Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate for Senate in Michigan, appealed to disaffected Democrats concerned about the anti-Israel positions of his Democratic opponent Dr. Abdul El-Sayed on Thursday.
Speaking on the front lawn of a house in Detroit, the Republican former congressman pitched the launch of “Democrats for Mike Rogers.”
“The Democrat voters who feel their nominee doesn’t represent them in their values, all hope is not lost,” Rogers said. “I’m not asking you to be a Republican. I’m asking you for the opportunity to earn your trust.”
El-Sayed, the former health director of Detroit and Wayne County, Mich., won a narrow victory in his Aug. 4 primary against Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) after a bitter election in which El-Sayed made his opposition to Israel and pro-Israel groups a centerpiece of his campaign. Stevens accused him of Jew-hatred.
Despite pre-election polls suggesting that El-Sayed had a double-digit lead in the race, he defeated Stevens by just one percent of the vote, and with only 48.5% of votes cast.
At the event with Rogers on Thursday, Rabbi Asher Lopatin, director of community relations at the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor, said that he usually votes for Democrats, but El-Sayed had “shown contempt for the Jewish community.”
“Sadly, Abdul El-Sayed has shown only contempt for Jews as a people, and called my people bloodthirsty,” Lopatin said. “Abdul El-Sayed is completely unfit to represent any piece of Michigan, any community—the Jewish community, the African American community, the Chaldean or even Arab-Americans.”
Lopatin pointed to El-Sayed’s comments after an attack on a Detroit-area synagogue in March, in which he said that Israel had to be condemned for killing the brother of the attacker, who was a commander in Hezbollah.
The rabbi also slammed El-Sayed for his campaign events with the left-wing, anti-Israel influencer Hasan Piker.
“He’s never disavowed Hassan’s antisemitism, a man who has called Orthodox Jews like me ‘inbred,’” Lopatin said.
In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Aug. 9, El-Sayed disavowed Piker’s claim that “America deserved 9/11,” but has previously dismissed questions about Piker’s views as a “gotcha game.”
Another of Rogers’ surrogates, Chelsea Rebeck, a tax attorney from West Bloomfield, Mich., wore necklaces with a Star of David and an outline of the State of Israel, and said that she was voting for the Republican after being a “lifelong Democrat.”
The Michigan Senate race is one of the key elections that could determine which party controls the upper chamber in 2027. Cook Political Report rates the election as a toss-up, the only such race with a seat currently held by a Democrat.
