Michigan Senate candidate Justin Amash will have a familiar (R) by his name on the Aug. 6 primary ballot. However, that’s not how he wanted to be identified when he last was in Congress in January 2021.
Amash was elected in the 2010 Tea Party wave when Republicans won control of the House. Amash stood out during his decade in Congress for his libertarian-leaning approach to governance, frequently clashing with the GOP over federal spending, interventionist foreign policy, and a range of other topics. In a scorching July 4, 2019, Washington Post op-ed, the then-Grand Rapids-area congressman announced that he was leaving the Republican Party and becoming an independent. Then, in April 2020, he joined the Libertarian Party, finishing out the final eight months-plus of his term as the only member of Congress to wear that label in office before retiring from the House.
Amash is now back in the Republican fold to run for Senate, a not-particularly-surprising move since the third-party route is almost always a political death knell. The Senate seat is open because Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) is retiring from the chamber after 24 years. Republicans see the open seat as a prime pickup opportunity in their quest to overturn Senate Democrats’ current 51-49 majority. The leading Democratic Senate candidate is Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), a former national security official who, in 2018, beat a Republican House incumbent for a Lansing-area seat in her first try for political office.
Amash’s most prominent competitors for the Republican nomination are also former House members. Ex-Rep. Mike Rogers represented a similar Lansing-area House seat as the one Democratic Rep. Slotkin currently does, from 2001-15. Rogers was House Intelligence Committee chairman for the last four years of his congressional career, and the Army veteran and former FBI agent went on to host a reality spy TV series on CNN, among other post-Capitol Hill endeavors.
Former Rep. Peter Meijer replaced Amash in the House, but only for a single, two-year term, it turned out. The supermarket heir and Army Reserve veteran — with a stint in Iraq as an intelligence officer — was among 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach then-President Donald Trump during the commander in chief’s second impeachment proceeding for Trump’s actions or, more precisely, inactions, during the Jan. 6 Capitol riots and events surrounding it to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 win. Meijer sought reelection in 2022 but lost the Republican primary to a former Trump administration official who was defeated for the western Michigan House in the general election by now-Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-MI).
The Michigan Senate race will take place amid the backdrop of a fierce fight for the White House in the perennial swing state between Biden and Trump. Since Trump won Michigan narrowly in 2016, Democrats have had the upper hand in elections. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) won twice, and the state legislature is controlled by Democrats, the first blue trifecta in nearly 40 years. Moreover, Republicans have only won a single Senate race from 1978 on, with former Sen. Spencer Abraham winning a single, six-year term in the “Republican Revolution” of 1994 before losing to Democratic rival Stabenow in 2000.
The state is still competitive for certain GOP candidates, said Ken Kollman, professor of American politics at the University of Michigan.
“A Republican can win Michigan, but you have to be pretty moderate,” Kollman told the Washington Examiner.
Whether Amash is such a candidate remains to be seen. Amash, a Grand Rapids-area lawyer and state legislator before winning his open House seat, has a maverick reputation in the House that could help. He was the only non-Democrat on Dec. 18, 2019, to vote for both articles of impeachment against Trump in the Ukraine/bribery affair, which the then-president was acquitted for in the Senate a couple of months later.
But Amash doesn’t seem to have much support among the GOP establishment. National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesman Mike Berg mocked Amash’s return party switcheroo in a post on X: “And here we thought Peter Meijer was the biggest Trump hater in this race.”
Amash’s adversarial history with Trump could play negatively among some Republicans in the state but could help him with independents. As one of only a handful of Palestinian American congressmen to be elected, Amash may court the large Arab American population in Michigan. Some in the community recently led a successful campaign to vote “uncommitted” instead of Biden in the Democratic primary over his handling of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks. An estimated 3 in 4 Arab Americans voted “uncommitted,” suggesting weakness for Democrats within the community.
The leading Republican primary candidate is Rogers, who has gained the former president’s endorsement, despite flip-flopping on Trump’s own nomination for president. The endorsement comes despite Rogers previously saying Trump’s “time has passed” and calling his tactics “clearly destructive.” Recently, Rogers stated his support for Trump as the 2024 GOP nominee for president.
Rogers announced his run in September 2023 and has the full backing of the Republican National Committee and NRSC. Steve Daines, chairman of the NRSC, voiced his support, emphasizing Rogers’s potential strength in the suburbs. In the last quarter of 2023, he raised $1 million, bringing his total raised since September to $2 million.
“It’s really Mike Rogers’s race to lose,” the University of Michigan’s Kollman said of the Republican nomination fight.
“He’s polling much better than others,” Kollman said. “The other known names are anathema to a lot of Republican voters in the state.”
Former Rep. Meijer, of the Meijer grocery store family dynasty, hasn’t drawn much interest from national Republicans. The RNC is notably disappointed in Meijer for bidding for the seat and released a statement to Politico late last year declaring that he “isn’t viable in a primary election.” The concern is if Meijer pulls votes from Rogers, it will clear the way for a candidate who is too extreme to be successful in the general election to win the primary.
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Whoever wins the primary will likely face Slotkin, a centrist Democrat who worked in the CIA and as the acting assistant secretary of defense at the Pentagon prior to being elected to office. But the RNC will need to invest heavily to beat her; she raised a record $2.8 million in the final quarter of 2023.
Moreover, Democrats are already going after Rogers for living in Florida full-time after leaving Congress and then returning to Michigan to seek office again. Whether that bloodies him up in the GOP primary remains to be seen. But it could provide an opening for Amash, whose topic set in some ways presaged Trump’s populist-nationalist pitch to voters by several years.
