As U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers’ candidates navigate the manicured lawns and gated communities of some of Detroit’s wealthiest suburbs, they’re walking a fine line in their efforts to convince Republicans disillusioned with Donald Trump to sign another deal next month. support Republican candidates.
Nowhere else in Michigan reflects the state’s recent shift toward Democrats more than Oakland County, just north of Detroit, home to the state’s largest Republican base. Democrats won decisively here in recent elections, and winning back voters in a county once dominated by traditional country club Republicans could be crucial to Rogers’ chances of accomplishing what no Republican in more than has done for three decades: win a U.S. Senate race in Michigan. .
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“We’ve created a great, probably the best ground game in the country right now,” Rogers said in a recent interview. “And we’re firing on all cylinders.”
With control of the Senate at stake, the race for Michigan’s open seat could be crucial. The Democrats currently maintain a small margin in the Senate, but will defend many more seats this year than the Republicans.
Rogers and his Democratic opponent, Rep. Elissa Slotkin, will meet Tuesday for their first debate. Neither participated in debates during the parties’ primaries, making this event the first opportunity for voters to compare their dramatically different policy views.
Republicans have grown increasingly confident that Rogers, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2001 to 2015, can flip a seat held for two decades by Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow, who is at the end of her fourth term. term of office retires. Standing in their way is Slotkin, long seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party with a fundraising advantage and an established track record in a competitive House district.
“Where I see Michigan, as well as our races across the country, are exactly as I predicted them last year,” said Sen. Gary Peters, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “These will amount to very close races.”
Slotkin entered the Senate race shortly after Stabenow’s announcement, effectively clearing the Democratic primary field and building a campaign war chest that dwarfed her potential Republican opponents. Her campaign said she had raised $42 million through the end of September.
With a big boost from national Republican Party fundraising groups, Rogers and Republicans have done their best to catch up. More than six months later, he entered the race and faced the challenge of navigating a state GOP divided by infighting between grassroots activists fueled by Trump’s conservative populism and the party’s old guard.
Rogers also faced a crowded Republican primary, which also included two other former members of Congress. Trump’s endorsement in March had a compounding effect and made Rogers the clear frontrunner, prompting many of his rivals to drop out and allowing him to clinch the Republican nomination in August.
Whether Rogers can keep the fractious GOP coalition together could go a long way in deciding the race.
By mid-July, Rogers had raised just over $5 million, the most recent figure reported by his campaign. While he has recently seen an influx of outside funding, including $22.5 million from Senator Mitch McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund announced last week, it has not given him the same opportunity to define his candidacy as Slotkin. In May she already sent out advertisements to draw attention to her background.
Ultimately, the outcome of the Senate race could depend on how the presidential candidates perform in Michigan. Some Democrats, including Slotkin, have raised concerns about Vice President Kamala Harris’ standing in Michigan with less than a month remaining in a state seen as crucial to the presidential race.
Republicans think they see an opening in both contests.
“Michigan will be a state where our outcome in the Michigan Senate race will likely be very closely tied to President Trump’s outcome in Michigan,” Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said during a press roundtable in Las Vegas. . “Trump’s number and Mike Rogers’ number will be very close.”
Rogers’ team is working hard to close the gap. His campaign has 36 paid staffers statewide, who lead volunteer groups that knock on 50,000 doors every week, according to Rogers’ campaign.
Slotkin’s campaign says its field operation is integrated into One Campaign, a coordinated effort involving Democratic candidates at all levels. That initiative includes 52 field offices and nearly 400 staff members across Michigan.
Oakland, the state’s second-largest county, was once a Republican stronghold, but President Joe Biden won it by more than 14 percentage points, largely due to a shift among suburban women in a state where reproductive rights have been extended since the U.S. the thoughts of the voters. The Supreme Court returned these cases to the states in 2022. Rogers’ team is now focused on winning back those voters.
On a crisp October morning, his investigators knocked on the door of the Oakland County suburb of Rochester, where lawn signs and other clues to the fierce political battle unfolding there were few and far between. Although Rogers’ campaign materials emphasize Trump’s support, campaigners in neighborhoods like this typically only mention the former president’s name when voters bring it up first.
“Mike just seems like a really good guy and someone I would want to represent Oakland,” said Donnell Green, a longtime Rochester resident. After speaking to the canvassers on Oct. 4, she added, “I like that he’s working across the aisle.”
Green declined to share her thoughts on Trump. However, in a region where famously anti-Trump Republican Senator Mitt Romney grew up, Trump remains a polarizing figure, and many Republicans in the county continue to turn away from his combative politics.
Slotkin believes reproductive rights are still on voters’ minds in Oakland County, where a ballot proposal enshrining abortion rights passed by a 28-point margin in 2022, securing its approval statewide. She continues to campaign on the issue, warning that Republicans could push for a nationwide ban.
However, Rogers is calling it a non-issue after the 2022 election and has said he would not support a federal ban.
Slotkin currently represents a central Michigan district that was expected to be one of the most competitive and expensive races of the 2022 cycle. She won reelection by more than five percentage points, using a strategy she repeated in her Senate campaign. This approach, she says, involves “going to places where Democrats may not have shown up in 40 years.”
“I am a Democrat representing a Republican-leaning district,” Slotkin told reporters in Grand Rapids last month. “I wouldn’t have won if I hadn’t involved all kinds of different voters.”
Slotkin could be most vulnerable in metro Detroit, where divisions are deepening within the Democratic Party over the Biden administration’s handling of the war between Israel and Hamas. The region has the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, and frustration with Biden is spilling over to other Democratic candidates, including Slotkin, who is Jewish. She has remained a supporter of Israel even as she has been critical of the country’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Growing discontent in metro Detroit could have an impact on Slotkin’s campaign.
“It’s something we’ve spent a lot of time on and I think it’s important for people to know that our Democratic candidates, the incumbents, care deeply about listening to the Arab-American community,” Peters said.
