A win for Rogers would ‘virtually guarantee a Senate majority for Republicans,’ his campaign manager wrote in a memo obtained by NR.
For several months now, Democratic Representative Elissa Slotkin has held a consistent if not narrow public polling lead over her Republican rival, former Representative Mike Rogers, in this year’s open race for Michigan’s retiring Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow’s seat.
But several recent surveys suggests that the contest may be narrowing significantly in the final stretch – a sign of good fortune for Rogers, a former FBI agent and House Intelligence chairman, in this state that Donald Trump carried in 2016 but that hasn’t elected a Republican to the Senate in thirty years.
While RealClearPolitics’ Senate polling average has Slotkin up 4.8 percentage points, a new Tarrance Group poll of 607 likely voters conducted September 14 through 18 and commissioned by the Rogers campaign shows the Democratic congresswoman leading 49 percent to her Republican rival’s 47 percent, with 4 percent of those surveyed remaining undecided. The results, first shared with National Review, are within the survey’s 4.1 percent margin of error.
What’s more, a newly released USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll of 500 likely voters conducted September 16 through 19 shows Slotkin leading 44.6 percent to Rogers’s 42.6 percent and Kamala Harris leading 47.6 percent to Donald Trump’s 45.4 percent.
“Mike Rogers has the momentum and for the first time in 30 years Republicans have a real opportunity to flip a Michigan U.S. Senate seat, virtually guaranteeing a Senate majority for Republicans,” campaign manager Tom Longpre wrote in a September 16 memo to interested parties, shared with NR. His memo cited three recent favorable polls from Cygnal, Fabrizio and Associates, and the New York Times showing a tight race, and also pointed to the Cook Political Report’s tossup rating for Michigan Senate, “making this race one of the most competitive in the country,” the memo adds.
While West Virginia is seen as a lock for the state’s Republican governor Jim Justice and Montana continues to trend in Republican nominee Tim Sheehy’s favor, a host of other GOP candidates running in purple and blue-leaning battlegrounds are competing for outside funding from Republican spending groups. Much of that funding is going toward TV spending in Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
It’s possible Rogers could snag a significant chunk of outside GOP ad spending in the final stretch. That would be a huge boon for his candidacy, given Slotkin’s fundraising prowess throughout the race. Either way, Republicans are hoping a strong ground game came pull him across the finish line. According to a spokesman, the campaign has knocked more than 250,000 doors have been now averages more than 45,000 doors per week. Rogers’s team, which includes more than three dozen paid staff and hundreds of volunteers, has also made more than a million phone contacts, the spokesman added, with total contacts averaging “more than 200,000 per week and growing.”
Republicans in the state are hoping that Trump, who lost the state in 2020, can carry down-ballot candidates running tough races across the finish line. Asked by National Review back in August how Harris’s ascension as the Democratic presidential nominee affects the presidential race in Michigan, Rogers invoked a line from Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: A New Hope.
“‘These are not the droids you are looking for.’ This feels a lot like that scene in Star Wars to me,” he told NR in an interview the day before he won his state’s Republican primary. “Her own words” will turn voters away. “This is not your mother’s Democrat Party. This is not your grandfather’s Democrat Party. It is so far left.”