Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers are unusually different candidates. El-Sayed is a physician and former public-health administrator running on an extensive program of economic intervention, institutional reform and universal benefits. Rogers is a former FBI agent, congressman and House Intelligence Committee chairman whose earlier career placed him comfortably within the institutional, national-security wing of the Republican Party.
Neither candidate fits neatly within CIVPAC’s policy framework. El-Sayed agrees with us on several civil-liberties, foreign-policy and social-policy questions but differs sharply on the role of government in the economy. Rogers is considerably closer on many economic questions and brings substantial national-security experience, but his increasingly close identification with President Trump raises a different concern about institutional independence.
Both candidates therefore leave us with a question that goes beyond ordinary policy differences.
Abdul El-Sayed: Specific, Substantive and Well to Our Left
El-Sayed deserves credit for the specificity of his campaign. His platform does not consist simply of aspirations. He frequently tells voters what legislation, taxes, regulatory institutions or government programs he would use to accomplish his objectives. That makes disagreement with him unusually easy to identify.
El-Sayed rebuilt Detroit’s health department after the city’s bankruptcy and later headed Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human & Veterans Services. His public-health work included programs involving lead exposure, children’s vision, opioid overdose and medical debt. He previously ran for governor in 2018 and has not held elective office.
The recurring difference between El-Sayed and CIVPAC is not primarily over whether many of the problems he identifies are real. It is over what government should do about them.
El-Sayed frequently responds to a social problem or market imperfection with federal provision, price regulation, public ownership, guarantees or restrictions on private activity. CIVPAC generally starts from a different presumption: preserve decentralized markets where possible, correct genuine externalities, enforce competition and liability, and subsidize the purchasing power of people who otherwise cannot participate.
That philosophical difference appears repeatedly throughout this comparison between his platform and our views.
Mike Rogers: The Two Rogers Problem
Rogers presents an almost opposite evaluation problem.
His earlier record contains much that a centrist independent voter might find reassuring. He served in the Army and FBI, represented Michigan in Congress for fourteen years, chaired the House Intelligence Committee and developed substantial expertise in terrorism, intelligence and foreign affairs.
Most strikingly, Rogers responded to Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election in unusually direct terms. On January 5, 2021, he wrote that the election had been free and fair, condemned efforts to reject certified results without evidence, and described Trump’s telephone pressure on Georgia election officials as sounding “more gangster than presidential.” He wrote that refusing to recognize certified elections without evidence represented an abdication of responsibility to the Constitution.
That Rogers demonstrated precisely the sort of institutional independence the Centrist Independent Voter wants from senators.
The Rogers campaigning in 2026 is different. His campaign promises that he will “stand with President Trump,” and when asked by Semafor where he differed from Trump, Rogers responded that he did not stop long enough to ask himself that question.
More troubling is Rogers’s later treatment of his own 2024 Senate loss. He has said that a van carrying ballots into Detroit early on the morning after Election Day “swung” the election against him. When reporters asked his campaign for evidence supporting that allegation, it did not provide any.
There is, however, a straightforward explanation for the van. Chris Thomas, Michigan’s former elections director, who was assisting with Detroit’s election administration, explained that batches of legitimate ballots collected from drop boxes and from voters who registered and voted on Election Day can arrive at the central counting location in the early morning as they work their way through the required processing procedures. He said such an arrival would not have been unusual.
Michigan’s subsequent statewide audits also found that the 2024 election was accurately tabulated and that reported election outcomes were correct.
Unless Rogers can provide evidence that something improper occurred, suggesting that this routine delivery of ballots “swung” his election is very difficult to reconcile with the standard Rogers himself articulated in 2021: certified election results should not be delegitimized without evidence.
That creates a direct tension with the standard Rogers himself articulated in 2021.
Democratic Institutions
The candidates raise quite different institutional concerns.
El-Sayed favors automatic voter registration, early and no-reason absentee voting and making Election Day a holiday. He opposes mandatory voter-ID requirements and specifically criticizes the SAVE Act as imposing unnecessary barriers to voting. Rogers supports voter ID and has pledged to help pass the SAVE America Act, which would impose documentary proof-of-citizenship requirements for voter registration as well as identification requirements for voting.
CIVPAC is generally comfortable with making legitimate voting convenient while also requiring reasonable identification. We do not support the SAVE Act. On this issue our position lies between the two candidates.
El-Sayed would abolish the Senate legislative filibuster entirely. He also favors public election financing and campaign-spending caps, would overturn Citizens United, and would prohibit outside spending through corporate 501(c)(4) organizations, Super PACs and 527 groups. His platform proposes transferring congressional redistricting to a federal nonpartisan committee of experts appointed for defined, staggered terms and working with the Census Bureau. He analogizes its structure to the Federal Reserve Board. He also supports Supreme Court term limits and providing the same number of appointments during each presidential term.
CIVPAC opposes partisan gerrymandering but is more skeptical of concentrating redistricting power in a federal body, whose independence, in light of recent Supreme Court decisions expanding presidential removal authority over executive-branch officials, cannot simply be assumed. We also favor retaining some meaningful minority protection in Senate procedure. We differ substantially with El-Sayed over restrictions on independent political speech.
With Rogers, however, the institutional question is more personal and immediate: would he still resist a president of his own party when he believed constitutional obligations required it?
That question will recur throughout this evaluation.
Foreign Policy, Ukraine and Presidential Power
El-Sayed’s foreign policy is less isolationist than the label “progressive populist” might suggest. He supports Ukraine against Russian aggression, supports continued international engagement and favors maintaining strategic ambiguity regarding Taiwan while emphasizing economic and technological competition with China.
Those positions contain substantial areas of agreement with CIVPAC, although we would place greater emphasis on military deterrence of China and on ensuring that Beijing cannot reasonably conclude either that an attack on Taiwan would succeed or that the costs of even a successful attack would be tolerable.
Rogers’s national-security credentials are considerably deeper. His congressional career centered heavily on intelligence and national security. His historical outlook toward Russia and America’s alliances was consistent with the internationalist Republican tradition.
