Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers is racking up another congressional endorsement, this one from House GOP secretary Lisa McClain (R., Mich.), National Review has exclusively learned, yet another sign that the former House Intelligence Committee chairman and FBI agent is consolidating support among Michigan Republicans in his primary bid for the seat of retiring Democratic senator Debbie Stabenow.
By endorsing Rogers, McClain joins a growing list of Republicans — including former president Donald Trump and two Republicans representatives from Michigan, Jack Bergman and Tim Walberg — in backing the preferred 2024 candidate of the Senate Republican campaign arm ahead of the state’s August primary. The crowded GOP primary field also includes wealthy businessman Sandy Pensler as well as former representatives Justin Amash (L., Mich.) and Peter Meijer (R., Mich.), who voted in favor of Trump’s first and second impeachments, respectively. (There are signs that the Senate primary field is slowly winnowing, as former Detroit police chief James Craig and Michigan State Board of Education member Nikki Snyder both recently suspended their campaigns.)
As NR reported in December, Rogers’s support for his party’s presumptive 2024 nominee is quite the turnaround for someone who has previously said that Trump’s “time has passed”and who even briefly explored challenging him for the 2024 presidential nomination. “If you weren’t disagreeing at some point along the way, you weren’t engaged in politics,” Rogers told NR in an interview late last year.
But the former congressman’s prior criticisms of Trump are water under the bridge for the former president, who praised Rogers during a campaign rally last week in Grand Rapids, Mich., and declared the state’s Senate primary “over.”
Also likely to publicly endorse the NRSC’s preferred Michigan Senate candidate in the near future is Representative Bill Huizenga (R., Mich.), whose leadership PAC, Upper Hand Fund, gave $5,000 to Rogers in November, according to Federal Election Commission reports.
Whoever wins the Michigan GOP’s Senate nomination is expected to have a tough general-election race against likely Democratic Senate nominee Representative Elissa Slotkin, a powerhouse fundraiser in the blue-leaning battleground that hasn’t elected a Republican to the Senate in three decades.