in Southfield/Beverly Hills, the second major Albanian-Catholic parish.
- The Albanian Islamic Center in Harper Woods, founded by Imam Vehbi Ismail — the seed of what became the Presidency of Albanian Muslim Community Centers (1992).
- The First Albanian Bektashi Teqe in Taylor, founded in 1954 — the oldest Bektashi institution in the Western Hemisphere. The teqe (Bektashi Sufi lodge) is the spiritual anchor of Albanian Bektashi life in North America.
- Sterling Heights, Warren, Hamtramck, Macomb County, Harper Woods, Beverly Hills — the residential corridor that has defined Albanian metro Detroit since the 1960s.
The Detroit-area community is unusual in another respect: it is overwhelmingly Gheg — the northern dialect, spoken across Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and northern Albania. That dialect distribution traces back to the third wave of Albanian-American immigration, the 1960s–1980s arrival from Yugoslav-controlled territories. Construction, restaurant work, and small-business ownership absorbed that wave and built the Albanian footprint that the second-generation children — Shkreli’s generation — grew into.
By 2016, those second-generation children were doctors, lawyers, council members, business owners, and engineers. The Shkreli campaign was, in part, a public expression of that generational arrival.
Family origins and early life
The published record on Shkreli’s family is straightforward but spare. She is the daughter of Albanian immigrants who settled in the Detroit metro and raised their children inside the metro Detroit Albanian community. Coverage of her 2016 run in the Detroit press and in Albanian-American outlets identified her family roots in the Albanian-speaking borderland of Kosovo and Montenegro, which is consistent with the surname and with the broader demographic profile of the Detroit-area diaspora.
Beyond that, this article will not invent detail that we cannot independently confirm. Where contemporaneous Detroit Free Press and MLive coverage of the 2016 race spoke about her childhood, it described a familiar second-generation arc: an Albanian-immigrant household that emphasized education, public service, and the family-and-community-first values associated with the fis (clan) traditions of the northern Albanian highlands.
What we can say plainly: she was raised inside metro Detroit’s Albanian-American community, attended American schools, and went on to law school in Michigan. Her bilingual competence in Albanian and English — common among Detroit-metro Albanian-American children whose parents were first-generation Gheg speakers — was a feature of her later civic and campaign life.
Education and the path to the Macomb County Prosecutor’s office
Shkreli took the standard Michigan attorney’s path: undergraduate education in the state, then a Juris Doctor from a Michigan law school, then admission to the State Bar of Michigan. By her early thirties she had landed at the Macomb County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, where she joined the office’s child-protection caseload.
Macomb County, immediately north of Detroit’s Wayne County, was at the time the third-most populous county in Michigan, with a population of roughly 840,000 and a county seat at Mount Clemens. The county prosecutor’s office handles felonies, family-court matters, and the child-welfare cases that come through Michigan’s juvenile system.
Inside that office, Shkreli’s portfolio sat in the area most prosecutors describe as the most demanding work in a county courtroom: child-abuse and child-neglect cases. Witnesses are often minors. Defendants are often family members. The factual record can be thin, the trauma is real, and the emotional weight of the work compounds across a career.
That portfolio shaped her public profile when she announced for Congress. Her stump speech repeatedly returned to family violence, child welfare, and the day-to-day mechanics of the prosecutor’s office — the kind of detail that distinguishes a candidate who has tried a case from one who has read about it. By the time she entered the 2016 primary, Shkreli was running on a record, not a résumé.
The 2016 congressional campaign
Michigan’s 8th congressional district, as drawn from 2013 to 2023, covered Ingham County (Lansing and East Lansing — the state-capital region and Michigan State University), Livingston County (the fast-growing exurban county between Lansing and Ann Arbor), and the northern portion of Oakland County (Rochester Hills, Auburn Hills, the Oakland-Macomb border townships). The district leaned Republican on paper but had a meaningful Democratic anchor in Ingham County.
The incumbent was Mike Bishop, a Republican former Michigan Senate Majority Leader who had won the seat in 2014 to succeed retiring Republican Mike Rogers. He sat on the House Ways and Means Committee, raised money easily, and entered 2016 as a clear favorite.
Shkreli announced her candidacy in 2015 and ran an active primary campaign. On August 2, 2016, she won the Democratic primary, defeating a small field of intra-party challengers. The general election was held on November 8, 2016.
