Former Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican who served seven terms in the House of Representatives and retired in 2015, is looking to get back into the game. He’s running for the GOP nomination in Michigan’s open Senate seat after Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow announced she would not seek reelection.
The race is poised to be one of the most competitive Senate races in the country and could decide which party controls the Senate in the next Congress.
In an interview with The Messenger, Rogers talked about his primary strategy, his stance on abortion, his changed views on former President Donald Trump, and how he can be the first Republican since former Sen. Spencer Abraham in 1994 to win a Senate seat in Michigan.
“I have a conservative track record, I’m a proven conservative,” he said in an interview with The Messenger. “I’ve proven that I can win in a very blue area. We won’t be outworked and I am lining up with the issues that people care about in Michigan.”
Michigan will be tightly contested at the presidential level. Former President Donald Trump won Michigan narrowly in 2016, and President Joe Biden flipped the state blue in 2020 on his way to the White House. Rogers, who has been critical of Trump in the past, has now endorsed his third presidential run. Rogers — who briefly considered a presidential run of his own — is part of a wave of past Trump critics who now endorsed the former president as the GOP presidential primary appears to be over. His primary opponents are attacking him for not being sufficiently pro-Trump.
Trump reposted Rogers’s op-ed endorsing him on Truth Social, the former president’s social media website. Rogers told The Messenger that he has spoken with Trump recently and said they had a “beautiful conversation.”
“[Trump] understands I’m the one person who can get in the Senate and help close and secure the border, that can do something about rampant crime, that can do something about a government that spends wildly,” Rogers said.
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Regarding his primary opponent’s criticism, Rogers said: “This is about the future of the country. And if that’s where they’re going, I think they’re going to be sadly disappointed.”
“There’s a reason Donald Trump tweeted out our endorsement,” he added. “I don’t know what else to say. They can say all they want, but at some point, they’re not telling the truth. I know this is politics, but my mother told me you probably ought to try telling the truth.”
He faces a competitive and crowded primary. Former Detroit Chief of Police James Craig, who was booted off the 2022 GOP gubernatorial primary ballot due to fraudulent signatures, has thrown his hat into the ring; so has former Rep. Peter Meijer, who was one of ten GOP House members who voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 insurrection. He lost his primary in 2022. Rogers will also have to defeat businessman Sandy Pensler, the runner-up in the 2018 Senate primary, and possibly former Rep. Justin Amash, a former Independent who announced Thursday that he was considering a run.
Amash once weighed running against Trump in 2020 and is a committed foe to the former president. Meijer said that he will support whomever is the GOP nominee – and that’ll likely be Trump.
Rogers has racked up endorsements from law enforcement organizations in Michigan as well as four U.S. Senators. He was urged to run by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm of Senate Republicans. Said Chairman Steve Daines: “Mike Rogers has been running a very strong campaign. We are encouraged by recent polls in Michigan showing this race is a pure toss-up.”
While recent polling has been rosy for Republicans in Michigan, the state Republican Party is in shambles. The party, led by former Secretary of State candidate Kristina Karamo, recently defaulted on a $500,000 loan as the party faces money woes. Factions of the party are at war with each other, as some members have tried to oust Karamo. Recently, she has sent cease and desist letters to her opponents.
Acknowledging the chaos in the Michigan GOP, Rogers said his campaign is working with other Republican campaigns around the state. “They’re calling us the mini-state party,” he joked. When asked about how the dysfunction of the state party would affect his campaign, he said he hoped Michigan Republicans would come together in November. He said his campaign is building the infrastructure necessary — voter contact, ballot collecting — that would typically fall to a state party.
“Everybody wants the state party to get its sea legs and get going, including me. I hope that happens,” he said. “I just can’t wait for it to happen.”
Rogers, if he advances to the general election, is likely to face Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin, the frontrunner for her party’s nomination. Democrats, especially in Michigan, have won by effectively campaigning on abortion rights after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.
Democrats have highlighted Rogers’s past stances on abortion, including various votes he took in Congress against abortion access, and are likely to attack him on the issue repeatedly throughout the campaign.
“I supported undoing Roe v. Wade so it would go back to the states,” Rogers told The Messenger when asked how he would respond to those attacks. “I think that the states have to decide these issues. Michigan voted on abortion. It’s part of the Michigan constitution that abortion is legal and there’s nothing I’m going to do in the federal government to undo what the state has done here in Michigan.”
And on election integrity, Rogers has begun to sound more Trumpian than not. Some of Rogers’s heaviest criticism of Trump came after the 2020 election. He wrote an op-ed in The Detroit News criticizing Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election and urged Michigan to certify election results.
He told The Messenger a story about his 2000 House race when a township clerk in Ingham County found uncounted ballots under a desk that hadn’t been counted.
“I think there are anomalies everywhere, every election cycle,” Rogers said. “Our goal is to try and minimize that as much as possible.” He said his team is putting together a “ballot integrity operation to make sure that one man, one woman, one vote.”
“We are going to outperform them by getting people who are concerned about the future of our state and our country out to vote,” he added. “That’s what we’re going to do and that’s how we’re going to do and that’s how we’re going to push back on them. Bad things happen.”
Rogers said Democrats are going to spend money on ads criticizing him on abortion and election integrity because they don’t want to talk about the economy, crime, national security, and lowering gas and food prices.
“We’re going to be talking about the things that actually matter in people’s lives,” he said, like the cost of groceries and the education system.
“People know me,” he said. “That’s why I think we’re getting the grassroots support that we are.”
The primary is on August 6.