Apparently, radicalism in Michigan now means asking whether elections are cleanly run. A left-wing column published Tuesday on Salon, written by Heather Digby Parton, brands Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers the "real radical," calls election skepticism the "most noxious, destructive conspiracy theory of all," and says his position should be disqualifying among "thinking people everywhere."
That isn't a definition of radicalism; it's a verdict delivered before the argument begins.
Rogers has suggested that a van carrying ballots into Detroit contributed to his narrow 2024 loss to Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin. He hasn't publicly produced evidence proving that allegation, but he should. An unproven claim isn't automatically a disproven claim, and asking for records, explanations, chain-of-custody safeguards, or a fuller accounting isn't political extremism.
From Salon:
If there is one thing we have been able to count on for the last 30 years, if not longer, it is that it doesn’t matter how extreme the right wing might become or how far down the conspiratorial rabbit hole they go. The media interprets all political events in this polarized environment as validation of the belief that conservatives are always more in touch with Real America, and therefore more deserving of positions of leadership. According to this thesis, if Democrats want to win power, they will have to radically change their positions.
That’s the conventional wisdom when it comes to the Michigan Senate race. After Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s win on August 4 in the Democratic primary, an avalanche of articles, editorials and op-eds — not to mention analysis by television pundits and social media influencers — have appeared claiming that he is too far left for Michigan’s general election voters. Practically no one is doing the same for his GOP opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, who has tacked so far right that he has become a Midwestern hologram of the president.
This pattern is fascinating, especially considering the fact that in the last 35 years, Democrats have won the presidency five times to the Republicans’ four, a number that includes the two times (George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016) the party lost the popular vote but won the anachronistic Electoral College. Coupled with the fact that control of Congress has been evenly split, it’s not as though the GOP has had their fingers on the American pulse this whole time. Instead, they have built a massive partisan media infrastructure and stolen Supreme Court seats to further put their thumbs on the scale of the electoral system with big money and voter suppression.
With the deep unfairness of the Senate giving far more power to small, rural (and conservative) states, the institutional advantage held by Republicans is profound. And yet, according to conventional wisdom and the predictable knee-jerk reactions by too many establishment Democrats, when Republicans win it’s because conservative ideas have won over the people, and when the Democrats win it’s also because conservative ideas have won over the people.
The burden on Rogers is to prove what he alleges. The burden on his critics is to stop pretending their disbelief counts as proof.
Republican concerns over Michigan election administration also didn't materialize from a fever dream. The Republican National Committee has litigated voter-roll maintenance, absentee-ballot procedures, election inspector allocation, and rules governing partisan challengers.
In O'Halloran and DeVisser, Michigan courts found portions of Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson's election-challenger guidance legally defective. The Michigan Supreme Court later affirmed some holdings, reversed others, and vacated another.
That's what a legitimate legal disagreement looks like.
Even now, the underlying records remain a live political and legal dispute. President Donald Trump's Justice Department demanded Wayne County's 2024 ballots and related election materials earlier this year, while Michigan officials refused and called the demand baseless.
From Reuters:
Nessel's office released the DOJ's letter, authored by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, along with a reply vowing to fight the request.
"This request is as absurd as it is baseless,” Nessel said in a joint statement with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.
"If this administration wants to bring this circus to our state, my office is prepared to protect the people’s right to vote.”
Nessel, Whitmer and Benson are Democrats. President Donald Trump, a Republican, has long pushed the false claim that his 2020 election defeat to Democratic President Joe Biden was the result of widespread voter fraud. Dhillon's letter focuses on 2024's elections, arguing they too need scrutiny.
The DOJ confirmed the letter's authenticity in response to a Reuters request but did not provide further comment.
The 2020 election remains a prominent concern for many Trump administration officials. In an interview with Fox News’ "Sunday Morning Futures" program, FBI Director Kash Patel pledged that arrests over alleged 2020 election issues are "coming soon."
On the same TV show, Dhillon touted the administration's efforts to get states to provide access to voter registration lists, saying the department has sued 29 states and the District of Columbia over their refusal of access to voter rolls.
DOJ staffers so far have reviewed 60 million voter records and found they included the names of 350,000 dead persons, said Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department's civil rights division. She did not provide any evidence that votes were cast for those names.
A federal demand doesn't prove fraud. Neither does a state refusal prove everything was flawless. It proves questions over access, oversight, and transparency are still being fought over.
The 2020 court record deserves the same honesty. The Supreme Court rejected Texas v. Pennsylvania, for lack of standing, meaning it didn't decide Texas's underlying election claims.
By contrast, the Seventh Circuit reached the merits of President Trump's Wisconsin constitutional challenge and rejected his claims.
Both facts matter; saying every election challenge was proven false in court is wrong. Saying no court ever reached the merits is wrong, too.
Adults, well, most of us, can handle both truths.
The double standard becomes almost comic when Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed enters the picture. His campaign advocates abolishing ICE, abolishing the Senate filibuster, ending lifetime Supreme Court appointments, changing the appointment structure of the Court, creating a federal redistricting body, and extending Medicare to every American.
People are free to support those ideas. But describing sweeping alterations of federal institutions as the "broad middle" while treating questions about election administration as radical requires a rather creative dictionary.
Heather Digby Parton also spends remarkable energy attacking everything around Rogers. We get complaints about the Electoral College, the Senate's representation of smaller states, "stolen Supreme Court seats," Republican media, conservative voters, prejudice, and what she calls Republican "cult worship" of Trump.
That material tells readers plenty about the writer's political worldview; it tells us considerably less about why Mike Rogers himself qualifies as a radical.
Conservatives shouldn't make the opposite mistake. We don't need to declare every suspicious event fraudulent simply because a Republican raises it.
Evidence matters.
If Rogers can substantiate his Detroit allegation, he should put the evidence on the table. If he can't, the claim should remain exactly what it is: unproven.
But "unproven" isn't a synonym for "radical," and skepticism isn't insurrection. Election rules should withstand questions precisely because elections matter so much.
Calling people dangerous for asking those questions isn't a defense of democracy; it's an attempt to place certain questions outside acceptable debate.
If the word "radical" applies only to the Republican asking questions, while the Democrat proposing major institutional reconstruction gets called mainstream, we are no longer reading a political standard applied fairly.
We're reading campaign literature.