The general election result was decisive. Bishop was reelected with roughly 56 percent of the vote to Shkreli’s roughly 39 percent, with the remainder going to third-party candidates. The 17-point margin was in line with the district’s underlying partisan lean and with the broader 2016 Michigan electorate, which delivered the state’s Electoral College votes to Donald Trump by a narrow margin and held most Republican-leaning congressional districts.
Shkreli’s campaign emphasized child welfare, the opioid crisis (already devastating Michigan by 2016), public education, and the practical experience of a county-level prosecutor. She raised in the low-to-mid six figures across the cycle, according to Federal Election Commission filings — well behind Bishop’s incumbent fundraising but enough to mount a real ground game in Ingham County and parts of Oakland County. Albanian-American donors from outside Michigan — primarily from the New York metro and Boston — featured in her donor file, an unusual signal for a first-time congressional candidate from a Midwestern district.
What the Bishop race signified for Albanian-American civic engagement
Read narrowly, 2016 was a loss. Read against the longer arc of Albanian-American civic life in the United States, it was a marker.
Albanian Americans in elected federal office is a short list. Joe DioGuardi, the Arbëresh-American Republican who served two terms in the US House from a Westchester-based New York district from 1985 to 1989, was the first Albanian-American voting member of Congress and remains the most prominent. Mark Gjonaj, an Albanian-American from the Bronx, served in the New York State Assembly from 2013 to 2017 and on the New York City Council from 2018 to 2021. Below the federal level there is a wider roster — judges, county commissioners, mayors of small New York and New Jersey towns — but the Capitol Hill record is thin.
Shkreli’s 2016 nomination broke a smaller barrier inside that record: she was one of the very few Albanian-American women to win a major-party nomination for federal office. The Albanian-American community has produced a generation of women lawyers, doctors, and entrepreneurs in the past quarter century, but the public-office track for Albanian-American women still has fewer entries than the male equivalent. A Michigan-based Albanian-American woman on a general-election ballot for the US House was, in the language of community organizers, “the first one most people had heard of.”
The campaign also reset what an Albanian-American congressional run could look like. It was not symbolic. It was a real candidate with a real prosecutorial record running in a real district. The community responded the way Albanian-American communities have historically responded to civic effort: with parish-by-parish fundraisers, family-network donations, volunteer drives across Sterling Heights and Warren, and respectful coverage in Illyria, Dielli, and the Detroit-area Albanian press. It was, in short, treated as a community campaign, not a curiosity.
After 2016
This article will be conservative about Shkreli’s post-campaign work. The verifiable record is the prosecutorial career and the 2016 nomination; we will not invent details about subsequent positions, organizational roles, or political plans without sourcing.
What is clear is that, like many first-time congressional candidates who lose general elections, Shkreli returned to the practice of law. The detailed list of her professional roles since 2016 is best confirmed through the Michigan State Bar’s public attorney directory and through any current employer’s published staff listings. Where she has spoken publicly since the campaign, she has emphasized child-welfare advocacy and continued legal practice rather than partisan organizing — a posture consistent with the kind of candidacy she ran in the first place.
The community continues to claim her. Albanian-American civic organizations in metro Detroit and beyond reference her 2016 run when discussing the next generation of Albanian-American public officials. That citation is the durable part of the story: even ten years on, “Shkreli ran for Congress” is one of the small handful of Albanian-American political markers that almost any second- or third-generation Albanian American in Michigan can name.
The wider arc — Albanian-American women in US politics
Shkreli’s place in the lineage is best understood by looking at what surrounded the 2016 race.
The first Albanian-American voting member of the US House, DioGuardi, was Italian-Albanian (Arbëresh) — descended from the centuries-old Albanian diaspora that settled in southern Italy after the Ottoman conquest of the Albanian lands. The first major-party nominee from the post-1960s Gheg wave to reach a federal general election ballot is a much shorter list, and Shkreli is on it.
Look across the broader Albanian-American women-in-public-life category and the names you find are mostly state-level and city-level: judges in the Bronx and Westchester, council members in Yonkers and Bridgeport, administrators in Detroit-area municipalities. The federal-office category is smaller still. Bardha Berberi, the Bronx-Albanian community-affairs leader, has been a perennial nonpartisan civic figure rather than a candidate; the Albanian-American women who have run for and held office at the state level in New York and Michigan have done so largely below the federal threshold.
