WHITE LAKE, Mich. — Republican Michigan Senate nominee Mike Rogers is betting that Democrats will leave their hard-fought primary divided, giving him a clearer path to victory even in a cycle expected to favor Democrats.
“Whoever comes out of it is going to have a coalition problem. Remember, voting starts in about five or six weeks. We’re in an election cycle now,” Rogers told The Post.
“We’ve been building toward that day. They’ve been fighting each other and moving further and further to the left. I think both of them are too radical for the state. And so whoever comes out of this is gonna have to put their own coalition together.”
The timing of the Democratic primary has already drawn warnings from within the party. State Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D), one of the better-known Democrats who exited the race, said the contest stretched too late into the campaign calendar. McMorrow dropped out last month but pledged to back the eventual nominee at their victory party.
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is also expected to join a unity rally Friday, part of an effort to smooth over tensions and rally Michigan Democrats behind their nominee.
Rogers said he is not especially concerned about which Democrat he faces, whether Dr. Abdul El-Sayed or Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), arguing that he is “going to beat either one.”
“We’ve got a plan for either one,” he said before polls closed. “If you think about this election, [it] is a change election.”
He continued: “60% of Michiganders believe the state is going in the wrong direction, and when you look at the last quarter century of two Democrat senators here in the state, we’ve lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs.”
Rogers, who previously chaired the powerful House Intelligence Committee, lost against Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) in the 2024 election race by a threadbare 0.34 percentage point.
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That defeat came despite President Trump carrying Michigan that year.
“Winning is better than losing, that was number one,” Rogers quipped when asked about lessons from his last campaign.
“[This time], we didn’t have a primary,” he said. “We have a lot more cash on hand than we did the last time, and this is the most important [point]: we built a ground game, like I think it’s the best and biggest in the country.”
Rogers boasted about how last month, his team hit a milestone of over 1 million door knocks and is expected to average about 30,000 doors a week.
“We will likely hit three to four million doors before this is over,” he said. “And that drives our voters to the polls, cuz again, they’re ready for lower utility rates, lower auto insurance rates, and they want their kids to be able to read.”
Most polls indicate that El-Sayed would be in a tight race against Rogers, trailing the former congressman by 0.3 percentage points in the latest RealClearPolitics polling aggregate.
A confident El-Sayed predicted to reporters on the primary eve that he would win by 7 percentage points, bashing Rogers as a “generationally bad candidate.”
Rogers, for his part, believes that El-Sayed is too “radical” to win in Michigan.
“I’ve never called him a communist,” he told reporters Tuesday. “I do think he’s very, very radical. He’s definitely a socialist. He’s been embraced by socialists.”
“This is that fight between Democratic socialists who want to take America into a dark, dreary, inopportune place. Or somebody who believes in the hope of America.”
