Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers suggested last month he lost his 2024 Senate bid after a “van showed up in Detroit with ballots” before the final count was over.
Rogers recounted the story during an Oct. 17 speech in Muskegon and an Oct. 7 event in Detroit, according to the Detroit News, which obtained and reviewed two videos of the remarks. During the Muskegon speech, he used air quotes to describe the ballots possessed by the alleged van.
Rogers, who is running for Senate again in 2028, did not substantiate his claims in the videos. A spokesperson for his campaign did not return a request for comment.
The former U.S. representative ran for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat in 2024 but narrowly lost to Democratic U.S. Senate Elissa Slotkin by a vote difference of just 19,006. The final tally was 2,712,686 to 2,693,680 votes, or 48.64% to 48.30%, according to the official results from the Michigan Bureau of Elections.
Rogers conceded to Slotkin the day after Election Day as only a few votes were still being counted. He did not request a recount.
Slotkin’s campaign did not return a request for comment.
During the Muskegon event, Rogers said the van with “ballots” appeared in Detroit around 5:30 a.m. the morning after Election Day. At the Detroit event, he told the crowd that it “swung the election on us,” the Detroit News reported.
Detroit, Michigan’s largest city and a Democratic stronghold, was a focal point of voter fraud claims in the state in 2020, when President Donald Trump, a Republican, lost the state and presidential election that year.
Trump raised further questions about election integrity in Detroit in 2024, when he won Michigan and the presidency. In that race, he narrowly beat then-Vice President Kamala Harris by about 80,100.
At the Muskegon event, Rogers said there was a problem that election with some conservatives voting the top of the ticket for Trump but no one else.
“This is important for all of us Republicans here and conservatives,” Rogers said. “One hundred thousand people walked into the poll, they voted for Donald Trump and they turned around and left. They didn’t vote for one other Republican on the ticket. If we’d had gotten 9,000 of those folks, we would’ve won. That works out to about 232 votes per county. That’s how short we were.”
Rogers is the most well-known Republican candidate so far to have declared a 2028 run for the U.S. Senate seat being left open by Democratic U.S. Sen. Gary Peters’ retirement.
Some of the Democratic candidates for Senate in 2028 took aim on social media at Rogers for his remarks about the 2024 election loss.
“The 2024 election wasn’t stolen,” said U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Birmingham. “Mike, you lost fair and square last year and you’ll lose again next year.”
“Just like Donald Trump, when Mike Rogers loses he claims it must be rigged,’ said state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, D-Royal Oak. “Michigan deserves better.”
“Or…maybe you just lost because you voted to raise Rx drug costs 60 times when you were in Congress,” said candidate Abdul El-Sayed. “Or because you retired to Florida to be a Pharma lobbyist. Or because you smile like everyone else frowns.”
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