(CNN) — As Michigan Democrats debate who is their best candidate for Senate, the presumptive Republican nominee, Mike Rogers, has a frank private assessment of the field.
During a call with supporters last month, Rogers said his campaign was in “pretty good shape” overall – and feeling good if former public health official Abdul El-Sayed captures the Democratic nomination in the August 4 primary.
“If he wins, I think we’re in good shape,” Rogers said while responding to a question about his campaign’s strategy for El-Sayed. “I mean, I think he’s so radical. I think he’s going to lose big parts of the west part of the state. We think we can do well in part of the southeast part of the state. I think we’ll do well if he in fact is the nominee.”
Rogers’ comments fit into a fierce debate in the Democratic primary about who is best equipped to retain the seat held by the retiring Sen. Gary Peters: El-Sayed, who is running as an unabashed progressive with the support of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), or Rep. Haley Stevens, running as a more moderate candidate.
A recording of the call was provided to CNN by a person who requested anonymity to share it.
National Democrats almost certainly have to keep Michigan in their column if they want to capture a majority in the Senate. Stevens’ campaign has long argued El-Sayed is too progressive for the closely divided battleground state and suggested Republicans want him to win the primary.
El-Sayed says he is best positioned to excite Democratic voters and bring back groups that have drifted away from the party.
Rogers, a former House member, is running for Senate again after losing a tight 2024 race to now-Sen. Elissa Slotkin. He made the comments on a June 15 call with campaign supporters when a person asked him about his plan to counter the El-Sayed ads that they had been seeing. He assured the questioner that the El-Sayed ads are “targeting his Democrat base” in the primary and that Republicans would be ready to go once there is a Democratic nominee.
Responding to Rogers’ comments, El-Sayed’s campaign said he has “built the strongest general election coalition: more than 10,000 volunteers, grassroots support in every corner of the state, and a campaign powered by people, not corporate PAC dollars.”
“Mike Rogers won’t be in ‘good shape’ in November, but the people of Michigan will be,” the spokeswoman, Roxie Richner, said in a statement.
In media appearances, Rogers has declined to say which Democrat he would prefer to face, criticizing both as wrong for Michigan and expressing confidence he could defeat either. His campaign reiterated that in response to a request for comment for this story.
“We’re in good shape to beat both of them,” a Rogers campaign spokeswoman, Alyssa Brouillet, said in a statement. “They are completely out of touch with working families, and Mike will defeat whichever of them emerges broke, battered, and bruised from their train wreck primary.”
A spokesman for the Stevens campaign, Arik Wolk, said in a statement about the June 15 call that Rogers “admitted what Republicans have said for weeks: They know they can beat Abdul El-Sayed, and that’s why they’re running ads to boost his campaign.”
The Stevens campaign and its allies argue Republicans have been working to prop up El-Sayed because they believe he is a weaker candidate for the general election. The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which is the campaign arm of the Senate GOP, released a digital ad last month warning that El-Sayed is “too radical for Michigan.”
Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, told Semafor last month that El-Sayed’s nomination would “make it even better for us there.”
Rogers, who represented Michigan in the House from 2001-2015, ran for Senate in 2024 and lost to Slotkin by about 19,000 votes, even as President Donald Trump carried the state. Trump quickly got behind Rogers in his comeback campaign.
“We’re going to win Michigan by turning out people who have already voted for us,” Rogers told supporters on the call. “We have enough votes in the bank to win this race. We have enough people who voted for Mike Rogers. If we just get them to turn out, we’re going to win.”
That is a huge difference with Democrats, who have been stuck in a contentious, expensive nominating battle for months. Until recently, their primary also featured a third serious candidate, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who dropped out earlier this month.
Stevens and El-Sayed have especially clashed over the US relationship with Israel, with a super PAC affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spending tens of millions of dollars on Stevens’ behalf. El-Sayed has shown more strength with his campaign’s fundraising, outraising Stevens in the second quarter and announcing Wednesday he has already raised more than $3.3 million this month.
Rogers and his campaign’s political director, Liam Putz, spoke repeatedly on last month’s call about the benefits of running unopposed in the GOP primary while Democrats duke it out.
“What we’re trying to do is let them go at each other while we’re building this team up over the summer,” Rogers said.
While Rogers made a passing reference to Stevens, he appeared more animated by El-Sayed. Rogers said El-Sayed is a democratic socialist – a label the Democrat has rejected – and “doesn’t believe in the free-enterprise system.”
“I don’t think he likes America, candidly. He doesn’t demonstrate he does. He hung out with a guy who believed that we deserved 9/11 as Americans,” Rogers said, referring to El-Sayed’s campaigning with Hasan Piker, a popular far-left Twitch streamer who has said he regretted his comment about the September 11 attacks. Piker has also been criticized by both parties for remarks about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including saying that he believes Hamas is “1,000 times better than Israel.”
Richner, El-Sayed’s spokeswoman, responded to Rogers’ charge by pointing to a recent campaign event where El-Sayed led chants of “USA!” after far-right provocateur Jake Lang disrupted the program.
“Does this look like a candidate that hates America?” Richner asked.
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