ROCHESTER, Mich. – As canvassers for U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers navigate the manicured lawns and gated communities of some of Detroit's wealthiest suburbs, they walk a fine line in their efforts to convince Republicans disillusioned with Donald Trump to back other GOP candidates next month.
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 have 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 to achieve what no Republican has done in more than three decades: win a U.S. Senate race in Michigan.
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“We created a large, probably the best ground game, I would argue, in the country right now," Rogers said in a recent interview. “And we are firing on all cylinders.”
With control of the Senate on the line, the race for Michigan’s open seat could be pivotal. Democrats currently maintain a narrow margin in the Senate but are defending far more seats in this year’s elections than Republicans.
Rogers and his Democratic opponent, Rep. Elissa Slotkin, are set to meet Tuesday for their first debate. Neither participated in debates during party primaries, making this event the first opportunity for voters to compare their dramatically different policy views.
Republicans have become increasingly confident that Rogers, who served in the U.S. House from 2001 to 2015, can flip a seat held for over two decades by Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow, who is retiring at the end of her fourth term. Standing in their way is Slotkin, long viewed 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 around the country is exactly as I would have predicted them last year,” said Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “These are going to come down to very close races.”
Slotkin entered the Senate race shortly after Stabenow’s retirement announcement, effectively clearing the Democratic primary field and building a campaign war chest that dwarfed her potential Republican opponents. She had raised $42 million through the end of September, according to her campaign.
With a big boost from national GOP fundraising groups, Rogers and the Republicans have been hustling to catch up. He entered the race over six months later and faced the challenge of navigating a state GOP divided by internal strife between grassroots activists fired up by Trump's brand of conservative populism and the party’s old guard.
Rogers also had to contend with a crowded Republican primary field that included two other former congressmen. Trump’s endorsement in March had a coalescing effect and made Rogers the clear frontrunner, prompting many of his rivals to drop out and allowing him to coast to the GOP nomination in August.
Whether Rogers can hold the fractious GOP coalition together could go a long way toward deciding the race.
By mid-July, Rogers had raised just over $5 million, the most recent figure reported by his campaign. While he has seen a recent influx of outside funding, including $22.5 million from Sen. Mitch McConnell's Senate Leadership Fund announced last week, it hasn’t given him the same opportunity to define his candidacy as Slotkin. She was already airing ads in May to highlight her background.
Ultimately, the outcome of the Senate race could turn on how the presidential candidates perform in Michigan. Some Democrats, including Slotkin, have expressed concerns about Vice President Kamala Harris’ standing in Michigan with less than a month to go in a state considered 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 be probably very closely tied to President Trump’s outcome in Michigan,” Montana Sen. Steve Daines, 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, leading volunteer groups that Rogers' campaign says have knocked on 50,000 doors a week.
Slotkin’s campaign says her 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 over 14 percentage points, largely due to a shift among suburban women in a state where reproductive rights have been on voters' minds since the U.S. Supreme Court turned those matters back to the states in 2022. Rogers’ team is now focused on winning those voters back.
On a crisp October morning, his canvassers knocked on doors in the Oakland County suburb of Rochester, where lawn signs and other indicators of the fierce political battle unfolding there were rare. Although Rogers’ campaign materials highlight Trump’s endorsement, canvassers in neighborhoods like this typically mention the former president’s name only if voters bring it up first.
“Mike just seems like a genuinely good guy and someone I’d want to represent Oakland,” said Donnell Green, a longtime Rochester resident. After speaking with canvassers on Oct. 4, she added, “I like that he works across the aisle.”
Green declined to share her views on Trump. However, in a region where noted anti-Trump Republican Sen. Mitt Romney grew up, Trump remains a polarizing figure, and many Republicans in the county continue to be turned off by his combative brand of politics.
Slotkin believes reproductive rights are still on voters' minds in Oakland County, where in 2022, a ballot proposal enshrining abortion rights passed by a 28-point margin, helping secure its statewide approval. She continues to campaign on the issue, warning that Republicans could push for a nationwide ban.
Rogers, however, calls it a nonissue after the 2022 vote and has said that he would not support a federal ban.
Slotkin currently represents a mid-Michigan district that was expected to be one of the most competitive and expensive races of the 2022 cycle. She won reelection by over five percentage points, using a strategy she has replicated in her Senate campaign. This approach, she says, involves “going to places where maybe Democrats haven’t shown up in 40 years.”
“I’m a Democrat that represents a Republican-leaning district,” Slotkin told reporters last month in Grand Rapids. “I wouldn’t have won if I hadn’t engaged all kinds of different voters.”
Slotkin could be most vulnerable in metro Detroit, where divisions within the Democratic Party over the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war are intensifying. 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, although she has been critical of the country's leader, Benjamin Netanyahu.
The growing discontent in metro Detroit could impact Slotkin's campaign.
“It is something that we have been spending a lot of time on and I think it’s important for folks to know that our Democratic candidates, incumbents care deeply about listening to the Arab American community,” said Peters.
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AP reporter Tom Beaumont contributed from Las Vegas.