Rep. Elissa Slotkin (L) and former Rep. Mike Rogers (R) | Andrew Roth and Lucy Valeski photos
With Michigan’s U.S. Senate race now down to the two candidates most people thought would end up with their party’s nominations, the campaigns for both Democrat Elissa Slotkin and Republican Mike Rogers must now switch their appeals to a broader-based general election audience.
Slotkin, a U.S. House member from Holly, made that plain as she addressed her supporters Tuesday night in Detroit and acknowledged the matchup with Rogers. When some began to boo, she quickly responded, “No, we don’t boo. … We win.”
After his primary victory, Rogers, a former U.S. House member from White Lake who’s been endorsed by former President Donald Trump, posted to social media his thanks for the GOP supporters who made him the nominee, but also made a pitch to independent voters to try and get him across the finish line in November.
“To those who voted for me in the primary, I want you to know that I will give it all I have to continue to earn your support,” said Rogers. “And for those of you who chose to go a different way — know that I will work just as hard to earn your trust, and your vote.”
In some ways, Slotkin seems better situated to make that pivot than Rogers. The three-term congresswoman has made a political career out of enticing independent voters in her purplish-to-red mid-Michigan district to cast their ballots for her over her Republican opponents, starting in 2018 when she defeated U.S. Rep. Mike Bishop (R-Rochester) and flipped the then-8th District into the Democratic column.
The 8th District had been solidly Republican since Rogers, a former Army officer and FBI agent, won the seat by a 111-vote margin over Democrat Dianne Byrum in 2000 and proceeded to serve seven terms, rising through the ranks to become the chair of the powerful House Intelligence Committee after the post-9/11 U.S. invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq.
But after the tight race to gain the open seat, which Rogers had flipped after being held by Democrat Debbie Stabenow prior to her run for U.S. Senate, the GOP-controlled redistricting process made the seat a safe one for Republicans and Rogers, as The Economist noted in a 2002 article.
“The new redistricting plan tacks on a lot of Republican suburbs to (Rogers’) seat. So, after only two years, the man who won by the narrowest of margins in 2000 finds himself in such a safe Republican seat that no Democrat is bothering to challenge him in 2002,” said the article.
The Senate seat that Rogers and Slotkin are now seeking is being vacated by Stabenow after she’s served four terms.
Democrat Frank McAlpine ran against Rogers in 2002 and was largely a sacrificial lamb, losing 70% to 30%. During his time in Congress, Rogers amassed a reputation for being somewhat moderate and was often focused on military affairs, although he boasted a fairly standard conservative voting record.
In all, Rogers won three of his six reelection campaigns with over 60% of the vote, while the other four had him over 55%.
In contrast, Slotkin has never had the luxury of running in a safe seat, winning all three of her elections by slim margins that average out to just over 51%. And in each of her two reelection campaigns, she was targeted by the GOP to try and take the seat back, forcing the former CIA agent and Defense Department analyst to build a prodigious fundraising network while simultaneously garnering a national profile as a Democrat who could beat Republicans in Trump-friendly districts.
So from the moment Slotkin announced she would seek the Democratic nomination, she has essentially been running the same type of campaign she always has, as a progressive on social issues and centrist on national security and economic issues.
And in Tuesday’s primary, she handily defeated actor Hill Harper — who defined himself as being the leftist candidate, particularly on the Israel-Gaza war and criminal justice reform — 76% to 24%.
“I don’t think Slotkin really needs to pivot,” Mike Radtke, a Sterling Heights councilman and Democratic consultant from Macomb County, told the Michigan Advance. “I think she’s been running a general election campaign this entire time, and that’s why she took a lot of flack from the left-wing of the Democratic Party.”
Harper never gained traction with the general electorate and failed to even come close in fundraising. However, Radtke said that as Hill’s base was mainly Black voters who make up a key Democratic Party bloc, their frustrations are not easily swept away. Slotkin has only represented a small slice of Oakland County and has never represented Detroit.