What is less satisfactory is that Rogers’s precise 2026 position on continuing assistance to Ukraine is harder to establish than we would like. In 2025 he said that the war ultimately would have to end through negotiation, opposed sending European troops into Ukraine and cautioned that Vladimir Putin should never be trusted in negotiations. But we have not found a comparably clear current statement explaining what military and economic assistance Rogers would continue to provide Ukraine, what terms he would regard as an acceptable settlement, or how he views America’s continuing NATO commitments.
Given his background and the current administration’s approach, those are not peripheral questions. This is one of the issues on which Rogers might usefully spend some time considering whether—and where—his own judgment differs from President Trump’s.
Iran provides an interesting and evolving point of comparison.
El-Sayed opposes the war, opposes a nuclear-armed Iran and favors diplomacy as the principal means of preventing one.
Rogers initially supported the administration’s military objectives while also saying that President Trump should seek congressional authorization before further military action. In August, however, his formulation was notably cautious. He said that the commander in chief has authority to do much of what Trump was doing and that working with Congress was “probably a better idea.”
Rogers has since moved further. In September he called for a swift end to the Iran conflict and criticized its continuation as Americans faced sharply higher fuel costs. That is a genuine present-day disagreement with the administration and should count as evidence that the 2026 Rogers is capable of taking a position contrary to President Trump.
It does not, however, completely answer the institutional question.
CIVPAC distinguishes the policy question—whether military action against Iran is wise—from the constitutional question of who possesses the authority to commit the country to sustained war. Rogers’s willingness to invoke Congress’s role is noteworthy. But saying that congressional authorization would be “a better idea” is not the same as saying that such authorization is constitutionally required.
We would like to know where Rogers draws that line. If a president continued substantial hostilities without congressional authorization, would a future Senator Rogers merely prefer that Congress be consulted, or would he regard Congress’s constitutional authority as having been violated?
Israel and El-Sayed’s Bright-Line Question
Israel raises a different and more fundamental question concerning El-Sayed.
CIVPAC does not regard criticism of Israel or of the Netanyahu government as disqualifying. Our own position leaves considerable room for criticism of Israeli settlement policy, support for Palestinian national self-determination, humanitarian assistance to Gaza and substantial limits on Israeli policy in the occupied territories.
El-Sayed goes considerably further. He opposes direct U.S. military aid to Israel and has repeatedly described Israeli conduct in Gaza as genocide and apartheid. In recent interviews he has emphasized “equal rights to peace, dignity and self-determination” for Jewish Israelis and Palestinians.
The unresolved issue is whether that self-determination includes Jewish national self-determination.
When CNN asked whether Israel has a right to exist, El-Sayed declined to answer yes, saying instead that “Israel exists” and that Jewish Israelis and Palestinians should determine the eventual political arrangement themselves. When subsequently asked whether a Jewish state should exist alongside a Palestinian state, he again declined to endorse that proposition. Instead, he said that if the people involved want one state, “that’s their choice,” and if they want two states, that too is their choice.
He has gone further in discussing the concept of a Jewish state, telling CNN: “Every definition of a Jewish state ends up in some articulation of illiberal values, every single one.”
For CIVPAC the relevant question is narrower than whether El-Sayed supports every Israeli policy:
Does Abdul El-Sayed accept that Israel should continue to exist as a secure Jewish and democratic national home for the Jewish people, with equal individual rights for its non-Jewish citizens, alongside a viable Palestinian state in which Palestinians exercise their own national self-determination?
His public statements do not yet provide a clear affirmative answer concerning the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
There is a potentially benign interpretation of his statements and his reluctance to answer the question directly. He could mean that he disagrees with the historical decision to establish Israel as a Jewish state but accepts its existence as an accomplished fact, recognizes the right of Israeli Jews to national self-determination within that state, and supports an equivalent Palestinian right in a separate Palestinian state.
But there is another possible interpretation. El-Sayed could mean that Israelis and Palestinians collectively should exercise self-determination within a single combined state. That view is held by some on the American left, and his statement that one state or two states should be left to the people involved leaves that possibility explicitly open.
For CIVPAC, those two interpretations are fundamentally different.
A single state encompassing Israel, the West Bank and Gaza would make the continued existence of a Jewish-majority national home dependent on future demographic and electoral outcomes. Jews could ultimately find themselves a political minority within the territory that was created in substantial part to provide them a secure national home. Given the history of Jewish minorities in Europe and the Middle East, we regard it as entirely understandable that Israeli Jews would find that prospect unacceptable. We do as well.
El-Sayed is a very articulate man. If he wants to make clear precisely what he means by Jewish and Palestinian self-determination, he is perfectly capable of finding the words.
Until he does, the ambiguity is relevant to our evaluation.
Health Care: Two Very Different Approaches
Health care may provide the clearest philosophical contrast between the candidates.
Rogers would retain the existing mixed public-private system. His 2026 plan emphasizes enforceable price transparency by hospitals and insurers, disclosure and penalties for excessive insurance denials, faster approval of generics and greater use of government purchasing leverage to reduce prescription-drug prices.
El-Sayed proposes something fundamentally different.
He calls his program Medicare for All, but the familiar name obscures how different his proposal would be from Medicare as Americans actually experience it today. His campaign promises automatic coverage for every American from birth to death for “all necessary healthcare,” specifically including medical, dental, vision and hearing services, with no premiums, deductibles or copayments. He says the coverage should be accepted everywhere. His campaign page also says additional private insurance through employers or unions could continue, although Medicare for All should make it largely redundant.
Existing Medicare looks very different. In 2026, Medicare Part B has a $202.90 standard monthly premium and a $283 annual deductible, while beneficiaries generally pay coinsurance for covered Part B services. Part A has a $1,736 inpatient hospital deductible and additional coinsurance for sufficiently long hospital and skilled-nursing stays.
“Medicare for All” has been used over the years for proposals ranging from allowing younger Americans to buy into something resembling existing Medicare to replacing most private health insurance with universal government-financed coverage. El-Sayed’s proposal is much closer to the latter.
It is therefore important to understand that he is not simply proposing Medicare with the eligibility age reduced to zero. He is proposing a new universal national health-insurance system substantially more comprehensive than existing Medicare and with essentially no price to the patient when medical care is consumed.
CIVPAC shares El-Sayed’s objective of universal insurance. Our preferred architecture is quite different: competing private plans, guaranteed issue, a strong coverage mandate, explicit public subsidies for people who otherwise could not afford adequate insurance, and a cap on the real per-capita public expense of the program.
