US Press
Mike Rogers asks AIPAC to stay out of his Michigan Senate race
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The most expensive pro-Israel campaign ever mounted in an American primary lost this month, and its intended beneficiary in the general election now does not want its help.
The New York Times reported on Monday that Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee for the Senate in Michigan, has told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee he would rather it did not advertise on his behalf.
Rogers met the committee's chairman, Michael Tuchin, in Los Angeles and made the request in person. The day after that conversation, according to the report, AIPAC shelved a video advertisement it had already prepared against his Democratic opponent.
That opponent is Abdul El-Sayed, the physician and former Detroit health director who won the Democratic nomination on 4 August against Representative Haley Stevens, and who becomes the first Muslim nominated by either major party for a United States Senate seat. AIPAC and allied groups spent more than $30 million trying to stop him.
The reasoning#
Rogers's calculation, as the Times describes it, is tactical rather than substantive. He intends to run against El-Sayed's positions on Israel and against his political associations, and he does not want the contest converted into a second referendum on the lobby itself. His campaign's assessment is that AIPAC's intervention in the primary backfired, and would backfire again.
That assessment is the story. For three decades the committee's endorsement and its independent expenditures have been treated in both parties as an asset a candidate accepts and a liability an opponent absorbs. A Republican nominee in a state Michigan's size asking it to stand down is a repricing, and it happened three weeks after Michigan Democrats chose the candidate the money was spent against.
El-Sayed has campaigned on ending the unconditional American military aid relationship with Israel, arguing that the money spent on wars abroad is owed to Americans at home. Michigan holds the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, in Dearborn and across Wayne County, and the primary was fought openly over Gaza.
What it does not mean#
Rogers's request is not a change of position, and nothing in the report suggests he has moved on Israel policy. AIPAC remains free to spend independently in the race; a candidate cannot instruct an outside group, only ask. The committee has not said publicly whether it will hold off through November.
For Palestinian readers the significance is narrower than a shift in American policy and larger than a campaign anecdote. What the Michigan race has established is that pro-Israel spending is now a variable a Republican strategist can decide is costly — not a constant. The lobby's money has not diminished. Its price has changed.
The general election is on 3 November.
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