Former Michigan Rep. Justin Amash says he voted for neither candidate in his state’s closely watched U.S. Senate race, but if forced to weigh the two on civil liberties, he believes Republican Mike Rogers is far more dangerous than Democrat Abdul El-Sayed.
Rogers, a former congressman endorsed by President Donald Trump, is running against El-Sayed in a contest drawing national attention. Amash, who left Congress in early 2021 after serving as a Republican, then an Independent, then a Libertarian, announced Monday in a thread on X that he did not vote for either man.
“It goes without saying that I have major disagreements with both Mike Rogers and Abdul El-Sayed, and neither one particularly likes me,” Amash wrote. “I also don’t vote for ‘the lesser of two evils.’ I believe you should support a candidate only if you truly want the person to hold that office.”
But Amash added a caveat: “I do know which one would be more dangerous in the U.S. Senate — and it’s not even close.”
Comparing Rogers to Bernie Sanders
To make his case, Amash compared El-Sayed to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who has endorsed El-Sayed and whose politics Amash says closely track the Democratic candidate’s.
“To assess who is the greater threat to American freedom, let’s take a look at my time in Congress with Rogers and Bernie Sanders, who shares many of El-Sayed’s views and can serve as his stand-in,” Amash wrote.
Amash argued that while Sanders holds policy views he considers harmful, Sanders lacks the institutional power to enact them. Rogers, he said, is a different story on the specific set of issues where a single senator can swing outcomes.
“Rogers is extraordinarily bad on all the issues on which an individual member of Congress may be the deciding vote… issues like war powers, surveillance, privacy, the freedom of speech, criminal justice, and government oversight and accountability,” Amash wrote. “Rogers poses a far greater threat to individual liberty and the Constitution than Sanders.”
He went further, saying Sanders is “actually much better” than the typical member of Congress on those civil-liberties questions — a comparison he extended to El-Sayed.
“I think it’s fair to view El-Sayed as someone who mostly will follow in Sanders’s footsteps on policy and therefore will be far less dangerous in practice than Rogers,” Amash wrote, adding: “El-Sayed as a senator will do many things that are bad. The question addressed at length is not whether he’s good but simply whether he’s better on the whole than Rogers.”
History between Amash and Rogers
Amash and Rogers have a political rivalry dating back to 2024, when Amash lost the GOP Senate primary to Rogers. Rogers went on to lose that year’s general election to Democrat Elissa Slotkin, who was then a House member.
The Rogers and El-Sayed campaigns did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The race took another twist Sunday when Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., who lost the Democratic Senate primary to El-Sayed, endorsed Rogers ahead of Election Day.
