Michigan GOP Senate candidate Mike Rogers (right) speaks at a rally on Saginaw Valley State University campus in Michigan alongside former President Donald Trump (left) on Oct. 3, 2024 ahead of the presidential election | Photo: Anna Liz Nichols
In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, now a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, called for President Donald Trump to accept a peaceful transition of power and condemned election denialism by Trump and his allies.
“The president and some in his party are refusing to accept the outcome of the election, instead sowing doubt and conspiracy,” Rogers wrote in a Washington Post op-ed one day prior to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building. “This was an election that multiple independent observers, the courts and both parties have found to be free and fair. To imply otherwise is self-serving and stokes further discord in our country.”
“President Donald Trump’s attempts to influence the electoral processes in Michigan, and elsewhere, is cause for both concern and alarm, and should be roundly rejected by both Democrats and Republicans alike,” he wrote in a Detroit News op-ed about a month earlier urging Michigan officials to certify the results. “It is well past time that the president accepts that he lost and begin the peaceful and orderly transition of power to President-elect Joe Biden.”
Now, Rogers, endorsed by Trump in his second Senate election in two cycles, is espousing his own election denial about his 2024 Senate bid — saying in October, without offering evidence, that a van of ballots was delivered to a polling place in Detroit. He embraced similar rhetoric during the 2024 campaign as well.
As he heads into 2026, Rogers is surrounding himself with a campaign full of those who also repeatedly questioned the results of the 2020 election.
Meshawn Maddock and Kenneth Thompson, for example, were both granted federal pardons by President Trump earlier this month for their alleged role in the “false electors” scheme that sought to cast Michigan’s electoral votes in 2020 for Trump, despite the state voting for former President Joe Biden.
Both Maddock and Thompson are now county co-chairs on the Rogers campaign, in Oakland County and Ionia County, respectively.
Screenshot of Meshawn Maddock’s X account 1/5/24
“Mike Rogers has either lost every last photon of sanity,” wrote Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party and the Chief Operating Officer of the Lincoln Project, “or he’s a lying pr**k who is cynically exploiting mushy MAGA minds in his desperation and thirst to be liked by them rather than normal American Michiganders.”
Rogers’ campaign did not respond to a request for comment from the Advance.
Rogers’ switch up demonstrates a greater trend in Republican politics — that it is increasingly hard to be a GOP candidate with a national or statewide profile without taking part in some level of election denial.
U.S. Senate candidate and former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers rallies for Donald Trump in Freeland., May 1, 2024 | Kyle Davidson
In 2022, for example, PBS tracking showed that of GOP gubernatorial candidates, 28 flat-out denied or fueled denial of the 2020 election compared to just eight who defended the results, and in secretary of state races, 19 Republicans denied or doubted the results while seven upheld Biden’s victory. Both GOP candidates in Michigan, Tudor Dixon and Kristina Karamo, respectively, fell in the category of expressly denying the results.
“Something we’re seeing nationally as well as in Michigan, is general mis- and disinformation that really undermines public trust,” said Alexa Solis, a Senior Communications Manager for All Voting is Local.
Maddock and Thompson are not the only election deniers on Rogers’ team. Nearly a dozen of the other county co-chairs named by Rogers in June had made statements online promoting conspiracy theories on the presidential election or the Jan. 6 riots. Norm Shinkle, one of the co-chairs in Ingham County, was the sole member of the State Board of Canvassers who refused to certify the 2020 elections, even as the other Republican on the board certified them.
“Looking ahead into 2026 there are definitely risks of election sabotage,” Daniel Rivera, Michigan senior campaign manager for All Voting Is Local, said. “Especially since these pardons happened and these folks are back out in the community, I would say it could serve as a blueprint to undermine and challenge election results, but we’re ready to fight back for those future attempts.”
Rivera works to ensure public trust and confidence in elections, emphasizing that election officials, regardless of party, are largely committed to ensuring that elections run smoothly and are free and fair.
“What we see as another challenge, are these partisan attempts to overturn the will of the American people,” he said.
