The U.S. Senate race unfolding in Michigan isn’t just pivotal for tipping the balance of the Senate. Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers are two very different candidates representing two very different political ethos. Today, the Prospect is focusing on the dynamics of this race, with Whitney Curry Wimbish on the Jewish org training “deep” canvassers for El-Sayed, Eli Day on El-Sayed’s approach to racist and Islamophobic attacks, and Zachary Groz on the previously unreported nature of Rogers’s wife’s pay-for-play consultancy.

In Michigan, El-Sayed Canvassers Engaging Voters on Jewish Safety

While AIPAC targets 130,000 Jewish Michiganders with mailers demonizing Democratic Senate nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Bend the Arc is connecting with voters on a deeper level. 

The largest progressive domestic-focused Jewish organization in the country is mobilizing volunteers to canvas for Democratic Senate nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, not just to get out the vote, but to hold substantive conversations about Israel, Palestine, antisemitism, and safety.

Bend the Arc is working with Seed the Vote and training its volunteers in “deep canvassing,” the practice of holding nonjudgmental, open-ended conversations with the goal of forging a connection and sharing viewpoints. Rather than the brief exchange of a typical door-knock, the conversations volunteers are aiming for can take up to 15 minutes and don’t necessarily seek to change anyone’s mind.

The group trained Jewish volunteers to speak with Jewish voters, “grounded in Jewish concerns and concerns about antisemitism,” said Eli Williams-Szenes, who leads advocacy and political affairs for Bend the Arc, and who was in Michigan last weekend working with canvassers and talking with voters. But concerns about antisemitism were coming up in conversations at non-Jewish households, too, he said, so the group did the same training for the full volunteer corps.

“Something that is coming up repeatedly in canvassing conversations is that a lot of people will volunteer out of the gate, ‘I don’t know what to do. I can’t vote for Mike Rogers because he’s, pick your thing, anti-choice, a Christian nationalist,’” Williams-Szenes said. “Then also saying, ‘And I don’t know how to vote for someone who feels about Israel the way Dr. El-Sayed does.’”

El-Sayed’s topline issues in his campaign are Medicare for All and affordability. He opposes U.S. aid to Israel and its genocide in Palestine; while he does not make that a plank in his platform, he has said the issues are interconnected because spending on Israel means less money to spend at home.

Volunteers are trained to listen, affirm voters’ fears, then draw out their specific worries and perhaps share their own, along with how they see the issue. “That conversation is doing something to people,” Williams-Szenes said. “It’s starting to wobble people.”

Beran also noted that El-Sayed scored 100 percent alignment with Bend the Arc’s domestic priorities, which is uncommon, and that one thing that the group has found effective is to encourage people to listen to him directly. Much like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has been similarly smeared by AIPAC and its allies, El-Sayed espouses universal human rights and has repeatedly emphasized the importance of Jewish safety and combating antisemitism.

Abdul El-Sayed Is Running Through, Not Around, the Right’s Racism

The Michigan Senate candidate is enduring Islamophobic attacks by refusing to accept the conservative narrative and pointing out their distract-and-divide strategy.    

In a midterm where Republicans are lacking a record to run on, their last resort, as one Trump operative told Axios this summer, has been to make it “a hate election.” And boy, have they. Attacks against El-Sayed in particular have evolved from 1980s-style panics about socialism into gutter Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism. Former Klan leader David Duke is right; his ideas have found a home in the modern Republican Party.

Take for example Vice President JD Vance, who in rallies has cast El-Sayed as a shadowy figure who “wants to litigate ancient grievances.” In the small southeast Michigan town of Monroe, Vance said that “what excites him is this prospect of wielding the power of a country he hates,” and that he perhaps sees the country as “too white or too proud or too American.” Separately, an ad being run widely in the state claims that El-Sayed would usher in Sharia law, another golden oldie for Republican fearmongers.

People need their villains, and El-Sayed offers them one. But Michigan’s U.S. Senate candidate has not sat back amid the howling bigotry of Vance, Donald Trump, his corporate stuffed-shirt opponent Mike Rogers, and the entire Republican establishment, fueled by over $130 million in dark-money spending. Instead, he has confronted the right’s extravagant racism by addressing it directly, hammering his opponents for choosing hate over the giant cost-of-living crisis staring every voter in the face.

As the election rhetoric nears its peak, the question is whether El-Sayed’s egalitarian, anti-war message can overcome the avalanche of racist hatred.

Mike Rogers’s Wife Runs a Consultancy That Sells Government Access
She got corporations to meet with members of Congress, and cabinet members—for a $100,000 initiation fee. If her husband reaches the Senate, ethics questions could grow.

Earlier this month, former Republican congressman and Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers appeared on the campaign trail with his wife Kristi, handing out $10 gift cards at a Detroit gas station. “We’re all struggling with incredibly high gas prices,” Ms. Rogers said in a video taken from the scene. “And Mike knows this.”

What voters would not have known from that video is that Ms. Rogers runs a Beltway trade group representing energy traders, mining companies, and manufacturers in their efforts to influence federal officials and federal policy. According to ethics watchdogs, Ms. Rogers’s position, which has not been previously reported, raises the potential for serious conflicts of interest should her husband win his hotly contested Senate race against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed.

In January of 2025, Ms. Rogers founded that trade group, known as the Partnerships Revolutionizing International Supply Chain Modernization (PRISM), asking founding private-sector members to pay a $100,000 initiation fee, plus $50,000 in annual dues. Memberships for non-founding corporate partners’ access cost between $25,000 and $50,000. But the Founding Council would have the ability to “shape PRISM’s direction and strategy and have final approval of any and all policy recommendations,” according to PRISM’s website.

In exchange, PRISM would help its members get face time with federal policymakers and diplomats with substantial leverage over decision-making that would affect their businesses. PRISM has held events with at least two Trump administration cabinet members, along with senators and House members.