“I will say that I think Elissa Slotkin has some work to do with the base to bind it all up, and I think some of that comes from the fact that certain segments of the party felt like there was not a meaningful primary and that they were essentially being dictated to as to their choices, and that’s what led to the protest vote,” said Radtke.
Andrea Bitely, a former GOP press secretary and founder of Lansing-based Bitely Communications, used the analogy of a famously funny scene from the sitcom “Friends” to describe Slotkin’s situation.
“I think Slotkin has already started making the pivot,” Bitely told the Advance. “The first initial turn is really critical. If you turn the corner in the stairwell wrong, everything gets a lot harder. Slotkin started to make that turn, at least the calculus for it, a couple of weeks back when she, in my assumption, saw that Hill Harper’s numbers were really soft.”
Rogers also easily triumphed in his primary on Tuesday, garnering 63%, with former U.S. Rep. Justin Amash, who earned 16%, and Dr. Sherry O’Donnell, who took 12%. And although Grosse Pointe Park businessman Sandy Pensler dropped out last month and endorsed Rogers, he still got 9.1%.
But unlike Slotkin, Rogers was still seemingly making a pitch to his party base as late as Monday, when he gathered with anti-trans activist Riley Gaines and former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to sign a pledge to support legislation that would ban trans athletes from participating in sports that align with their gender identity.
However, Bitely says that may not have been such an overtly partisan move as it might seem on the surface.
“That’s probably his first shot across the bow on Slotkin,” said Bitely. “There must be polling out there that says this is a good route, showing women that he stands with them in prohibiting people born as male from participating in women’s sports. So that is one interesting pivot he’s starting to make to appeal to women voters. Not all women voters are on the same page as him, but it is definitely a spot where he can speak to female voters, especially independent voters.”
Radtke said he thinks that will be a much steeper hill to climb for Rogers.
“I’ll be frank with you. I’m a highly connected individual, and I have no clue what Mike Rogers is running for,” he said. “The Michigan Republican Party is in shambles. When [former Michigan GOP Chair Kristina] Karamo’s sex demon thing went over like a broken balloon, at that point, they were so desperate that they were just just scrambling for any person who might have some name ID. So in my opinion, I think he’s going to have a lot of trouble, and I think he’s going to be in fundraising trouble.”
Cash in the bank
Slotkin certainly starts off the general election race with a cash advantage, although independent groups are expected to play heavily to help both contenders.
The latest fundraising filings with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) show that as of July 17, Rogers had just under $2.5 million in cash on hand. By comparison, Slotkin has more than $8.7 million.
But now that the primaries are over, Rogers will be hoping for a major cash infusion from the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NSRC), whose chairman, U.S. Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), offered a note of congratulations to Rogers on his primary win.
“Mike will work to restore our economy, secure the southern border, and ensure Michigan families have a voice they can trust in Washington. Mike’s opponent, Elissa Slotkin, has a perfect 100% voting record for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s policies that have made life unaffordable, opened our southern border, and unleashed chaos around the world,” said Daines.
Whether or not the NRSC turns that talk into cash will largely depend on whether it views the race in Michigan as one that has a reasonable chance of success. When Stabenow announced her decision to retire, the NRSC made it known they viewed the decision as a major opportunity to gain control of the U.S. Senate after a disappointing 2022 election when Democrats added one seat to their majority.
“Senate Democrats don’t even have a campaign chair yet and they are already dealing with a major retirement,” said NRSC communications director Mike Berg. “We are going to aggressively target this seat in 2024. This could be the first of many Senate Democrats who decide to retire rather than lose.”
Radtke says the NRSC will certainly make some sort of investment, but deciding to sustain it will be tough if Rogers doesn’t demonstrate an ability to grow beyond the GOP base.
“The issue is if they want to retake the Senate, there’s a lot of targets, and Slotkin is a hard draw. She’s gone head-to-head with these guys several times, and she’s shown that she’ll gut it out and win in tight races,” he said.
Timing is everything
After Rogers retired from Congress in 2015, he went into the private sector as a cyber security adviser and businessman, and eventually moved into a 4,751-square-foot home in Cape Coral, Florida, valued at $1.7 million.
