Mike Rogers, GOP convert to election denial, wins Michigan GOP Senate primary

Mike Rogers, a former U.S. congressman who pushed false claims of a stolen 2024 election in Michigan and praised Trump’s recent primetime tirade against elections, won Michigan’s Republican primary election for an open U.S. Senate seat Tuesday. 

Rogers will face Abdul El-Sayed — the former director of the Wayne County Department of Health, Human, and Veteran Services —in November’s general election, a key race that could determine which party controls the Senate. Democrats only need to flip four seats to win the Senate, but they’ll also need to hold onto a few crucial seats — including the Michigan seat currently held by outgoing Sen. Gary Peters (D). 

During a campaign rally weeks before the primary election, President Donald Trump endorsed Rogers. 

“He is one of the best candidates we have anywhere,” Trump said. “He’s smart. He’s tough. He’s fair.”

But Trump and Rogers didn’t always have a rosy relationship. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Rogers — who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2001 to 2015 — publicly rebuffed Trump’s efforts to overturn the vote in an op-ed for the Washington Post.

“This behavior from the administration is seen in Third World dictatorships, not the leading democracy in the world,” Rogers wrote. “This needs to end. Our current challenges are too great. We must have a unified effort to tackle the problems we face.”

But Rogers’ opposition to voting conspiracies and the election-denier world wouldn’t last. 

Rogers narrowly lost his 2024 Senate election to Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D) and conceded the race. But a year later, after he launched his campaign to fill Peters’ seat, he falsely claimed that the election was stolen from him. 

During a speech last year, Rogers claimed without evidence that a van carrying fraudulent ballots caused him to lose the race.

“Now, there were some ballots that showed up at 5:30 — I wish I were kidding — in a van,” Rogers reportedly said. “And that swung the election on us. And it happened to be here in Detroit. We ended up losing that thing by about 17,000 votes.”

Rogers also seemed to have changed his tune on the 2020 election. Rogers praised Trump’s election speech last month, during which the president revived debunked 2020 conspiracies — including false claims of voter fraud in Michigan. 

“The news coming out of the White House tonight is deeply troubling — especially that of a voter fraud scheme right here in Michigan,” Rogers said. “As we learn more in the days to come, one thing remains clear: If our nation does not have security and confidence of our elections, then we do not have much of a nation at all.”

On the campaign trail, Rogers has advocated for several voter suppression policies — like recruiting off-duty and retired cops to serve as poll watchers to intimidate voters in Detroit. 

If elected, Rogers will flip a key seat and be another Trump ally in the Senate who could help to pass more voter suppression measures, including the stalled SAVE America Act.