Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and former Representative Mike Rogers do not like each other.
The two Senate candidates in Michigan have spent months trying to tear each other down. During their debate on Wednesday, Mr. Rogers questioned Dr. El-Sayed’s loyalty to the country and sought to tie him to overseas Islamist groups. Dr. El-Sayed characterized Mr. Rogers as bought and paid for by corporate donors and in thrall to President Trump.
And somehow this debate was more civil and substantive than the last time they met, two weeks ago.
Polls show a tight race in a contest that could decide control of the chamber, with Dr. El-Sayed seeking to defend the Michigan seat for Democrats and Mr. Rogers hoping to give Republicans a lift by flipping it.
Here are five takeaways from their second and final debate:
Rogers went after El-Sayed’s background, but not quite as hard.
After pushing during the first debate to place Dr. El-Sayed’s Muslim faith and family history at the center of the campaign, Mr. Rogers laid off just a little. He did not mention his opponent’s mother this time around.
Instead, he sought to tie Dr. El-Sayed, an Egyptian American, to the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement founded in Egypt nearly a century ago.
“If you are going to go to the United States Senate, we need to know: Are you for America or are you for these terrorist groups overseas?” Mr. Rogers asked.
Mr. Rogers somewhat clumsily suggested that Dr. El-Sayed wanted to defund the police not only in the United States, but also in Egypt — because of an open letter he signed in 2012. The letter called on Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who won Egypt’s first competitive presidential election, to “purge” police officials who had been loyal to the previous autocratic government.
Mr. Morsi was removed from power a year later in a military takeover.
Dr. El-Sayed asked for extra time to deliver a fuller response and then gave a clear declaration of his loyalty to the United States.
“It’s actually really quite beneath you, Mike,” Dr. El-Sayed responded. “I am proud of America. I’m proud to be an American. I’m proud of our Constitution that guarantees all of us the right to pray as we choose to pray. And the question that you would ask, that I think is actually really quite shameful as somebody who’s actually served under that Constitution, it is shameful, shameful.”
El-Sayed hit Rogers over Trump, and offered to play MAGA bingo.
Dr. El-Sayed’s debate strategy was clear from the start: He wanted to tether Mr. Rogers to Mr. Trump and not allow his Senate rival to create any political distance from the unpopular president.
Dr. El-Sayed made a case that Mr. Trump, and by extension Mr. Rogers, was responsible for policies that have driven up the costs of fuel, groceries and other daily needs. He invited viewers to play “MAGA bingo,” in a lighthearted attempt to head off words or phrases Mr. Rogers might use to attack him. And he noted times when Mr. Rogers dodged questions about White House policy or his connections to Mr. Trump.
“The thing about MAGA is, whenever they’re talking, they are trying to distract you,” Dr. El-Sayed said. “Just remember: When they’re distracting you, they’re also trying to pick your pocket. It’s a form of corporatized bribery.”
Rogers made a pitch to Black voters and Jews …
Mr. Rogers made a pitch to the Democratic voters who opposed Dr. El-Sayed in the party’s hard-fought Senate primary race in August.
He made an explicit appeal to voters who backed Representative Haley Stevens, a moderate Democrat, particularly Black voters and Jews. Anger among some Jewish Michiganders about Dr. El-Sayed’s left-wing opposition to Israel has for months worried Democrats who want him to win.
But Mr. Rogers’s appeal to Black voters could also be significant in the general election. Black voters make up roughly 12 percent of the Michigan electorate, while Jewish voters make up less than 2 percent. Mr. Rogers cited his work on housing in Detroit and pointed to what he described as his campaign’s success with Black voters.
“We’re doing well with African Americans in the city of Detroit, in Pontiac, in Flint,” Mr. Rogers said.
… while El-Sayed tried to reach out to Republicans.
A key part of Dr. El-Sayed’s electoral strategy is to build a voting coalition that looks different from how Democrats have won in Michigan in the past.
He may do worse with moderate Democrats in the Detroit suburbs, but he is banking on improving on his party’s performance in rural areas that have swung toward Republicans during the Trump years.
On Wednesday, Dr. El-Sayed pointed to his crowds during his trip last week to Michigan’s conservative Upper Peninsula. There, he said, voters brought the same concerns about high costs as people he had met elsewhere in the state.
“We had 500 people in Iron Mountain, 600 in Escanaba, 1,300 in Marquette, all coming together around a vision for an America where it just shouldn’t be this hard,” he said.
Rogers’s wife served in Iraq — as a civilian.
Mr. Rogers was keen to invoke his wife, which male politicians often do to try to soften their own image.
At the beginning of the debate, Mr. Rogers said “my wife and I” had decided to run for the Senate, as if she were on the ballot with him.
Later, he seemed to imply that his wife, Kristi Rogers, who worked in Iraq as a civilian employee of the Defense Department during the Iraq war, had served in the military, as he and other members of his family did.
“I wore the uniform of the United States proudly, as my son did, my wife served, my brother served, my father served,” Mr. Rogers said.
A Rogers campaign spokeswoman, Abby Ronson, said after the debate that Ms. Rogers had “felt called to serve our great country after 9/11, and we thank her for answering the call to protect Americans.”
The post MAGA Bingo and Questions of Loyalty: 5 Michigan Senate Debate Takeaways appeared first on New York Times.
