Mike Rogers’s Plan to Defeat Abdul El-Sayed
Tunku Varadarajan
Wall Street Journal
August 29, 2026
Mount Pleasant, Mich.
To hear Mike Rogers tell it, you probably shouldn’t be reading this article unless you’re from his state. “People in Washington, D.C., want this to be a national race,” he says. “We sometimes get more interest in our race than we would really like. But we’re running a Michigan race for Michigan citizens.” Mr. Rogers, 63, is the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate—as he was in 2024, when he lost by a whisker. Although Donald Trump carried the Wolverine State in both 2016 and 2024, it hasn’t sent a Republican to the Senate since 1994.
Mr. Rogers, an eight-term representative who didn’t seek re-election in 2014, faces Abdul El-Sayed, a combative, … far-left Democrat. Mr. El-Sayed has the avid support of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both of whom campaigned with him in Michigan. He also has the backing of Hasan Piker, a poisonously anti-Israel left-wing influencer who is partial to Hamas and has said that “America deserved 9/11.”
Mr. El-Sayed won a bruising primary this month against Haley Stevens, an old-school liberal and pro-Israel politician of the kind that is increasingly out of favor in today’s Democratic Party. Among the first to congratulate Mr. El-Sayed was New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who said: “I am proud to be part of a movement of politicians and candidates who are looking to put working-class Americans back at the heart of our politics.”
Mr. Rogers knows full well that the Senate race isn’t of only provincial concern. Seconds after expressing it, he withdraws his wish to have less of the national spotlight on Michigan and calls the race “one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime.”
The national scrutiny is entirely appropriate. The radical left, and the Democratic Socialists of America in particular, sees Michigan as a bridgehead. “If you think about the dynamic of what’s at risk for the country, this election is huge,” Mr. Rogers says in an interview on the morning of his party’s nominating convention at the Soaring Eagle Casino & Resort, owned by the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe. “We have DSA members flown in from all over the country in Michigan. They think this is where they’re going to plant the flag for their movement, to spread it across the rest of the country.”
… Mr. El-Sayed has used Fight Agency, the consulting firm that masterminded the Mamdani mayoral campaign, for his digital and social-media strategy. “Abdul is now the new face of the democrat socialist movement in America,” Mr. Rogers says. “He would be the most senior democrat socialist elected.”
The far left is “excited and heavily invested,” Mr. Rogers says, because Mr. El-Sayed and his fellow travelers “fundamentally want to change the government, and to change the government’s relationship with people.” Mr. Rogers alleges that his opponent is “on the Obama plan. Two years in the Senate, and he’s going to run for president in 2028.” (Mr. Obama won the presidency four years after his election to the Senate.) “He also has the domain name AbdulForPresident, so you can see where his head’s at.” (Mr. El-Sayed registered the domain in 2017. He has said that he did so as a pre-emptive measure to prevent its misuse.)
Mr. El-Sayed has called Mr. Rogers a “coward.” At the convention after our interview, Mr. Rogers calls the Democrat “con man Abdul.”
“I know a con man when I see one,” says Mr. Rogers, who was a special agent with the FBI from 1989 through 1994. The Republican offers a list of things he says “con man Abdul wants to abolish”: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, voter ID, gasoline-powered cars, private health insurance, police funding, prisons and the Second Amendment. “We’re talking about building homes in Detroit. He’s talking about building a movement. He wants to be a national figure with a national message.”
Mr. Rogers says that his opponent is “aggressive and angry and has a meanness of heart and spirit” and is “an antisemite, which is probably the nicest thing you can say about his attitude to Jews.” Mr. Rogers points to the presence of Mr. Piker and to Mr. El-Sayed’s primary campaign, which pilloried Ms. Stevens obsessively over her support from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
“Abdul has stapled himself to Piker. He might be his running mate, last I looked. He brought him back as a closer on the final weekend. He had him as his closer to win the primary.” Mr. Rogers utters a line that he has used often in speeches on the stump: “Abdul wants to represent Palestine. We want to represent Michigan.”
He also reprises a line he’s used about Mr. El-Sayed on social media: “Abdul is too extreme to go anywhere near the Senate.” He adds: “I always believe you probably should send somebody back to the Senate that could get a security clearance.” He criticizes Mr. El-Sayed for his “violent language,” saying that “he’s said some pretty vile things, including, by the way, telling me and my family we’ll have no safe quarter in the state.” What Mr. El-Sayed actually said, on the day of his primary victory, was milder: “You are not going to have safe quarter from people holding you accountable for what you’ve done.”
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Another factor—which may make the difference between victory and defeat—is the prospect of Democratic voters rejecting his radical and divisive opponent. Mr. Rogers’s campaign kickstarted a “Democrats for Rogers” movement. “It’s gathered support faster organically than we anticipated,” he says. “We even printed up ‘Democrats for Rogers’ signs and, man, they’re flying out the door, aren’t they?”
