WHITE LAKE, Mich. — Republican Michigan Senate nominee Mike Rogers believes that Democrats will emerge from their bruising primary fight badly fractured, boosting the opportunity for him to win, despite the expected blue wave this cycle.
“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.”
One of the big-name Democrats to drop out of the race, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D), raised concerns about the primary taking place so late in the election cycle, contending that the contest went on for too long. McMorrow dropped out of the race last month but vowed to support the winner at their victory party.
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is also planning to partake in a unity rally on Friday to help patch things up among Michigan Democrats.
Rogers said he didn’t have a strong preference on who to run against between Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), expressing confidence that he’s “going to beat either one.”
“We’ve got a plan for either one,” he stressed before polls closed. “If you think about this election, [it] is a change election.”
He added: “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.
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.”
