The candidates conducting one of the country’s most divisive and hard-fought Senate campaigns roasted each other Wednesday night in the second and final debate of the Michigan Senate race.
Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official, and Republican Mike Rogers, a former congressman, jabbed each other for an hour over the economy, national security and health care.
Both laced their substantiative policy answers with unrelated personal attacks.
Michigan’s open Senate seat is key for both parties’ hopes for controlling the Senate, where Republicans now hold a 53-47 advantage. Republicans view it as the best opportunity to flip a seat, even as they’re on defense elsewhere in the country. Democrats are aiming to hold every seat they have while flipping four Republican-held ones.
Here are five takeaways from the debate, aired live from WXYZ Detroit’s studios in Southfield, Michigan.
Family ties and the Muslim Brotherhood took a back seat
The headlines that dominated this race all week were largely — but not completely — a footnote.
El-Sayed would be the nation’s first Muslim senator, and Republicans have leaned into attacks related to his religion and identity.
El-Sayed protested that Rogers has been questioning his loyalty to the country, and said, “It is really quite beneath you.”
“I know you want to make this about being a victim,” Rogers retorted. “This is about an ideology.”
President Donald Trump has called El-Sayed a jihadist. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said he’d be a national security threat. Rogers has questioned whether his family helped send money to terrorist groups and whether El-Sayed belonged to any of those groups himself.
El-Sayed’s half sister has written on social media about their biological mother’s “activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early ’70s while she was in college.” El-Sayed’s parents divorced when he was 3 and he was raised by his father and step mother in a Detroit suburb. El-Sayed has said repeatedly that he has no connection to the Islamic political movement, which has many branches.
Rogers is not buying it.
“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?” he said during the debate.
El-Sayed has forcefully defended himself, and reframed the attacks as a way for Republicans to distract from unaffordable groceries, gas and health care.
El-Sayed would not let up on Rogers’s ties to Trump
El-Sayed repeatedly challenged viewers to play “MAGA Bingo” when Rogers was talking, diminishing the former congressman’s positions as recycled Trump talking points designed to change the subject and paper over Rogers’ true views.
He described Rogers as “hip to hip with Trump” and called him the president’s “sock puppet.”
“When they’re distracting you, they’re also trying to pick your pocket,” El-Sayed said.
Rogers said “the bingo game ought to be how many times he can put the word Trump in any answer.”
They disagreed sharply on many policies.
Trump was also at the center of several policy differences.
Rogers called Trump’s tariffs on Canada “a mixed bag” while El-Sayed said they “clearly have hurt” people. El-Sayed called the war in Iran unnecessary and responsible for the rising prices of gas and groceries, while Rogers said it’s necessary to contain the threat Iran poses to the world.
Rogers defended Trump’s immigration enforcement surge, saying it contributed to a nationwide drop in violent crime. El-Sayed said it contributed to illegal searches of citizens and neighborhoods terrorized by masked agents.
El-Sayed spoke to the anxiety that artificial intelligence would wipe out jobs and proposed protective federal regulations, while Rogers articulated a proposal closer to Trump’s more hands off approach: loosening antitrust provisions so that AI companies could work together on safety.
The two also disagreed on other issues, including guns and the Supreme Court. El-Sayed supported universal background checks for guns. Rogers said “it depends.” Rogers was against expanding the Supreme Court. El-Sayed was for it.
Rogers painted El-Sayed as a democratic socialist
Rogers tried to link El-Sayed to his party’s most left-leaning flank.
While some prominent democratic socialists, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), have campaigned with the Democrat, El-Sayed does not consider himself a member of the movement.
But Rogers characterized El-Sayed’s campaign slogan of “Money out of politics. Money in your pocket. Medicare for all” as signifying a democratic socialist agenda that would result in a huge tax increase that could bankrupt the economy.
“Money in your pocket? You’ll be lucky to have a damn pair of pants when you’re done,” Rogers said.
El-Sayed retorted that Rogers was a corporatist and told the cameras, “the folks pulling the money out of your pocket are the big corporations who are buying his campaign. I outraised him three times, but somehow there are more ads for him on TV.”
The race remains close
Despite national media attention and record spending in the state,polls consistently show El-Sayed with a narrow edge, barely outside of the margin of error — a margin much smaller than Democrats are holding in Michigan’s other statewide races.
A Marist Poll released Wednesday showed El-Sayed leading Rogers 50 percent to 48 percent among likely voters, a lead within the poll’s 4.3 percentage point margin of error.
The post Takeaways for Michigan’s second and final Senate debate appeared first on Washington Post.
