In a Tight Michigan Senate Race, Both Sides Target Split-Ticket Voters

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The second and final debate for an open U.S. Senate seat had just finished on Oct. 16 when Rep. Elissa Slotkin recalls making a half-joking plea to her rival. “Could you just knock me out and wake me up on Election Day and just let me know how it goes?”

Such is the fatigue—for voters and candidates alike—that has settled here in Michigan, a hotly contested presidential battleground that’s also home to one of the few Senate contests that’s legitimately a toss-up.

A year ago, some were viewing the disciplined Slotkin as the clear favorite to take over the Senate seat that fellow Democrat Debbie Stabenow has held since 2001. But as the polls have tightened, both Slotkin and her Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, are clear-eyed about how their fortunes and those of the standard-bearers of their parties may not perfectly align.

“I wouldn't be here without split-ticket voters. In 2020, I won my district and Donald Trump won my district. So I'm only here because of the Trump-Slotkin voters,” Slotkin told me on Saturday afternoon in the Detroit neighborhood of Mexicantown after she spoke at a rally that Harris headlined. And, in a race that could come down to a few thousand votes, Slotkin is working with a clear mandate to do what she needs to do to put herself across the finish line. If Harris happens to get there, too, Slotkin considers that an added bonus.

“There's still a lot of people who are unsure about the top of the ticket,” Slotkin says.

It’s a similar pragmatism for Rogers, who sought the Trump endorsement and has tried to avail himself of the MAGA universe given he has few better options. “Yeah, listen, I’m not running Donald Trump’s campaign. I’m running Mike Rogers’ campaign for the United States Senate,” he told NBC News this month when confronted with the mismatch with Trump, whom he blasted after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.

That’s not all that the two Senate candidates have in common. The Michigan contest is a rare match-up between two lawmakers with tangible voting records, although they never served concurrently so direct contrasts have been hard to make. Rogers spent seven terms in the House, including a run as chairman of the Intelligence panel, and left just ahead of Trump’s seismic takeover of the GOP in 2016. 

They both also know about discipline and cold calculations. Slotkin is a former CIA analyst with tours in Iraq and a former Pentagon official during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama eras. And Rogers is a former FBI agent.

For Democrats, Michigan’s Senate race has always been one of those if-the-dam-break contests that they viewed as a safe bet with Slotkin as their nominee. Yet nerves set in as 2024 rolled on. So wobbly was the spine of the Democratic Establishment, Slotkin criticized Biden in July for not passing the torch before he did, and she dodged Biden when he visited the state that month. (She was in Washington for votes, her office said.) But since Biden dropped out and cleared the way for Harris, Slotkin has been happy to campaign with Harris, while being careful not to lash herself entirely to the top of the ticket.

“It's going to be a tight race. You can feel that on the ground,” Slotkin tells me. “And I've been in particularly some of the more conservative parts of our state, because that's where my strength is.”

While both Senate candidates are showing up when the presidential candidates are in town, Rogers is focusing his bid more on direct voter targeting over events or interviews. (A campaign spokesman declined to even share a public schedule beyond his stops with Trump.) And Republican groups are on pace to spend $96 million in broadcast and cable ads in the state, lapping Democrats’ $88 million kitty.

The outside help is welcome for Rogers, who didn’t exactly find a turn-key machine waiting for him. The one-time GOP dominance in Michigan evaporated with Gretchen Whitmer’s rise. In due course, Republicans lost the governorship, a state Senate supermajority, and a state House majority. The last state party chairwoman was an unrivaled mess, piling up debt and eventually refusing to accept that the party’s other leaders had elected to remove her from power. 

“This was not the Michigan GOP that Mike Rogers enjoyed when he was in office,” says one Republican strategist sympathetic to institutional weaknesses far from Rogers’ fault.

Left with few better options, Rogers has since synced up with the Trump operation in the state, joining the ex-President on Friday for a business roundtable and then a rally in Detroit.

“We cannot take another four years of Harris,” Rogers said at that rally before Trump took the stage. “You know how we change this? We elect Donald J. Trump on Nov. 5.”

Although Trump teased Rogers would join him on stage as Senate nominees in other states have done, that cameo did not happen. Instead retired boxer Tommy “The Hitman” Hearns and rapper Trick Trick took the stage.

From the start, Slotkin was going to be a tough figure to defeat. She’s a close ally of Whitmer and the Democratic machine the Governor runs in a rare state where one survives. And on Capitol Hill, even Slotkins’s critics concede she runs an efficient operation to help her constituents, which is one of most under-appreciated ways pols build goodwill back home.

But Slotkin has one vulnerability that is particularly acute in Michigan: her support for a Biden-era rule that as many as two-thirds of all new cars bring zero emissions by 2032. The issue has let Rogers cast his opponent as unfairly favoring electric vehicles, which take fewer hours and parts to make.

"It's ruining our car industry," Rogers told Slotkin during that debate that ended in a joking request to be rendered unconscious. "You're promoting Chinese technology in America."

Slotkin declined to vote for a House Republican-brought measure to roll the rule back—it was mostly a GOP ploy to put Democrats on the record, as it would have gone nowhere in the Senate anyway—and has emphasized she wants to keep manufacturing strong in the state, regardless of what powers the final product. “I don't care what you drive. I want to build them," Slotkin said.

For her part, Slotkin is counting on Rogers’ slow-drip of a residency mini-scandal. Rogers had moved to Florida but returned to Michigan to buy, tear-down, and build a lake house. But as of the primary, it wasn’t fit for occupancy and it’s not clear that it counts as his domicile for voting purposes this fall. Republicans have dismissed this as an oppo-play that has nothing to do with his policy agenda.

Voters of all stripes recognize the jump-ball nature of the race. While the presidential campaign takes up a lot of the oxygen, the Senate one is the statistically better shot for Democrats.

“I’m nervously optimistic,” says Randy Lamoth, a 65-year-old retiree from Lake Orion, Mich. He was sitting in the front row of a Slotkin event on Friday morning and was ready to tell his neighbors that Slotkin is “not your typical Democrat.” “She makes the right choices. She is nowhere near an extremist,” Lamoth said.

A few hours later, a similar—and vague—ring of hope came through with Doug Hutchinson, a 65-year-old retiree from General Motors who calls Macomb Township home. He was waiting to get VIP access to a Trump rally in Downtown Detroit with his wife, Teresa, with whom he has worked to coordinate the state’s bloc of Catholic voters, which polls suggest is split evenly by party and totals about a quarter of all adults in the state.

“We’ll vote straight Republican, so I guess that means Mike Rogers,” Hutchinson said, wearing a Trump shirt and holding a stack of other merchandise. “I don’t know much about him, but I’m focused on Trump. That might be enough for Rogers if Trump wins this state by 10 points.”

Polls show Harris and Trump dead even, while Slotkin is running about four points ahead of Rogers. Trump’s coattails may be imaginary at this point, but the insiders on the ground in Michigan know this reality: at this point in 2016—two weeks before Election Day—Hillary Clinton was up 8 points on Trump; Clinton lost by one-third of 1 point when the votes were actually counted.

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