GOP Senate candidate Mike Rogers’ pitch to Black voters: ‘We’re not bad people’

In the race for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat, former Congressman and FBI agent Mike Rogers easily won his primary. The Republican was aided by a combination of name recognition, lots of campaign cash, and an endorsement from former President Trump.

Rogers has recently picked up some key endorsements, including from the Michigan Farm Bureau.

AgriPac — the Michigan Farm Bureau’s political action committee — had previously supported retiring Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Stabenow.

Rogers was in Detroit last week for a roundtable with Black clergy.

During the event, Rogers told an anecdote of a Michigan family who was having a hard time making ends meet despite having two incomes.

Rogers attributes the problem to both the inflated price of goods and the fact that people aren’t getting paid enough, despite working full time.

“Part of the problem was when [the Biden Administration] funneled cash into the U.S. economy,” he said. “You got so much cash, so few goods, it just drove all the costs up.”

Two rounds of pandemic-era stimulus checks went out during the Trump Administration, before a third set of checks were given out as part of the Biden Administration’s American Rescue Plan Act.

However ARPA did pump a lot of federal dollars into municipalities for public works projects. Economists generally agree the stimulus money staved off a recession, but it did fuel a meteoric rise in inflation.

Rogers has been hitting the campaign trail all over the state of Michigan, including multiple stops in Detroit. He says it’s making a difference with Black voters.

“Democrats tell them you can’t vote for the other team because they’re bad people,” Rogers says. “And what they’re finding out is we’re not bad people.”

“We actually have unique solutions for their problems, including literacy, including criminal justice reform, including block grants that actually go to communities.”

Immigration has been a hot topic throughout this election cycle.

Lately, former President Donald Trump and GOP Vice Presidential Candidate J.D. Vance have been using racist tropes to attack Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. The lies about immigrants eating pets and stealing jobs have led to bomb threats and have further widened political divisions in the area.

That’s not something that concerns Rogers.

“These campaigns are full of really bad things that people say over on both sides of the aisle,” Rogers says.

He says the Black faith leaders aren’t concerned with the rhetoric coming from the Trump-Vance campaign.

“These people aren’t listening to that,” Rogers said.

“You know what they’re listening to: How can you help me with criminal justice reform? How can you make my groceries less expensive? How can you make my gas bill [go] down? So I’m not playing that game where we parse words that happened at a rally somewhere. I’m not doing it,” he said.

Rogers is facing Democratic U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin in the general election.