Former U.S. Rep. Justin Amash says he voted for neither candidate in Michigan’s closely watched U.S. Senate race, but he’s made clear which one he thinks would do more damage in Washington: Republican Mike Rogers.
In a thread posted on X, Amash said he cast his ballot without picking either Rogers, who has President Donald Trump’s endorsement, or Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. “I also don’t vote for ‘the lesser of two evils,'” Amash wrote. “I believe you should support a candidate only if you truly want the person to hold that office. I’ve already voted, and consistent with the above principle, I didn’t vote for Rogers or El-Sayed. But I do know which one would be more dangerous in the U.S. Senate — and it’s not even close.”
Amash, who represented Michigan in Congress from 2011 to 2021 and now identifies as a Libertarian, lost the 2024 Republican Senate primary to Rogers. Rogers went on to lose that year’s general election to Democrat Elissa Slotkin.
Comparing Rogers to Bernie Sanders
To make his case, Amash compared Rogers to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., calling Sanders a political stand-in for El-Sayed since Sanders has endorsed him and the two share similar views.
“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 he disagrees sharply with many of Sanders’ proposals, the structure of government limits how much damage a single senator with those views can do. Rogers, he said, is a different matter.
“In contrast, Rogers is extraordinarily bad on all the issues on which an individual member of Congress may be the deciding vote. Again, these are issues like war powers, surveillance, privacy, the freedom of speech, criminal justice, and government oversight and accountability,” Amash wrote.
He went further, writing that “Rogers poses a far greater threat to individual liberty and the Constitution than Sanders,” adding that Sanders is “actually much better” than the typical member of Congress on those specific issues.
Applying that same logic to the current race, Amash concluded that El-Sayed would likely govern in a way similar to Sanders. “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,” he wrote, though he added a caveat: “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.”
Neither the Rogers nor the El-Sayed campaign immediately responded to requests for comment.
A race full of twists
The comments add another unusual turn to a Senate contest that has already seen cross-party moves. Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens, who lost the Democratic primary to El-Sayed this year, endorsed Rogers on Sunday, shaking up the race just days before voters headed to the polls.
Amash, who voted to impeach President Trump in late 2019 while still serving as a Republican in the House, switched his party affiliation to independent that same year and to Libertarian in 2020.
