On Tuesday, Republicans in Michigan picked their nominee for an open U.S. Senate seat. Rogers won, and he'll face Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in November for the seat being vacated by Sen. Gary Peters. It is one of a handful of races that will decide control of the Senate.
Five years ago, Rogers was one of the Republicans willing to say out loud that Donald Trump was trying to steal an election.
Today he is the one making things up about vans.
What he wrote in January 2021
On January 5, 2021 — the day before the Capitol was attacked — Rogers published an op-ed in the Washington Post titled "The election is over. Let's get back to governing."
He did not hedge:
"This behavior from the administration is seen in Third World dictatorships, not the leading democracy in the world. This needs to end. Our current challenges are too great. We must have a unified effort to tackle the problems we face."
That is about as clear as a Republican statement got in that moment. Rogers had served in the House from 2001 to 2015 and chaired the Intelligence Committee. He knew exactly what he was describing.
What he says now
Rogers ran for Senate in 2024 and lost to Elissa Slotkin. It was close — 48.6% to 48.3%, a margin of about 19,000 votes. He conceded. He made no allegations of fraud at the time.
Then he decided to run again. And the story changed.
At a speech last year he told an audience this:
"Now, there were some ballots that showed up at 5:30 — I wish I were kidding — in a van. And that swung the election on us. And it happened to be here in Detroit. We ended up losing that thing by about 17,000 votes."
The Detroit News reviewed video of two such appearances. At an October 17 event in Muskegon, he described a van "showing up" in Detroit at about 5:30 in the morning after Election Day — and made air quotes with his fingers when he said the word "ballots."
When the Detroit News asked his campaign for any evidence at all, a spokeswoman did not respond.
There isn't any. Rogers has never produced a name, a document, a complaint, or a court filing — just a story about a van, told to rooms of supporters. He couldn't even keep his own margin straight: he says 17,000, and the actual number is roughly 19,000.
He also didn't say any of this in 2024, when he might have been asked to prove it. He said it in 2025, when he needed a primary electorate.
Then he endorsed the 2020 lie too
Last month Trump gave a primetime speech reviving debunked conspiracy theories about 2020, including claims of voter fraud in Michigan. Rogers — the man who once compared this behavior to a Third World dictatorship — responded approvingly:
"The news coming out of the White House tonight is deeply troubling — especially that of a voter fraud scheme right here in Michigan. As we learn more in the days to come, one thing remains clear: If our nation does not have security and confidence of our elections, then we do not have much of a nation at all."
Democracy Docket reported that the Michigan "fraud" cited in that speech had no impact on any votes.
Note the construction of Rogers' statement. He never claims the fraud is real. He says the news is "deeply troubling" and that "as we learn more" we should worry about confidence in elections. It is engineered so that when the claim collapses, he never technically said it.
That is the whole trick. He gets the benefit of the lie without owning it.
This isn't just talk — it's a plan for Detroit
Election denial has a practical purpose in a campaign, and Rogers has been open about his.
Democracy Docket previously reported that his campaign has been recruiting off-duty and retired police officers to serve as poll watchers in Detroit — the city he has repeatedly named as the source of his imaginary van.
Put those two facts next to each other. He tells supporters that Detroit stole an election from him. Then he sends men who look like police to stand in Detroit's polling places and watch people vote.
If he wins in November, he'd also be another Senate vote for the SAVE America Act, the stalled bill that would require documentary proof of citizenship to register — a requirement that would sweep in married women whose names don't match their birth certificates and millions of Americans who don't have a passport handy.
The Trump endorsement, and what it cost
Trump endorsed Rogers at a rally at the General Motors Proving Ground in Milford on July 27, weeks before the primary.
"He is one of the best candidates we have anywhere," Trump said. "He's smart. He's tough. He's fair."
This is the same president whose conduct Rogers described in 2021 as something you see in dictatorships. The price of the endorsement was the position.
Rogers is not alone in this. Michigan Republicans have made peace with saying things about their own state's elections that are simply not true — John James told a Trump rally that the president had won Michigan "three times," a state Trump lost in 2020 by more than 154,000 votes.
What Michigan voters should ask
Rogers has already answered the important question — twice, in opposite directions.
In 2021, when he had nothing to gain, he said Trump's attack on the election was the behavior of a dictatorship and it needed to end.
In 2025 and 2026, when he needed a Republican primary, he became the thing he'd condemned.
Only one of those two men was telling the truth. Voters get to decide which one is on the November ballot.
Source
Mike Rogers, GOP convert to election denial, wins Michigan GOP Senate primary — Matt Cohen, Democracy Docket, August 5, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Paul Sancya.
