Could Mike Rogers' Message Be Leading Him to Defeat?

He’s a communist. He’s a Sharia-adherent Muslim. He is friends and allies with America-haters and Jew-haters. And there’s one other thing that’s also true about Abdul El-Sayed: he could very well be the next U.S. senator from Michigan.

Newsweek reported the startling news on Thursday: For all his divisiveness, and for all the confidence that people have had that there are still enough patriots in Michigan to defeat him (which may still turn out to be true), El-Sayed “leads Republican Mike Rogers in two September surveys of Michigan’s U.S. Senate race as the midterm campaign enters its closing stretch and voters focus on household costs.”

Well, we know El-Sayed is going to get nearly 100% of the Muslim vote in Dearborn, Hamtramck, and their environs, but could he win the whole state? Yes: “A Fox News poll found a near-even race, with a very slight advantage for the El-Sayed, while Big Data Poll measured a wider Democratic edge using another sample and approach.”

Newsweek remarks that “the findings give El-Sayed fresh momentum and suggest he currently holds the better position, though neither survey shows a clear lead beyond polling uncertainty.” Polling uncertainty is right. Polls for years now have tended to underestimate support for patriots and Republicans in general, sometimes drastically so. That could well be happening here.

Or it could be simply that the politics of anger is working again. Newsweek states that “at a September campaign event, Rogers framed the choice starkly: ‘Do you want to give your family divisiveness and anger, or do you want to give them the promise of America?’”

That could well be a winning formula. But we must be aware of the fact that divisiveness and anger have actually won before over vague and lofty talk of “the promise of America.” As the campaign enters its final weeks, Rogers should take careful note of the negative example of one of the most famous losing campaigns in American history, that of Thomas E. Dewey for president in 1948.

The Democrat Party had suffered not one, but two splits. Former Vice President Henry Wallace was running to the left of President Harry S. Truman. Segregationist Strom Thurmond was running to his right. With the Democrat vote split three ways and Truman unpopular, Dewey, who had lost to Roosevelt in 1944, looked to be a lock. He led comfortably in all the polls, so much so that his relatives began writing to him about when would be a good time to visit him in the White House. The New York Times declared: “Thomas E. Dewey’s election as President is a foregone conclusion.” Just before the election, Life magazine ran a photo of Dewey captioned: “The next President of the United States.”

Virtually everyone, except Harry Truman, seemed to agree.

Since Dewey and his team ascribed his 1944 defeat to being overly aggressive and partisan, they opted this time around to deal in vague, soothing platitudes and not engage Truman. Dewey’s determination to be inoffensive left him with nothing but bromides and meaningless verbiage. In a speech in Phoenix, he intoned: “America’s future — like yours in Arizona — is still ahead of us.” The Louisville Courier Journal ridiculed him: “No presidential candidate in the future will be so inept that four of his major speeches can be boiled down to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. Our future lies ahead.”

Truman, in contrast, went vigorously on the offensive. He raced around the country excoriating the Republican-controlled Eightieth Congress as “the worst in history” and the Republicans themselves as “gluttons of privilege.” Truman asked, after the manner of “progressives” since William Jennings Bryan, “Is the government of the United States going to run in the interest of the people as a whole or in the interest of a small group of privileged big businessmen?” He sounded, in fact, a bit like Abdul El-Sayed railing against corporate PAC money.

The crowds loved it, and exhorted him to “Give ’em hell, Harry!” He did. The New York Times headlined its coverage of one Truman speech as “PRESIDENT LIKENS DEWEY TO HITLER AS FASCISTS’ TOOL.” Even then, Dewey wouldn’t respond.

Harry gave ’em hell again on election night, confounding all the pundits by soundly defeating Dewey (and rendering both Thurmond and Wallace, who had once appeared so formidable, utterly irrelevant). After the election, Truman was photographed jubilantly holding the Chicago Tribune’s early edition, featuring the headline “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.” The president had proven the whole world wrong.

Could Mike Rogers be the Thomas E. Dewey of 2026? It would be an immense tragedy for the entire nation if Abdul El-Sayed went to the Senate. But it could happen.

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