Former House Intelligence Committee chairman and FBI agent Mike Rogers won Michigan’s crowded Republican Senate primary race on Tuesday night, according to early returns, setting the stage for a competitive general-election race for retiring Democratic senator Debbie Stabenow’s seat.
The Associated Press called Rogers’s primary win at 9 p.m. EDT. He will now face off against Representative Elissa Slotkin, the longtime Democratic favorite to succeed Stabenow who fended off a primary challenge from actor Hill Harper.
Early polls suggest Slotkin has an edge. Though former president Donald Trump carried Michigan in 2016, the state leans blue on the statewide level and hasn’t elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate in 30 years.
Rogers told National Review in a primary-eve phone interview that his ground game kicked off in earnest six weeks ago. “We have tried to stitch as much of the factions of a Republican Party in Michigan together as possible,” he said, “and we think we’ve been pretty successful at that.”
The Michigan GOP has been extremely divided under former chairwoman Kristina Karamo’s tumultuous tenure, which was marked by party infighting and soaring debt over the past year. Karamo failed to communicate effectively with legacy donors, as illustrated by her spurning of Oakland County Republican Party chairman Vance Patrick’s request for her to promote a Trump event. She was eventually ousted in January due to her poor leadership; a county judge affirmed the state party’s decision a month later.
Her successor, Pete Hoekstra, assumed the role with a vision to turn the Michigan GOP into a “professional business organization again,” he told National Review in June, five months into his tenure. Hoekstra’s party also set out to work together with Trump’s grassroots movement to recruit and train on-the-ground volunteers with the purpose of reaching highly targeted voters in their own neighborhoods.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee dropped seven figures into a statewide field program to support Rogers for the Senate race, which has seen former representative Peter Meijer and former Detroit police chief James Craig drop out ahead of the primary. Backed by the NRSC, Rogers outperformed his remaining competitors — Justin Amash, Sherry O’Donnell, and Sandy Pensler — in Tuesday night’s early vote results.
“Nobody thought that we were going to walk into a nomination; we told the NRSC that,” Rogers said. “We believed that we could put the biggest part of all the coalitions together to win. And I think, clearly, we’ve been able to do that.”
Earlier this year, Rogers endorsed Trump for the presidency after predicting the year before that he would not be the Republican Party’s nominee for a third time. The former congressman stands corrected, though he said at the time that disagreement is an indication of one’s political engagement.
“Differences within a party tend to be small and tempered,” Rogers told National Review back in January in an interview that coincided with his Trump endorsement. This week, he maintains that his qualms with the former president weren’t related to policy. In March, the former president returned the favor and endorsed Rogers, closing any Trump lane in the GOP primary.
“I was never a ‘Never Trumper.’ I had some style differences, and I pointed them out, because that’s the way I am,” Rogers said ahead of his primary victory. “Donald Trump said I was ‘tough but fair.’ Now if Donald Trump says that, I’m not sure why any of the Trump folks couldn’t get over that as well.”
Asked how Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket 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 said. “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.”
The key problem for Harris, Rogers said, is “Kamala has been stapled to [President Joe Biden’s] leg, on the border, on the economy, on all of that. . . . We’re cutting into their coalitions, because people realize this isn’t working,” he added. “It’s a disaster.”
Rogers is hosting his primary-election night party in Lake Orion, Mich., where former state representative Bradford Jacobsen lent his support. Jacobsen said Rogers, according to the Detroit News, is a great candidate for Republicans because “he’s got the whole package all put together” partly due to his experience in the military and FBI. Rogers served in the U.S. Army and became an FBI special agent before entering public service in 1994.