That home, which he still owns, was his official residence until his decision to run for U.S. Senate last year. He and his wife purchased a one-bedroom, 728-square-foot home in White Lake Township just prior to his announcement he was running. But he never lived there and that home was demolished so a new one could be built in its place. He technically remains living at his sister-in-law’s home in Genoa Township, near Brighton.
Slotkin has her residency issues, as well. While she grew up in Michigan, she left to go college, and then serve in the CIA and Defense Department during the Bush and Obama administrations. She only moved back home to make a run for Congress in 2018.
Then when redistricting placed her Holly residence outside her mid-Michigan base, she moved to Lansing to stay in what was now the 7th District, but later created headlines when she moved out of her rental condo, as it was owned by a campaign donor. Slotkin then changed her voter registration in 2023 back to her hometown of Holly, even though that was outside the 7th Congressional District that she currently represents.
While Rogers amassed personal wealth working for giant telecommunications companies like AT&T and Nokia, when he decided to return to Michigan and announce his run for Senate last September, he had been out of Michigan politics for nearly a decade.
In that same decade that Rogers left from Michigan, Slotkin returned to her home state and won her initial run for Congress largely based around her support for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which Trump and Bishop were focused on ending despite enduring popular support.
Now both Slotkin and Rogers have to appeal beyond the mid-Michigan district they both represented to win voters statewide in November.
It’s all about turnout
With Vice President Kamala Harris now atop the Democratic presidential ticket, enthusiasm among Democrats has continued to rise on par with fundraising and volunteers.
Slotkin, who reportedly was concerned about Biden staying in the race dragging down Democrats, has embraced Harris and spoke at her 15,000-person rally in a Detroit Metro Airport hanger on Wednesday.
“Democratic enthusiasm is through the roof,” said Radtke. “You can win a primary with a lot of votes and then still get crushed in the general election. But the totals for a lot of these races for Democrats in traditionally Republican areas are very high, and that’s surprising.”
Radtke says that many of the local Macomb County races that he has looked at are places where Democrats have traditionally not had a lot of success, but he is seeing Democratic nominees who probably will lose in the fall garner as many or more votes than the Republican nominees to those same boards.
“And I think that shows that there’s a lot of latent Democratic enthusiasm because they probably didn’t go to the polls to vote for their local county commissioner or whatever,” he said. “They went for state House races and stuff like that. But there’s enough votes that push through the network to show that Democrats are voting. So if I was the Republicans, and I think that they are acting a little goofy, they should be worried.”
Dennis Darnoi, a GOP strategist from Oakland County, said he was looking to see Rogers’ relative strength heading into the general election by at least equaling the voting percentage Donald Trump got in Michigan’s presidential primary in February.
“I’m going to kind of look at the mark that Trump set in the presidential primary, when a lot of people were saying, ‘Hey, there’s a problem there. 27% of Republican primary voters didn’t support him,’ said Darnoi. “The question remains, ‘Is there still a small percentage of Republican voters who aren’t going to vote for Trump or Trump-backed candidates?”
In that contest, Trump polled 68.1% of Republican voters, while former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley notched 26.6% and uncommitted voters were at 3%, which analysts at the time said showed some signs of weakness within the party.
But Darnoi says that doesn’t absolutely mean trouble for Rogers, who earned just under two-thirds of the vote on Tuesday with three other Republicans on the ballot.
“I think you will find people who are supportive of Nikki Haley [who later dropped out and endorsed Trump], but who are also going to be supportive of Mike Rogers,” said Darnoi.
Radtke, however, thinks the picture is not so rosy for Rogers when it comes to convincing Michigan voters he will best represent their interests in the U.S. Senate.
“He left the state about as quick as he could when he was going to go collect his payday on Fox News or whatever silliness that he thought he had earned as intelligence chairman. I mean, this is true carpetbagging. On his way back in, he didn’t even reestablish himself. I think the folks in Michigan aren’t going to be buying what Rogers is selling,” said Radtke. “He’s overstayed his welcome. You know, the snowbirds are going to be returning to Florida soon.”