“The closer a Negro got to the ballot box, the more he looked like a rapist — E. Franklin Frazier
Mike Rogers is determined. The Floridian hoping to be Michigan’s next U.S. Senator wants to make it clear to MAGA voters that there is no ethical or principled standard so low that he can’t shuffle beneath it.
“You know what, let’s put police officers … as our poll watchers. Because go ahead. Try to intimidate them. Please.”
It’s no longer enough to stop Black people from voting. Now the plan is to beat ‘em up a little. Knock a few heads together. Why stop there? Why not tie up two or three and lynch them to a tree at the entrance to the polling place?
Please.
Rogers claims that extreme measures are required so that he doesn’t “go to bed at 2 a.m. a winner and wake up at 4 a.m. a loser.”
He’s referring to the 2024 US Senate race when he also forced himself to briefly leave his Florida mansion to run a spirited but ultimately failed race, falling to Elissa Slotkin by 19,000 votes.
Another seat has opened up, and Rogers has brought his ocean-front tan and aggressive campaigning back to try again. He’s amping up the destructive Trumpian lies that voting fraud by Democrats is responsible for any election that a Republican loses.
He hallucinates about a mysterious van that showed up late at night packed with altered, fake, or otherwise illegitimate ballots that swung the 2024 election in Slotkin’s favor.
In addition to all the factual rebuttals, there is one prickly inconsistency shrouding this canard. Rogers is essentially saying that devious Democrats were so clever that they could without detection alter enough ballots to steal the election in the Senate race, but somehow these same masterminds didn’t bother with the presidential race, leaving the state in Trump’s camp.
Rogers is a liar, but he’s no fool. He knows he lost two years ago, not because of ballot machinations, but because a swath of MAGA voters so distrusted him that they either skipped that part of the ballot or cast a protest vote for some obscure candidate. Slotkin’s Michigan vote total nearly matched that of Kamela Harris, but Rogers lagged behind Trump by about 123,000 votes.
The MAGA crowd hadn’t forgotten that after the 2020 election Rogers – thinking that the Trump Era was over and that the party would look to new leadership – openly criticized Trump and scoffed at the notion that the election was stolen.
But Trump persevered and rose even stronger, demanding fealty to even the most obvious lies. Rogers has eagerly and willingly hopped on board. There isn’t a marginalized American he won’t demonize. There isn’t a Democrat – or even an independent – that he won’t write off as anti-American.
In this light, adopting the lie of an early-morning stolen election has been as refreshingly easy for him as enjoying a gentle Gulf of Mexico breeze while sipping a Cosmopolitan.
The claim drips of irony. Back in 2000, the year of the Gore-Bush debacle, Rogers started his congressional career by winning a razor-thin election for the U.S. House. Most of the night, it didn’t look like he was going to win. Sometime after midnight at his Lansing election-night party, he tearfully thanked his supporters for their strong effort, and then drove about 40 minutes to sleep at his Brighton home. He actually lived in Michigan back then.
About two hours later, a family friend woke him with the cheery greeting, “Good morning, Congressman.” Late-counted votes from a neighboring township had come in stronger for him than expected, nudging him to an 80-vote victory.
He literally went to bed at 2 a.m. a loser and then woke up at 4 a.m. a winner. Strangely, no one in the Rogers camp saw anything fishy with the late ballot swing. It’s only cheating when the Democrats win.
Rogers doesn’t have to worry about how he’ll wake up the day after this November’s election. Regardless of the outcome, morally and ethically he’ll wake up a loser — just as he does every single day of his life. He seems comfortable with it.