The distinction is not merely ideological. It concerns how scarce health-care resources are allocated.
A zero price to the patient does not make physicians, nurses, operating rooms, diagnostic equipment or hospital beds costless. Eliminating deductibles and copayments increases the quantity of medical care patients demand. The best experimental evidence we have—the RAND Health Insurance Experiment—found substantially greater utilization under free care than under plans requiring patients to bear part of the cost. Cost sharing can discourage useful as well as unnecessary care, but the underlying economic point remains: demand responds to price.
If capacity does not expand sufficiently to satisfy the additional demand, something else must allocate scarce care. That can mean waiting time, referral requirements, administrative decisions or other restrictions on supply.
An additional question emerged as we examined El-Sayed’s proposal: what happens when a physician or hospital considers the government’s reimbursement inadequate?
Current Medicare permits physicians and some other providers to opt out of Medicare and privately contract with patients. Medicare then pays nothing for those privately contracted services. Participating providers, by contrast, generally agree to accept Medicare’s approved amount subject to the applicable patient deductible and coinsurance.
El-Sayed’s current campaign says his coverage would be “accepted everywhere,” but we have not found a clear statement explaining whether a physician or hospital could reject the government’s reimbursement for a covered service and instead contract privately with the patient.
That is not a minor technical question.
If providers can freely opt out and private insurance can pay them more, reimbursement below the amount necessary to attract adequate physician and hospital capacity could encourage the development of a substantial private tier. Households might then pay taxes supporting the universal system while also buying private insurance or paying privately to obtain the physicians, hospitals or access they prefer.
If providers cannot meaningfully opt out for covered services, the problem changes rather than disappears. Government would assume responsibility for continually determining the appropriate reimbursement for an enormous range of physician, hospital and other medical services.
Medicare already establishes administered prices, but it does so within a health-care economy that also contains commercial insurers, employer plans, private practices and negotiated payments. That surrounding market generates information about physician earnings, staffing costs, hospital expenses, scarcity and alternative reimbursement.
A comprehensive single-payer system would make government-administered prices much more important while reducing some of those independent market signals. Errors would not necessarily appear first as visibly incorrect prices. They might instead appear as physician shortages, difficulty recruiting particular specialties, reduced hospital capacity, longer waiting times, or excessive investment in services whose government reimbursement was comparatively generous.
Other countries demonstrate that administered pricing can operate within universal systems, but they also illustrate the tradeoffs. Canada prohibits most patient charges for publicly insured physician and hospital services but has a considerably narrower publicly insured benefit package and recurring waiting-time problems. Taiwan operates a national single-payer system with administered prices and global budgets but retains patient copayments and privately paid services. South Korea combines compulsory participation for covered services with meaningful cost sharing and a substantial non-covered market.
We have not found a close international analogue combining a benefit package as broad as El-Sayed proposes with no premiums, no deductibles, no copayments and little or no ability for providers and patients to escape government-set reimbursement.
That leaves an uncomfortable economic choice. Reimbursement could be set generously enough to induce physicians and hospitals to supply the quantity and quality of care demanded, but that would make an already expansive program correspondingly expensive to taxpayers. Or government could restrain reimbursement and overall spending, in which case some combination of queues, capacity constraints and administrative rationing becomes increasingly likely.
Setting and continually correcting millions of relative medical prices would in either case be a formidable administrative undertaking.
None of this establishes that a single-payer system cannot function. It does mean that provider participation, private contracting, the role of supplemental insurance and the method by which reimbursement would be established are central features of El-Sayed’s proposal rather than implementation details.
El-Sayed frequently says that he “wrote the book” on Medicare for All. These seem like exactly the kinds of questions on which someone who wrote the book should be able to provide clear answers.
Until he does, CIVPAC remains deeply skeptical that a system this comprehensive, with essentially no price at the point of service and government assuming such a dominant role in setting medical reimbursement, would provide health care efficiently or at a sustainable cost.
Taxes, Spending and Economic Policy
El-Sayed proposes a substantially more progressive tax structure.
His platform would tax capital gains above $1 million at ordinary-income rates and tax inheritances above $1 million as ordinary income. He would eliminate stepped-up basis at death, although his platform does not specify an exemption or threshold for that change. He supports a higher marginal income-tax rate on earnings above $1 million but does not specify the new rate.
He also favors an annual tax on large fortunes. He has supported proposals imposing wealth taxes of roughly 5 percent on billionaires and has more recently discussed taxing wealth above $100 million, at one point using a 7 percent annual rate as an example.
Those are extraordinarily large taxes when applied annually to the stock of wealth rather than to the income that wealth produces.
A 5 percent annual tax, considered by itself, would amount to about 40 percent of an unchanged initial fortune over ten years and about 64 percent over twenty years. At 7 percent, the corresponding figures are roughly 52 percent and 77 percent. Those calculations ignore income taxes, capital-gains taxes, estate taxes and inflation.
Another way of seeing the magnitude is to compare the tax with investment returns. Over the twenty years through 2026, the S&P 500 produced an inflation-adjusted total return of roughly 8.4 percent annually before taxes. For a high-income buy-and-hold investor paying current federal taxes on dividends and long-term capital gains, a reasonable illustration puts the real after-federal-tax return at roughly 7 percent, before state taxes.
On that comparison, a 5 percent annual wealth tax would absorb most of the real after-tax investment return. A 7 percent annual wealth tax would consume roughly all of it. And unlike an income or capital-gains tax, the wealth tax would still be owed in years when the investment produced no income or suffered a loss.
That is fundamentally different from increasing the income-tax rate on a wealthy person’s earnings or taxing realized capital gains. An annual wealth tax repeatedly taxes the underlying capital itself.
CIVPAC supports retaining an estate tax and accepts that very wealthy households can reasonably be asked to contribute more in taxes. We oppose annual taxation of unrealized wealth.
This is hardly an eccentric distinction. Broad annual net-wealth taxes have largely disappeared across developed economies. Most OECD countries do not impose one.
