El-Sayed Won. Now Meet Mike Rogers.
AIPAC spent $30 million to lose Michigan. His Republican opponent lives in Florida and won't say what he thinks about anything.
This is "What I'm Hearing" — a somewhat daily guide to the stories that matter, drawn from the best pro-democracy political writers working right now, with my analysis on top.
El-Sayed Won.
The Associated Press called it this morning: Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, beating establishment favorite Rep. Haley Stevens by roughly a point. He won a swing-state Senate primary against the entire weight of the party apparatus and the most expensive Democratic primary in American history.
Roughly $60 million in outside money backed Stevens — a record for a Democratic primary. More than half of it, over $30 million, came from AIPAC's United Democracy Project, which broke its own single-race spending record on attack ads against El-Sayed. Axios put the outside-spending disadvantage at 12 to 1. And El-Sayed still won — while out-raising Stevens more than two to one in direct contributions, $4.6 million to $2.2 million in the second quarter.
He also did the thing the consultants said was suicide: he ran at the money instead of away from it. When Stevens voted with Republicans against an amendment to condition military aid to Israel, El-Sayed made it the campaign: "She chose to side with AIPAC and Republicans to continue to fund a war machine that has taken the loved ones of many Michigan families." His campaign cited Data for Progress polling showing 86% of Michigan primary voters were less inclined to back a candidate supporting continued funding to Israel. In Dearborn, crowds chanted "Down with AIPAC" at his rallies. His campaign manager's line last night: "This was always going to be the many versus the money."
This wasn't a safe blue district where a progressive could win on turnout. This was a statewide race in a genuine battleground, with control of the Senate riding on it, and AIPAC emptied the clip. Zeteo's Prem Thakker, reporting from the ground, called the night "an astonishing failure for AIPAC."
I didn’t have a particular dog in this race, other than my strong distaste for AIPAC. El-Sayed is closer to my personal politics than Stevens is, but a Stevens victory wouldn’t have been catastrophic. This primary was ugly. Both candidates sank below the acceptable threshold at times. The Democratic infighting of it all was incredibly counterproductive. And now, like James Talarico in Texas, El-Sayed has a huge job on his hands to win the support of Haley Stevens’ supporters. To be clear, Stevens has a role to play in that as well, but the onus is on El-Sayed to earn their votes.
Mallory McMorrow, an early rival of El-Sayed, who took 4% after suspending her campaign, endorsed El-Sayed: "We head to November together as a unified party." This is the right posture. I hope more follow her lead. Because regardless of where you land on the Democratic infighting scale, none of it matters if the Republicans hold the Senate. My great hope is that this Michigan Primary ends, or at least pauses until after the midterms, this so-called Democratic civil war. Now is the time to focus all our energy and attention on defeating Republicans. Which brings me to Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent in the Michigan Senate race. A man who has enjoyed the absence of the spotlight for too long. Let’s talk about him.
Mike Rogers, Florida Man.
Mike Rogers lives in Florida. Not "lived." Not "has a vacation place." In 2024, while running for Senate in Michigan, he was registered to vote in Cape Coral, Florida. He left Michigan more than a decade ago, but his record didn’t.
Rogers spent fourteen years in Congress. He voted against the Affordable Care Act and repeatedly to repeal it — in a state where the uninsured rate fell from 11% to 5% under that law, and where nearly two million people have pre-existing conditions. He backed the Ryan budget that would have turned Medicare into a voucher program and raised the eligibility age from 65 to 67, shifting costs onto seniors. He supported partially privatizing Social Security — a plan that would have put retirees' savings in the stock market right before it lost half its value in 2008. He voted for the Medicare Part D provision barring the government from negotiating drug prices, then defended it, then voted against lifting it — after taking more than $1 million from the pharmaceutical and health products industry over his career. He voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Twice. He voted against the Paycheck Fairness Act. Twice. He voted against repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell and against a fully inclusive Violence Against Women Act, and finished his House career with a 0 out of 100 on every HRC scorecard ever issued while he served. On abortion, he co-sponsored legislation to strip FDA approval from mifepristone, backed fetal personhood, and celebrated Dobbs — in a state where voters wrote reproductive rights into the constitution by 13 points. He couldn't vote on Prop 3 himself. He was still registered to vote in Florida.
Mike Rogers left Congress in 2015 and then got very, very rich. In 2013, his financial disclosure showed $380,000 of income. By 2023, that grew to $11.3 million. The former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee sat on the board of IronNet Cybersecurity from 2015 to 2023, advised Forgepoint Capital — a venture firm managing over $1 billion that invests in cybersecurity and AI companies holding federal contracts — from 2018 through at least August 2025, and picked up work tied to several Saudi companies. If he wins, he arrives in the Senate with a portfolio full of industries that live on the federal contracts he'd help write.
Two days ago, Semafor caught up with him outside a beachfront restaurant in Grand Haven. How would he vote on the Senate measures condemning Trump's tariffs?
Where does he stand on the $1.8 billion anti-weaponization slush fund?