Jewish Democrats, unsettled by Mr. El-Sayed’s hostility toward Israel, his nonstop demonization of AIPAC and his association with Mr. Piker, are susceptible to appeals from Mr. Rogers. He’s also keen to point out that it would be a mistake to regard Michigan’s sizable Arab vote as a solid bloc for Mr. El-Sayed. Mr. Rogers has been courting Lebanese Christian and Iraqi Catholic Chaldean voters, and even Sunni and Shiite Muslims: “I have friends in the Muslim community who are eager to be a counterweight.” He says Arab businessmen are spooked by Mr. El-Sayed’s “anticapitalist rhetoric and by what he wants to do to business. They’re very entrepreneurial in the Muslim community. They don’t think that’s good for their future.”
Although he presents himself as a market-friendly conservative, Mr. Rogers has called for a one-year moratorium on the construction of data centers in Michigan. He insists this isn’t a populist move. “Concerned citizens are worried. We ought to try to help them, not scare the bejesus out of them.” Data centers have a “large impact on a community. I don’t believe you should bulldoze them through. I don’t support a ban at the federal level, but here in the state we should get a year’s pause to answer the questions that people have.”
His opponent, he says, wants to “nationalize” artificial intelligence. “This is why he’s so out of sync with the state.” Mr. El-Sayed has called for “public ownership” and “public control” of AI.
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Mr. Rogers’s team has done its election math. “When I ran in 2024, I got 300,000 more Republican votes than any other statewide candidate in our history,” he says. “So that means we have a good pool of people who’ve already voted for Mike Rogers once.” He received almost 2.7 million votes in 2024. If he gets 2.2 million in the lower-turnout midterm, he says, “we’ll win this race. We have to re-engage those who voted for us in ’24, and work our new Democrat coalitions, which is a real thing.” He cites calculations by the pollster Mark Penn, who said that if Mr. Rogers attracts 5% of Ms. Stevens’s primary voters, “that would be enough for us to win. And we think we’re going to do better than that.”
Mr. Rogers also believes he can make inroads into the black vote. Ms. Stevens won much of the urban black vote in the Democratic primary. She swept Wayne and Genesee counties—which include Detroit and Flint, respectively—taking more than 60% of the vote in Detroit. Mr. Rogers thinks some of these voters are ripe for defection: “The African-American community of Michigan has felt a little bit abandoned” by the Democratic Party. In the primary, Mr. El-Sayed won handsomely in college towns, but his opponent outperformed him comfortably among black voters.
Mr. Rogers and his wife, Kristi, recently met with Detroit City Councilwoman Mary Waters, the leading vote-getter among all council candidates in November 2025. Speaking to the Michigan Chronicle after her meeting with Mr. Rogers, Ms. Waters, who is black, said, “Detroit is not a DSA city. Damn betcha I met with Rogers.”
As Mr. Rogers describes the meeting, “We talked about the things that were important for the city. And later she went on TV and said, ‘I liked his plans, the things he’s going to do for housing, education. And I think every Detroiter should hear them.’ She didn’t endorse me, but that is a very powerful statement. Because I’m running on issues to fix things in the state.”
He cites Michigan’s woeful schools: “Our education is now 45th in the country. Two-thirds of our fourth-graders can’t read. If you can’t read by fourth grade, you have about a 70% chance of being on welfare or in prison.” On housing: “You can’t buy a home here. First-time homeowners are 40 years old.” And more: “We’ve 200,000 manufacturing jobs. We have the highest utility rates in the Midwest. We have the highest auto-insurance rates in the country.” His focus on these issues, he says, resonates more with Michigan’s black voters and blue-collar voters than does Mr. El-Sayed’s “socialism and divisiveness.”
Mr. Rogers has attracted attention in Michigan with his novel outreach to Democratic voters in Detroit, something few Republican candidates for statewide office have taken the trouble to do. His campaign, he says, has “crossed”—knocked on—“1.5 million doors already,” he says. “That’s twice as many as in 2024.” In and around Detroit, “African-American voters have been notably welcoming.”
Among the responses he gets are comments to the effect that “for too long the Democrats have taken their support for granted, and they feel I more closely represent their values vs. my opponent.” Other black voters have extended support to him, he says, because of his emphasis on solving Michigan’s housing crisis—particularly by building on empty lots in Detroit—and improving the schools, which serve as “a pipeline to poverty.”
He thinks other Republicans should follow his example with black voters. “I believe that our free-market-oriented solutions are better than the big-government socialists’. Absolutely. And I don’t think we should run away from that.
“We go to the city of Detroit and talk about what we want to do. We have found that people are more receptive than you think.” He accepts that there will always be “hardened political people of both parties” who just won’t budge. “But what we’re finding is that people feel abandoned. And that’s unsustainable in America.”
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