Even among the European countries that retain broad wealth taxes, El-Sayed’s proposed rates would be exceptional. Norway’s combined national and municipal wealth tax reaches approximately 1.1 percent at the top. Switzerland’s combined cantonal and municipal maximum rates range roughly from 0.1 to 0.87 percent depending on location. Spain is the important exception: its state wealth-tax schedule reaches a top marginal rate of 3.5 percent, although exemptions and regional rules complicate direct comparisons.
Thus Norway and Switzerland tax wealth at rates only a fraction of the 5 to 7 percent El-Sayed has discussed. Even Spain’s unusually high 3.5 percent top statutory rate remains substantially below them.
That matters for another reason: wealthy taxpayers and capital are unusually mobile.
A billionaire deciding where to establish residence, invest new capital or locate a business has many attractive alternatives that do not impose a 5 or 7 percent annual charge on net worth. A revenue estimate that treats the existing location and composition of billionaire wealth as fixed therefore risks substantially overstating the tax base that would remain after the tax was imposed.
Eliminating or limiting stepped-up basis at death is analytically different from an annual wealth tax and is not, in itself, an unreasonable proposal. CIVPAC has not adopted a specific position on it. The details would matter greatly, including the exemption level, treatment of illiquid assets, record keeping for assets held for decades and whether tax would be due at death or only when an inherited asset was eventually sold.
Our broader concern is that El-Sayed’s published tax agenda concentrates heavily on distribution and the political influence associated with large fortunes while giving remarkably little attention to how these taxes might affect saving, investment, entrepreneurship, capital formation, avoidance, migration of taxpayers or economic growth.
Those effects do not disappear because the people paying the tax are billionaires.
Nor can a permanent expenditure program safely be financed by simply multiplying today’s billionaire wealth by a proposed tax rate. The relevant question is how much taxable wealth would still be present—and in what form—after people had years to respond to the tax. We would also expect tax rates this high to affect long-term economic growth and therefore tax revenue from other sources.
Rogers approaches taxation from almost the opposite direction. He strongly supports the Trump tax program and has promised to make its tax cuts permanent. He emphasizes reducing federal taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security benefits and supports the larger estate-tax exemptions contained in Republican tax legislation.
At the same time, Rogers promises to protect Social Security and Medicare and supports substantial national-security spending.
That leaves Rogers with his own arithmetic problem. Lower taxes, protected major entitlement programs and substantial defense commitments cannot by themselves produce deficit reduction. We have not found a current Rogers proposal identifying spending reductions sufficient to reconcile those commitments with a credible long-term path for the federal budget.
Neither candidate has therefore provided the kind of comprehensive long-term fiscal reconciliation CIVPAC would prefer.
El-Sayed tells us in considerable detail where he would find additional revenue, but says much less about how the proposed taxes would change the behavior of the people and capital being taxed.
Rogers tells us much more clearly which taxes he would cut than which expenditures he would reduce to pay for them.
Trade and Industrial Policy
Neither candidate is a conventional free trader.
El-Sayed criticizes NAFTA and favors what he calls “targeted, smart tariffs” to protect Michigan manufacturing and incubate industries he regards as strategically important. His proposal is considerably more disciplined than across-the-board protection: the tariffs would focus on selected growth industries, use clearly communicated benchmarks with trading partners and sunset as American producers became established.
CIVPAC remains skeptical of infant-industry protection. Governments have a poor record of determining in advance which industries deserve protection, while industries that obtain tariffs develop a strong incentive to persuade government that the protection should never end. We nevertheless recognize legitimate exceptions involving genuine national-security dependencies, foreign subsidies and other demonstrably unfair trading practices.
El-Sayed strongly opposes President Trump’s current tariff war with Canada, arguing that it raises prices and threatens Michigan manufacturing.
Rogers has taken the opposite position. He has defended Trump’s tariff strategy, has described some of the Canadian tariffs as “necessary,” and has argued that his relationship with Trump would give him influence over the policy and help limit its damage to Michigan.
We are not sure what that claimed influence would amount to in practice. What is clear is that Rogers has so far chosen to defend the administration’s approach rather than publicly challenge the Canada tariffs.
For a Michigan senator, this is hardly an abstract disagreement over trade theory. Michigan’s automobile supply chain is deeply integrated across the Canadian border. Michigan’s Department of Transportation describes the automotive supply chain as “fundamentally binational and trinational,” and Canada alone purchased roughly 36 percent of Michigan’s exports in 2025.
This is therefore another issue on which Rogers could clarify the limits of his agreement with President Trump. Agreement with tariffs in particular circumstances does not itself demonstrate political dependence. But we would like to know what economic circumstances would cause Rogers to conclude that a tariff had become counterproductive and whether he would be willing to oppose the president when that occurred.
There is also a separate constitutional question.
The Constitution assigns Congress the powers to impose duties and regulate foreign commerce. Congress has delegated substantial tariff authority to presidents under particular statutes, so the issue is not whether every presidential tariff is unconstitutional. But delegation has limits.
In Learning Resources v. Trump in February 2026, the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s attempt to derive sweeping tariff authority from the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The Court emphasized that tariffs are an exercise of the taxing power and stated that the president possesses no inherent peacetime authority to impose them. When Congress delegates tariff authority, it must actually do so.
CIVPAC therefore would like to hear more from Rogers not only about whether particular tariffs are economically wise, but about the institutional principle involved. A senator has responsibilities under Article I independent of whether he agrees with the president’s immediate policy objective.
Rogers has emphasized his relationship with Trump as a reason Michigan should trust him to influence the administration from within. On trade, we would also like to know when a future Senator Rogers would be prepared to tell a president of his own party that Congress has not given him the authority he claims.
Labor and Education
El-Sayed is strongly pro-union. He supports the PRO Act, opposes right-to-work laws, supports prevailing-wage requirements and says unions should have “a significant voice” in decisions about the future of the economy. His platform repeatedly assigns unions an institutional role in economic, trade and education policy. He has also received extensive support from organized labor, including the UAW, AFT, AFSCME and several SEIU locals. (abdulforsenate.com)
Rogers presents a more mixed record. He publicly supported the 2023 UAW strike, saying autoworkers deserved a fair deal after years of concessions. But his congressional record was considerably more skeptical of organized labor: he voted to restrict application of federal prevailing-wage requirements and to limit actions by the National Labor Relations Board. We have not found a clear current Rogers position on the PRO Act or federal right-to-work legislation. (guides.vote)
CIVPAC supports the right of private-sector workers to organize and bargain collectively, but we also support secret-ballot representation elections, individual worker choice and right-to-work protections.
