Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) met with Republican Mike Rogers for a second debate in Michigan’s Senate race on Monday night, presenting a rare opportunity to shake up what until now has been a static race.
The two candidates got into heated exchanges, much as they did at their first meeting in Grand Rapids last week, while still trying to signal to viewers that they valued bipartisanship and civility.
The debate repeatedly turned back to each politician’s record. Slotkin has served in the House since 2019, allowing Rogers to tie her to President Joe Biden’s record on the economy.
Rogers served seven terms in the same chamber until 2015, a fact Slotkin used to paint him as a career politician beholden to special interests.
Here are the Washington Examiner’s takeaways from their hourlong debate in Detroit.
Candidates spar over records in Congress
One of the most memorable exchanges of the night came as the two sparred over Medicare and Social Security.
Slotkin repeatedly pointed to Rogers’s votes in the House, including his past opposition to the government negotiating drug prices, to accuse him of siding with drug companies and their “pure, unadulterated greed.”
Rogers bristled at the accusation, speaking under his breath as Slotkin finished her remarks. He accused her of misrepresenting his record before pivoting back to the higher cost of groceries and energy bills experienced after the pandemic.
“You don’t hear her talking about those successes because it’s been so harmful for our state and our seniors,” Rogers said.
Slotkin did not let the issue go, retorting, “Just own your record, Mike, man,” before the conversation turned to climate change.
The exchange reflected how each candidate sees the other’s tenure in Congress as a liability. As Slotkin introduced voters to her stances, Rogers said Slotkin had “done nothing” to solve problems in the House, both domestically and abroad.
At one point, in discussing Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, he accused Slotkin of “bad judgment after bad judgment after bad judgment.”
Slotkin, for her part, used Rogers’s more establishment reputation in Congress to accuse him of having undergone a political transformation under former President Donald Trump.
“I want the 2014 Mike Rogers back,” she said in discussing Rogers’s flirtations with Trump’s claims of a stolen election.
“The 2014 Mike Rogers is absolutely here,” Rogers responded before pivoting once again to inflation. He said civility would return to politics after Washington comes together to fix problems he said Slotkin had helped create.
Rogers uses transgender politics to fend off abortion attacks
When the conversation turned to abortion, Slotkin leveled an allegation that Rogers is used to making against Slotkin: that on the issues that count, she sides with the Democrats.
With abortion, she accused Rogers of reliably voting with Republicans to restrict abortion access during his tenure in the House.
“He has shown us who he is. Do not trust him on this issue,” Slotkin said.
Rogers has voted to restrict the procedure, signing on to “life at conception” bills in the House, but since Michigan passed a referendum protecting access in 2022, Rogers has vowed not to do anything in the Senate to circumvent that referendum.
He called the decision to have an abortion one of the most “heart-wrenching” a woman will have to make before associating Slotkin with efforts to allow biological males to compete in girls sports.
He called the issue of abortion an “outlier” in the debate over women’s rights and said that support for access “certainly does not put you on team normal.”
Slotkin uses Betsy DeVos as boogeyman on education
One of the more novel attacks from Slotkin came during a question on education. Rogers said raising reading levels in Michigan schools was the “biggest civil rights issue of this generation,” while Slotkin emphasized teacher pay and more federal funding.
The conversation then turned hostile as Slotkin attempted to tie Rogers to Betsy DeVos, the former secretary of education whose emphasis on school choice and voucher programs has made her a boogeyman on the Left.
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She accused Rogers of wanting to defund public schools, citing the campaign donations he has received from DeVos.
In response, Rogers painted Slotkin as a private-school-attending elite who could not meaningfully address the problems of public schooling.