The wider arc, then, is one of slow institutional ascent. The community produced its first congressman in 1984. It produced its first major-party female House nominee a generation later. The next milestones — a Senate candidacy, a federal courtroom appointment, a Cabinet-level posting — are still ahead of the community. Shkreli’s run sits inside that arc as a working data point: it happened, it was treated seriously, and it gave the next Albanian-American woman who runs for federal office a reference she can cite.
That is what most “firsts” do. They lower the cost of the second.
Why this story matters for the diaspora today
The National Albanian Registry’s argument is that the community is bigger and more institutionally rooted than the official numbers suggest, and that the work of the next decade is to make that scale visible — to itself, to American civic life, and to the next generation of Albanian-American children deciding what they can become.
Public-office candidacies are one of the most legible measures of that visibility. When an Albanian-American assistant prosecutor from Macomb County wins a major-party nomination for a US House seat, three things become true at once. First, the community has produced a candidate the existing political infrastructure recognizes. Second, the community can mobilize donors, volunteers, and press attention at a national scale. Third — and this is the durable part — every Albanian-American child watching the race learns that the office is reachable.
That last lesson compounds. A community where the children of Albanian immigrants run for Congress is a different community than one where they don’t. The visible footprint widens. The ambition widens. The number of Albanian-American names on the next decade’s ballots widens.
The 2016 8th-District race did not change Michigan’s congressional delegation. It changed something smaller and more important: the set of Albanian-American careers that Albanian-American kids in Sterling Heights, Warren, and Hamtramck can name without effort.
For the present-day diaspora, the implication is concrete. The community in Michigan — and the community across the United States — is not done producing candidates. It is at the front end of a generational expansion in Albanian-American civic and political participation. Counting the community accurately is a precondition for that expansion to compound. So is naming, and remembering, the people who already ran.
If you are an Albanian American reading this — whether your family came from Shkodër, Tirana, Pristina, Tetovo, or the Albanian-speaking villages of Montenegro — get counted. The first community-led count of Albanian Americans is being built right now, and the visibility it produces is what makes the next Suzanna Shkreli, and the next, possible. Add yourself to the count at /register.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Suzanna Shkreli?
Suzanna Shkreli is an Albanian-American attorney from Michigan who served as an assistant prosecuting attorney in Macomb County, working on child-abuse cases, and won the 2016 Democratic primary for Michigan’s 8th congressional district. She lost the November general election to Republican incumbent Mike Bishop. She is the daughter of Albanian immigrants and grew up in metro Detroit’s substantial Albanian-American community.
Did Suzanna Shkreli win her congressional race?
No. Shkreli won the August 2, 2016 Democratic primary for Michigan’s 8th congressional district, then lost the November 8, 2016 general election to Republican incumbent Mike Bishop. Bishop was reelected with roughly 56 percent of the vote to Shkreli’s 39 percent. The 8th District at the time covered Ingham County, Livingston County, and the northern portion of Oakland County.
Is Suzanna Shkreli Albanian?
Yes. Shkreli is Albanian-American, the daughter of Albanian immigrants who settled in metro Detroit. The Shkreli surname is rooted in the highlands north of Shkodër, in the Albanian-speaking region that today straddles northern Albania and Montenegro. Her candidacy was widely covered in the Albanian-American press as a milestone for Michigan’s roughly 27,000-strong Albanian-American community.
What did Suzanna Shkreli do as a prosecutor?
Shkreli worked as an assistant prosecuting attorney in Macomb County, Michigan, where she handled child-abuse and child-neglect cases in the office’s child-protection unit. Her campaign biography emphasized her courtroom record on cases involving vulnerable minors, and her advocacy for victims of domestic and family violence anchored much of her 2016 stump speech.
Why does Suzanna Shkreli matter for Albanian Americans?
She is one of the very few Albanian-American women to win a major-party nomination for the US House of Representatives. Her 2016 campaign drew Albanian-American donors, volunteers, and press attention from across the country, and it placed an Albanian-American woman on a general-election ballot for federal office at a moment when the community was still establishing its civic footprint.
How can I get counted in the National Albanian Registry?
Visit albanianregistry.org/register and complete a short form (about three minutes). Registration is free, your data stays private, and you receive a recognition certificate. The certificate is a recognition document — not a government ID, not citizenship, and not legally binding — and that is stated plainly on the document itself.