We are substantially more skeptical of collective bargaining in the public sector.
There is an inherent institutional problem when public-sector unions help elect the officials who subsequently negotiate with them over salaries, work rules, pensions and retiree benefits. The people sitting on opposite sides of the bargaining table may have overlapping political interests, while a substantial portion of the bill—particularly for pension and retiree promises—can fall on taxpayers decades after the officials who approved the agreement have left office.
That concern is not theoretical.
Illinois ended fiscal 2024 with roughly $144 billion in unfunded state pension liabilities. The state’s own budget history attributes the problem in part to benefit enhancements enacted without sufficient accompanying funding and in part to later reductions in required contributions. Pew has likewise identified Illinois as a particularly severe example of policymakers repeatedly failing to set aside enough money to finance promises already made. (illinois.gov) (pew.org)
Michigan has its own cautionary example. Unfunded pension and retiree-health obligations accounted for roughly 40 percent of Detroit’s liabilities when the city entered bankruptcy. (pew.org)
The point is not that unions alone caused either problem. They did not. The point is that public-sector compensation negotiations can produce long-term promises whose full costs are politically easy to postpone and extraordinarily difficult for future taxpayers to escape.
Education
Education produces another clear contrast.
El-Sayed supports universal child care and pre-K, substantially greater federal education spending, a minimum teacher salary of at least $60,000, greater funding for school nurses, psychologists and other support personnel, full federal funding of IDEA, expanded vocational and apprenticeship education, and a debt-free and tuition-free pathway through higher education. He would link increases in federal education spending to increases in defense spending. He strongly opposes vouchers and other programs that direct public money to private schools. (abdulforsenate.com)
Rogers puts considerably greater emphasis on basic skills and school choice. His current education agenda calls for restoring Michigan’s Read by Grade Three retention policy, greater use of phonics, directing Title I money toward individualized literacy tutoring and putting shop classes in high schools. He also supports school choice and has criticized Michigan for declining to participate in a federal tax-credit program financing private-school scholarships. (rogersforsenate.com) (guides.vote)
CIVPAC finds attractive elements in both agendas. We strongly support higher teacher compensation and expanded vocational education. We also favor greater emphasis on basic literacy and numeracy and are open to charters and vouchers provided participating schools face comparable testing and accountability requirements.
But substantially higher teacher compensation should be part of a bargain, not simply an expenditure increase. We favor meaningful performance-based compensation and the ability to remove persistently ineffective teachers. We do not support tenure or contractual work rules that make performance largely irrelevant to continued employment.
That is one reason El-Sayed’s repeated insistence on giving unions a larger role in education policy concerns us. The interests of teachers and the interests of students overlap substantially, but they are not identical. An education system should be organized principally around the latter.
A federally mandated $60,000 teacher minimum also ignores enormous differences in wages and living costs among communities. Federal support for higher teacher compensation can be justified, particularly in hard-to-staff schools and subjects, but Washington is poorly positioned to determine a single appropriate salary floor for every labor market in the country.
El-Sayed and CIVPAC agree that vocational education deserves far greater attention. We disagree more fundamentally about higher education. El-Sayed proposes a tuition-free and debt-free pathway through college and other postsecondary training. CIVPAC does not believe that the existence of substantial social benefits from higher education means its direct private beneficiaries should pay nothing toward its cost.
Here again the philosophical difference is familiar: El-Sayed is inclined to make an important good free or heavily subsidized at the point of consumption. CIVPAC is more inclined to preserve prices while ensuring that people who lack sufficient resources receive the assistance needed to participate.
Climate, Energy and Data Centers
El-Sayed regards climate change as an urgent federal responsibility. He favors a pathway to 100 percent renewable energy built around large investments in solar, wind, battery storage, grid modernization and energy efficiency. He also would codify the EPA’s Endangerment Finding into law so that future administrations could not eliminate the agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. He supports continued American participation in the Paris Agreement.
CIVPAC accepts the underlying climate problem but differs substantially over the architecture of the response.
We favor an economy-wide carbon price combined with a border adjustment, allowing markets to determine whether emissions reductions come from renewable energy, nuclear power, efficiency, carbon capture, direct-air capture or technologies that have not yet been developed. We do not see an economic reason to prescribe in advance which low-carbon technologies should win.
For that reason, El-Sayed’s goal of 100 percent renewable energy strikes us as unnecessarily restrictive. Renewable energy and low-carbon energy are not the same thing. Natural gas, for example, is a fossil fuel but emits substantially less carbon dioxide than coal when used to generate electricity. Carbon capture could also allow some fossil-fuel generation to remain consistent with substantial emissions reductions.
El-Sayed does partially qualify his headline objective by saying that he is open to emerging climate technologies based on their safety, reliability and community acceptance. We are not entirely sure what that means, and it leaves unclear how technologies that are low-carbon but not technically renewable fit in. What is clear is that a goal of 100% renewable fails to take into account the costs of achieving that goal.
We also question relying heavily on the Clean Air Act as the principal instrument for controlling greenhouse gases. The Act was designed primarily to regulate conventional pollutants and individual sources, not to solve a worldwide stock-pollutant problem in which a ton of carbon dioxide has essentially the same climatic effect regardless of where it is emitted. Congress should address that problem directly rather than attempting to make an older regulatory structure perform a task for which it was not originally designed.
A carbon price makes the environmental cost explicit while allowing households and businesses to decide how best to respond. A border adjustment is important both to discourage the relocation of carbon-intensive production abroad and to give foreign producers an incentive to reduce emissions if they want access to the American market.
Rogers approaches the issue very differently. He opposes renewable-energy and electric-vehicle mandates and argues that technological development and economic growth, rather than government mandates, should lead any transition. In his 2024 Senate campaign he spoke of eventually reaching a “carbon free economy,” but described that objective as “a long way in the future.” His 2026 positions continue to emphasize energy abundance, consumer choice and opposition to renewable and EV mandates. Absent some form of government intervention, Rogers appears to be relying largely on technological change to reduce the cost of carbon-free technologies enough that they eventually displace fossil fuels. That is possible, but, as Rogers himself says, it may be ‘a long way in the future.’ We would like to see a clearer recognition that the problem warrants something less than a largely laissez-faire approach.
