We have completed our evaluation of the 2026 Michigan U.S. Senate race between Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Abdul El-Sayed.
It is not an endorsement.
We could not quite get there for either candidate.
That is worth putting in context. During the Democratic primary, CIVPAC endorsed Haley Stevens over El-Sayed. Had Michigan Democrats chosen Stevens as their nominee, we would probably have endorsed her in the general election as well. Our inability to endorse El-Sayed is therefore not simply a consequence of evaluating a Democrat against a Republican. It reflects concerns specific to his candidacy and policy program.
Rogers and El-Sayed present very different strengths, weaknesses and policy agendas. But each leaves us with an important unanswered question that goes beyond the ordinary disagreements voters should expect in a Senate race.
Our full evaluation examines those differences in considerable detail.
El-Sayed has produced one of the most extensive and specific policy platforms we have encountered this election cycle. (That is one reason why this evaluation has taken about a week to draft.) We agree with him on some important matters, including support for Ukraine, concern about unauthorized military action, protection of reproductive freedom, vocational education, increasing housing supply and taking potentially catastrophic artificial-intelligence risks seriously.
We disagree much more broadly with his economic approach. His Medicare for All proposal would create a far more comprehensive government-financed system than Medicare as Americans know it today. His proposed annual wealth taxes are extraordinarily high by international standards. His AI program would go beyond regulation to substantial government ownership and control of major AI companies. We also differ on labor policy, tariffs, climate policy, the Senate filibuster and restrictions on independent political spending.
But those normal policy disagreements are not what ultimately prevent us from reaching an endorsement.
For El-Sayed, the unresolved question concerns Israel.
He has repeatedly declined to say plainly that Israel should continue to exist as a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian state. He has said that whether there should ultimately be one state or two should be decided by “the people,” without clearly defining who he means by that term.
Our question for him is straightforward:
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?
He is perfectly capable of answering it.
Mike Rogers presents a very different problem.
Rogers’s earlier career gives us substantial reasons to take him seriously. He has deep national-security experience and, in 2021, forcefully rejected Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. Rogers wrote then about the danger of blind allegiance to a person or party and insisted that certified election results should not be rejected without evidence.
The 2026 Rogers has aligned himself much more closely with President Trump.
To his credit, he has also demonstrated some real independence. He has called for an end to the Iran war, supported slowing AI development while safeguards are developed, and backed a Michigan pause on new data centers despite the administration’s very different approach.
But his comments about his own 2024 Senate loss remain difficult to reconcile with the standard he articulated in 2021. Rogers has suggested that a Detroit ballot delivery “swung” the election against him without producing evidence that anything improper occurred.
So our question for Rogers is equally straightforward:
Does he still apply to himself the standard he articulated when Donald Trump lost an election?
More broadly, where are the lines at which a future Senator Rogers would place his own judgment, constitutional responsibilities and institutional obligations ahead of loyalty to President Trump?
We are not asking either candidate to agree with CIVPAC on everything.
We are asking each to answer a question that bears directly on whether we can recommend entrusting him with a seat in the United States Senate.
Michigan voters should listen carefully for those answers.
Until we hear them, this remains an evaluation, not an endorsement.
