Michigan Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers has drawn sharp criticism from both sides of the aisle after releasing a direct-to-camera video on social media on Saturday saying he will not take action to restrict abortion rights at the federal level if elected by Michiganders on Tuesday.
Rogers, who is in a toss-up contest against Democratic nominee Abdul el Sayed, has received ire from both opponents and supporters of abortion for pledging not to pass a national abortion ban in the Senate, which critics say is a departure from his strong anti-abortion record during his 14 years in the House in the early 2000s.
The pledge from Rogers came after el Sayed reposted audio of Rogers touting his past anti-abortion voting record to a socially conservative audience. In retort to his opponent, Rogers said on X on Saturday that he would not contradict the will of Michigan voters, who enshrined abortion through all stages of pregnancy into the state’s constitution via a ballot initiative in 2022.
“The Michigan voters went to the ballot box and made a woman’s right to choose part our State Constitution and as Michigan’s next Senator I will never go to Washington and overturn the will of the Michigan people,” Rogers said.
Although Rogers’s rhetoric in the new video drew criticism from his right, his stance has been the same for years now. Rogers made the same pledge not to touch abortion at the national level during his unsuccessful 2024 campaign for Senate against now-Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI).
Slotkin beat Rogers by a margin of roughly 3 percentage points. As of the day before the election, el Sayed has a 5.3-percentage-point lead over Rogers, according to the RealClearPolitics average from the past month.
Pro-abortion groups criticized Rogers for attempting to downplay his anti-abortion voting record in the House.
During his time in the House from 2001 to 2015, Rogers voted on a slew of anti-abortion legislation, including an attempt to prohibit most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy and legislation that would have protected life at fertilization.
Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All, said the last-minute endorsement from Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), el Sayed’s primary opponent, also does not excuse Rogers’s anti-abortion prerogatives.
“Nothing can erase Mike Rogers’ votes or make him any less dangerous to our reproductive freedom,” Timmaraju said. “Haley Stevens is giving cover to a politician who spent his career trying to ban abortion and was still bragging about that record just days ago.”
But Rogers is also taking heat from the anti-abortion wing of the GOP.
The organization CatholicVote, which historically rallies behind anti-abortion Republican candidates, suspended its endorsement of Rogers on Monday following public outcry about his ad.
Kelsey Reinhardt, president of CatholicVote, said via press release on Monday she and many fellow anti-abortion Catholics “trusted that [Rogers] would stand for the unborn, as he did for years in Congress.”
“The teaching of the Catholic Church is that the threat of abortion is the preeminent priority because all rights are second to that first right, the right to life,” Reinhardt said. “While many issues are prudential: data centers, tax rates, how best to fund and operate education, this issue is non-negotiable.”
According to the Michigan Catholic Conference, there are nearly 1.5 million Catholics in the Wolverine State.
FUTURE OF MAHA AND ANTI-ABORTION POLICY HINGES ON ROGER MARSHALL’S ELECTION CHANCES
Robert P. George, a conservative public intellectual and professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University, said on X that the position from Rogers was “not exactly a profile in courage” and could backfire.
“An interesting thing about political expediency is that it can turn out to have been … not so expedient,” George wrote. “It can demoralize a key segment of one’s own voters in an effort to attract others. And it can signal to all voters that a candidate is unprincipled and inconstant.”