We do not expect Rogers necessarily to embrace CIVPAC’s carbon-tax proposal. Reasonable people can disagree about the appropriate carbon price, the costs imposed on American households and industry, and how much the United States should spend when much of the climate benefit depends on actions taken by the rest of the world.
But we would like to know more clearly whether Rogers regards climate change itself as a serious problem requiring public policy.
That question has become more important because President Trump has moved well beyond skepticism about particular climate policies. In September 2026 he described climate change as “all a big hoax.” Rogers’s earlier discussion of an eventual carbon-free economy suggests a potentially different view, but he has not made the distinction as clearly as we would like. A candidate asking centrist independent voters to view him as an independent-minded senator should be willing to say whether he agrees with the president on something this basic.
Data Centers
Data centers produce an unusual area of partial convergence.
El-Sayed has proposed detailed conditions for new data-center development. Among other things, he would require data centers to bear the cost of their own additional electricity demand, protect local water resources through closed-loop cooling, provide greater transparency and community participation, and prevent utilities from using data-center construction to evade clean-energy requirements.
Rogers now supports a one-year Michigan moratorium on new data centers while the state develops stronger rules protecting local control, water resources and existing utility customers. That represents a significant change from his earlier enthusiasm for attracting data-center investment, and it also places him at odds with President Trump’s aggressive support for rapid data-center development.
CIVPAC agrees with both candidates on an important principle: data centers should bear identifiable incremental costs they impose. Existing electricity customers should not be required to finance transmission lines, generation capacity, water infrastructure or other investments principally needed to serve a new data center. Pollution, excessive water depletion and other genuine external costs should likewise be internalized. We also believe that state and local governments should not use tax abatement to attract data centers or for that matter any other specific kind of economic activity.
But we would draw a distinction that El-Sayed’s proposal sometimes obscures. An increase in electricity prices caused simply by an increase in demand is not an externality. It is a market price responding to increased scarcity. Preventing prices from reflecting increased demand can suppress precisely the signal that encourages conservation and new electricity supply.
The proper objective is therefore not to guarantee that existing customers can never experience a price increase after a large new user arrives. It is to ensure that they are not forced to subsidize costs that are properly attributable to that user.
Rogers’s willingness to break with the administration on data centers is nevertheless significant for our broader evaluation. It is one concrete example in which the 2026 Rogers has demonstrated that agreement with President Trump is not automatic.
We would like to see some others.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is one of the areas in which El-Sayed has developed an unusually detailed policy program.
He takes both the potential benefits and the risks seriously. His platform acknowledges possible major gains in medicine, science and productivity while emphasizing risks involving employment, cybersecurity, biological weapons, political manipulation, surveillance and potentially catastrophic loss of human control.
Many of those concerns overlap with CIVPAC’s.
El-Sayed proposes mandatory independent safety testing of advanced AI systems before deployment, reporting of serious incidents, testing for deceptive or dangerous behavior, biosecurity requirements and restrictions on the use of AI for autonomous weapons, warrantless surveillance, medical-care denials and employment decisions.
He also proposes what his platform calls “compute controls” and “Know Your Customer” requirements. In less technical language, this would mean regulating and tracking access to the advanced computer chips and enormous computing systems required to develop the most powerful AI models and requiring companies supplying that computing power to know who is using it. The objective is to make extremely large-scale AI development more traceable and controllable, particularly where national-security risks are involved.
CIVPAC is sympathetic to much of this risk-management agenda. Catastrophic AI risks may be uncertain, but potentially catastrophic risks do not need to be probable before they deserve serious attention. Requirements involving testing, financial responsibility, incident reporting, cybersecurity, biosecurity and controls over access to exceptionally powerful computing resources deserve serious consideration.
El-Sayed, however, goes considerably further.
His AI Under Democracy proposal would require 50 percent plus one of the board seats at frontier AI companies to be publicly appointed or democratically elected rather than chosen by shareholders. He supports placing roughly half the equity of the largest AI companies into public ownership, with returns used in part to finance an annual public AI dividend. He also proposes an “automation levy”—a tax based on the number of workers AI is deemed to replace—to finance worker assistance, education and wage insurance.
CIVPAC strongly disagrees with that approach.
Government regulation of a technology presenting unusual risks is one thing. Government ownership and effective board control of the companies developing it is something quite different. It would make government simultaneously regulator, major shareholder and controlling participant in corporate governance. We see little reason to believe that political control would allocate capital, select technologies or manage rapidly changing AI companies better than private owners operating subject to appropriate safety, liability and competition rules.
The automation levy also presents a practical problem. Technological change rarely permits us to identify cleanly which particular worker was “replaced by AI.” A job may disappear because of AI, conventional software, robotics, international trade, changing consumer tastes or a combination of all of them. Trying to impose a tax based on an administratively estimated number of workers displaced by one particular technology invites arbitrary distinctions and enormous opportunities for lobbying.
AI is also likely to create jobs as well as eliminate them. So far, aggregate economic data do not establish that AI has caused net economy-wide job destruction. The Federal Reserve describes the overall employment effect to date as limited, even though there are signs of displacement or reduced hiring in some highly exposed occupations. That seems a particularly weak factual foundation on which to build a tax explicitly tied to the number of jobs supposedly destroyed by AI.
The benefits of AI are also likely to be diffuse and unpredictable. Companies developing AI may capture some of those gains, but businesses and individuals using AI may capture others through higher productivity, new products and higher incomes. Rather than attempting to trace each benefit back to AI and devise a special tax for it, CIVPAC would generally allow the ordinary corporate and personal income-tax systems to capture part of those gains wherever they ultimately appear.
CIVPAC is more sympathetic to technology-neutral assistance—education, retraining, relocation assistance or temporary income support—that helps displaced workers regardless of whether their job disappeared because of artificial intelligence or some other economic change.
El-Sayed has recently gone further still and called for a serious pause in frontier AI development until safety concerns can be better understood. He also advocates international agreements governing the largest AI systems, including restrictions involving autonomous weapons and nuclear command and control.