"I'm not talking about any of that stuff. I don't care. I mean, I care."
On Trump's war with Iran?
Rogers said he'd heard "hardly anything" from voters about it.
Rogers wants to run a small, local, inoffensive campaign about potholes and water quality while the man who gave him his "complete and total endorsement" runs the country into a ditch. He lost to Elissa Slotkin by 19,000 votes in 2024 by keeping his head down. He's running the same play.
So make him answer. Every debate, every town hall, every local news hit: Do you support tariffs that raise costs for Michigan manufacturers? Will you vote to end the Iran war? Do you still want to repeal the ACA? Would you have confirmed Todd Blanche? Do you support Trump's executive order restricting mail voting in your own state? Is birthright citizenship in the Constitution? Where do you actually live?
90 days, Democrats. Time to get on the offensive.
Read more: The Intercept, The Hill, Axios, Zeteo, The Message Box
Blanche Got His Deal.
Todd Blanche cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee 12-10 on Tuesday after Cornyn and Tillis got the written commitment they demanded.
Late Sunday, Blanche rescinded the May 18 order that created the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund” — the taxpayer pot designed to compensate people who claim the government was weaponized against them, including January 6 defendants. “This order establishes, beyond any doubt, that there is no fund,” he wrote. But as NBC News found, the only person who signed the rescission was Blanche. The underlying agreement that created the fund was signed by lawyers for Trump, two of his sons, the Trump Organization, and the head of the IRS. One party to a five-party contract announced on X that the contract is void. Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s assessment: “It is a sham and a fraud on the Congress.”
And the rescission doesn’t touch what actually matters. It doesn’t claw back settlements already paid. It doesn’t disturb the tax-audit immunity Blanche personally signed for Trump and his family — the arrangement Judge Kathleen Williams nullified last month while referring Blanche to the bar, and which Aaron Parnas estimates spares Trump roughly $100 million in back taxes. Nothing stops a future attorney general, or Blanche himself, from reissuing the order.
Susan Collins announced she’ll vote no on the floor. Hundreds of his former colleagues signed a petition calling him unfit; the New York City Bar Association filed a formal objection; Epstein survivors testified against him; a federal judge referred him for discipline. If he’s confirmed anyway, remember that the entire accountability apparatus of the American legal profession said no, and the Senate said yes to a man whose qualification for running the Justice Department is that he used to be the defendant’s lawyer.
Read more: CNBC, NBC News, The New Republic, Letters from an American, The Parnas Perspective
Trump Prosecuted a Man for His Own Contractor’s Bad Paint Job
For weeks, Trump blamed vandals for the peeling coating and algae in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — a renovation whose contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coating, he hand-picked himself. He demanded arrests. The DOJ delivered one: Davey Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist. Then Hearn’s lawyers asked for the grand jury transcripts, and on Friday, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro moved to dismiss the case, conceding in court that the evidence wasn’t there.
A prosecutor who charges an innocent man to match a presidential talking point, then folds when discovery approaches, has committed a serious abuse of office. Trump said Pirro “choked” and “folded like an umbrella.” He is reportedly weighing firing her. Pirro and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum were spotted entering the White House hours later. Even Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana understood the actual lesson: “You better not go before a federal judge and make allegations you can’t back up.”
Brian Tyler Cohen’s point about the coverage is the one worth sitting with: legacy outlets described this as a case being “dropped,” a prosecutor who “choked,” a story that “didn’t hold up.” The plain word is lied. Trump lied about vandalism to cover for his own contractor’s shoddy work, the Justice Department indicted a man to make the lie true, and the prosecutor is now in trouble for refusing to keep it going. This is what weaponized law enforcement looks like. A canoeist and a paint job.
Read more: The New Republic, Democracy Now, Letters from an American, Pod Save America
They’re Writing the 2026 Steal in Public
Zeteo cataloged 19 ways Trump and Republicans are working to rig and steal the midterms: voter purges, gutting election security infrastructure, threats of arrests and raids at polling places, and targeted attacks on immigrant and Black voting power. A companion piece sketches the endgame — a scenario in which January 3, 2027 becomes the new January 6, with Republicans challenging Democratic House wins to hold the chamber even in defeat.
I’ve tracked the pieces here as they’ve come: the SAVE Act, the mail-voting executive order now sitting on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, the CMS memo chilling nursing-home voting assistance, the census filing, the Georgia election board hiring deniers with subpoena power. Each one looked small. Together they’re a system. And Brian Beutler argues Senate Democrats just passed on their last pre-election opportunity to force a real confrontation over it.
The counter isn’t complicated, and it hasn’t changed since I first wrote it in July: win by a margin too big to rig, and refuse to be surprised.
Read more: Zeteo, Off Message, David Pakman
That’s your Wednesday. El-Sayed beat $30 million of AIPAC money in a swing state. Blanche cleared committee on a rescission only he signed. Trump prosecuted an Olympic canoeist to cover for his own contractor. And the plan to contest the midterms is being written where you can read it.