We share his concern that development may be outrunning society’s ability to understand and control the risks. But a generalized American pause poses its own danger if China or other competitors continue development. Any substantial restriction on frontier development therefore has to confront both the safety risk of moving too quickly and the national-security risk of allowing less constrained competitors to move ahead.
Rogers’s position has recently evolved in an interesting direction.
Earlier in the campaign he was dismissive of some warnings about AI-driven job losses, characterizing much of the discussion as “fearmongering.” But in September, following increasingly stark warnings from AI industry leaders, Rogers said that AI development should slow down long enough for government and its partners to “catch up” and establish stronger safeguards. He said passage of a national-security framework for AI would be a top priority if he were elected to the Senate.
That places Rogers notably apart from President Trump, who has resisted broad restrictions on AI development out of concern that they would weaken the United States relative to China.
We welcome Rogers’s recognition that AI presents risks requiring more than a laissez-faire response. But his position remains much less developed than El-Sayed’s. “A national security framework” describes an objective, not yet a policy. We would like to know what safeguards Rogers actually favors, what risks he believes justify government intervention, what role he sees for liability and private insurance, and under what circumstances he believes development should be slowed.
The difference between the candidates is therefore not simply that one worries about AI and the other does not. Both now say that the technology may be developing too rapidly.
The more important difference is what they would do about it.
El-Sayed has provided an extensive answer, portions of which CIVPAC finds thoughtful and portions of which we regard as an extraordinary and unwise expansion of government ownership and control over private enterprise.
Rogers has moved toward recognizing the problem but has not yet supplied anything comparably detailed. Detail is valuable, but only if the policies being described are sound.
On an issue potentially this consequential, we would like to see Rogers provide considerably more of it.
Abortion, LGBTQ Issues and Personal Liberty
El-Sayed supports federal protection of abortion rights and says health-care decisions involving reproduction and gender-affirming care should generally be made by patients and physicians, with parents involved when the patient is a minor. He would codify the protections previously associated with Roe v. Wade and supports the Women’s Health Protection Act.
Rogers describes himself as pro-life and supported the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe. His current position, however, is that abortion policy should principally be decided by the states. He opposes a comprehensive federal abortion ban and says he will “100 percent respect” the decision Michigan voters made when they amended their state constitution to protect reproductive freedom.
That Michigan amendment is broad. It establishes a fundamental right to make decisions involving pregnancy, including contraception, sterilization, abortion, miscarriage management and infertility care. The state may regulate abortion after fetal viability but may not prohibit one when, in the professional judgment of an attending health-care professional, it is medically indicated to protect the patient’s life or physical or mental health.
Rogers has also said he supports protecting and expanding access to IVF. That is worth noting because some of the fetal-personhood measures he supported during his earlier congressional career potentially raised questions about IVF and some forms of contraception.
CIVPAC’s general presumption on abortion is closer to El-Sayed’s than Rogers’s. We believe reproductive decisions should principally remain with patients and physicians, while allowing greater room for reasonable regulation later in pregnancy with appropriate medical exceptions.
On LGBTQ rights, Rogers’s position has evolved considerably from his earlier career. He previously opposed same-sex marriage, but later said his position had evolved and has acknowledged marriage equality as existing law. He has also said that gay and lesbian Americans should not be fired from their jobs or evicted from their homes because of their sexual orientation.
Rogers does, however, strongly oppose transgender girls and women competing in female athletic categories and has made protection of women’s “sports and spaces” a prominent campaign issue.
El-Sayed takes the more expansive position. He supports broader federal LGBTQ protections and opposes government efforts to prohibit gender-affirming medical care, including for minors when parents and physicians are involved.
CIVPAC again begins with a presumption against broad government prohibitions on private medical decisions. We do not, however, regard every issue involving minors, public financing or professional medical standards as simply a matter between a patient and physician. Even the constitutional framework established by Roe and later modified by Casey recognized increasing room for legitimate state regulation as pregnancy progressed.
Athletic competition presents a particularly distinct question. Rules governing competitive categories are necessarily established by institutions, leagues and athletic associations. We think that these issues are best resolved at that level rather than involving either the state or the federal government.
On these cultural and personal-liberty questions, neither candidate maps perfectly onto CIVPAC’s positions. El-Sayed is generally closer to our presumption in favor of private medical decision-making, while Rogers’s position on preserving separate female athletic competition is substantially closer to ours, except for his preference for governmental involvement.
Rogers’s Remaining Question
Taken issue by issue, Rogers has enough identifiable positions of his own that it would be unfair to characterize him simply as an extension of Donald Trump.
His health-care and education proposals are substantially his own. He has said that Congress should play a role in decisions involving sustained military action. More recently, he has called for an end to the Iran war despite the administration’s determination to continue it. He supports slowing AI development long enough for government to establish stronger safeguards, while President Trump has resisted such restrictions because of competition with China. And Rogers supports a Michigan moratorium on new data centers despite the administration’s strong support for rapid data-center expansion.
Those disagreements matter. They demonstrate that agreement between Rogers and Trump is not automatic.
At the same time, Rogers himself has created a larger concern by saying that he does not spend much time thinking about how he differs from Trump. Asked directly about differences with the president, he said, “I don’t stop long enough to say, ‘how are we different.’”
For a candidate seeking support from the centrist independent voter, we think he should spend some time on the question.
We are not asking Rogers to manufacture disagreements with a Republican president for political effect. Nor does independence require opposing Trump whenever an opportunity presents itself. Senators normally agree frequently with presidents of their own party.
The relevant question is whether Rogers retains principles that constrain that political allegiance—circumstances in which his own judgment, constitutional responsibilities or previously stated principles would require him to take a different course.
His own 2021 essay provides an unusually clear standard.
Writing while President Trump was attempting to overturn the 2020 election, Rogers said that refusing to recognize state-certified elections without evidence of fraud represented “an abdication of the higher responsibility to our Constitution.” He specifically warned against “self-service, self-preservation and blind allegiance to a single person or party.”
Those are strong words. We agree with them.
They also make Rogers’s later comments about his own 2024 defeat particularly difficult to understand.
Rogers has said that a van carrying ballots into Detroit early on the morning after the election “swung” his race against Elissa Slotkin. When reporters asked his campaign to provide evidence that anything improper had occurred, it did not do so. Election officials explained that legitimate batches of ballots collected from drop boxes and voters registering and voting on Election Day can arrive at the central counting facility during the early morning as they move through normal election procedures.
Rogers therefore has a straightforward way to resolve the tension between his 2021 standard and his subsequent comments.
He can state unequivocally whether Elissa Slotkin legitimately won the 2024 election and either provide credible evidence that something improper occurred with the Detroit ballot delivery or withdraw the suggestion that it improperly “swung” the election.
All we are asking is whether he still applies to himself the evidentiary standard he articulated so forcefully when Donald Trump lost an election.
There are other institutional questions on which greater clarity would also be useful. We would like to know how a future Senator Rogers would respond if a president continued substantial military operations without congressional authorization; imposed tariffs without statutory authority; attempted to use federal law enforcement for political purposes; or otherwise claimed executive powers that properly belong to Congress.
His recent positions on Iran, AI and data centers provide some evidence that the independent-minded Rogers has not disappeared.
But those are primarily policy disagreements. Election legitimacy presents a more fundamental test because Rogers himself framed recognition of certified elections without contrary evidence as a constitutional responsibility.
The Mike Rogers of 2021 clearly had lines he would not cross.
The 2026 record now contains some encouraging evidence that Rogers still has lines of his own. What remains unresolved is whether those lines still hold when loyalty to President Trump—or Rogers’s own political interests—pushes in the opposite direction.
El-Sayed’s Remaining Question
El-Sayed leaves us with a very different unresolved question.
We can disagree with Medicare for All, annual wealth taxation, public ownership of AI companies, union policy, trade protection, abolition of the filibuster and a substantially larger federal role in the economy. Those are major disagreements, but they are ordinary matters of democratic policy.
Nor does severe criticism of Israel or of the Netanyahu government, by itself, answer the question that concerns us.
When directly asked whether Israel has a right to exist, he declined to say yes. When subsequently asked whether a Jewish state should exist alongside a Palestinian state, he again declined to endorse that proposition, saying instead that if “the people” want one state, that is their choice, and if they want two states, that is their choice. Exactly whom El-Sayed includes among “the people” entitled to make that decision is itself unclear.
He has also said that “Every definition of a Jewish state ends up in some articulation of illiberal values.”
That leaves one important question unanswered:
Does Abdul El-Sayed accept that Israel should continue to exist as a secure Jewish and democratic national home for the Jewish people, with equal individual rights for its non-Jewish citizens, alongside a viable Palestinian state in which Palestinians exercise their own national self-determination?
There are possible interpretations of El-Sayed’s statements that would be consistent with such an outcome, and others that would not. We do not think it is appropriate to choose among those interpretations for him.
He can answer the question himself.
El-Sayed is an articulate candidate who has demonstrated an unusual willingness to explain complicated policy positions in considerable detail. If his conception of Jewish and Palestinian self-determination includes the continued existence of both a Jewish national home and a Palestinian national home, he should be able to say so plainly.
Until he does, the ambiguity remains material to our evaluation.
Where the Evaluation Stands
This race does not reduce easily to a conventional left-versus-right comparison.
El-Sayed offers one of the most detailed policy programs we have encountered in this election cycle. That deserves credit. He has thought seriously about health care, artificial intelligence, housing, climate change, labor, taxation and the institutional structure through which he would pursue his objectives.
CIVPAC agrees with significant parts of that agenda: support for Ukraine; concern about unauthorized military action; easier legitimate voting; protection of reproductive and other private medical decisions; vocational education; increased housing supply; some forms of antitrust enforcement; and serious attention to potentially catastrophic AI risks.
But the disagreements are equally, if not more, substantial. El-Sayed generally responds to economic and social problems with a much larger role for the federal government than CIVPAC favors. Medicare for All, annual wealth taxation, public ownership and control of AI companies, abolition of the filibuster, restrictions on independent political spending, stronger union influence, targeted protectionism and technology-specific climate mandates all illustrate that broader philosophical difference.
We are especially concerned that some of his most ambitious proposals leave basic implementation questions unanswered. His Medicare for All plan does not clearly explain whether doctors and hospitals could refuse government reimbursement and privately contract with patients. His proposed annual wealth taxes would be extraordinarily high by international standards and would create substantial incentives for avoidance, relocation and changes in investment behavior. His AI program combines legitimate safety concerns with an extraordinary degree of proposed government ownership and control.
Those are serious policy disagreements. They are not, however, the only issue preventing us from completing our evaluation of El-Sayed.
His repeated refusal to say plainly whether Israel should continue to exist as a Jewish and democratic national home alongside a Palestinian state leaves a separate and more fundamental ambiguity. He can resolve it simply by answering the question directly.
Rogers presents almost the reverse problem.
On many economic questions he is closer to CIVPAC’s general preference for markets, private provision and limited government intervention. His national-security experience is substantial. His education and health-care proposals contain significant elements we find worthy of consideration, and his positions on abortion and same-sex marriage have evolved considerably from his earlier congressional career.
Nor is it any longer accurate to describe the 2026 Rogers as simply following President Trump wherever the president leads. Rogers has broken with the administration over continuation of the Iran war, has called for slowing AI development while safeguards are developed, and supports a Michigan data-center moratorium despite the administration’s aggressive support for rapid data-center expansion. His current disagreement with Trump over Iran is particularly significant.
At the same time, Rogers continues to support Trump’s tariff policy toward Canada despite Michigan’s unusually deep economic integration with its northern neighbor. And his statement that he does not spend much time considering how he differs from Trump remains troubling for a candidate whose strongest earlier argument for himself was precisely his willingness to exercise independent judgment.
Most importantly, the contrast between the Rogers who forcefully rejected unsupported election claims in 2021 and the Rogers who subsequently suggested without supporting evidence that a Detroit ballot delivery “swung” his own 2024 defeat remains unresolved.
The two candidates therefore arrive at the end of this evaluation with very different unanswered questions.
For El-Sayed, the question concerns the meaning of national self-determination and whether it includes the continued existence of both a Jewish national home and a Palestinian national home.
For Rogers, the question concerns whether his recent examples of policy independence extend to circumstances in which constitutional principle, institutional responsibility or his own political interests put him in direct conflict with President Trump.
Both candidates are capable of answering those questions.
Their answers would help the centrist independent voter decide how to vote.