Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez urged Michigan voters on Thursday to look past Republican attacks on Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, saying the attacks were meant to distract from his opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, and a record in Congress she believes has helped raise health care costs across the country.
At a rally for El-Sayed, as seen on video, Ocasio-Cortez observed, “And by the way, the interests that help incentivize the policies that are making this happen are bankrolling the other guy. And they don’t want people to hear the reason they’re doing all this about Abdul is because what they actually don’t want people to hear about is Mike Rogers.”
She cited Rogers’ votes over his 14 years in Congress. “Mike Rogers, who voted against the ACA. Mike Rogers, who voted against the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund,” she said, adding that he “voted to repeal the ACA many times after voting against its establishment to begin with.”
“And now Mike Rogers is showing up at either the border with Canada or on television wondering why health care is so expensive,” she alleged. “It’s expensive because of you, Mike.”
Ocasio-Cortez campaigned on Thursday in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, visiting Escanaba, Iron Mountain, and Marquette, where more than 1,200 people attended a rally at Northern Michigan University’s arena. She held events in the Detroit area on Friday and announced that she had shifted $1 million from her own campaign fund to support El-Sayed.
The race to fill the seat vacated by retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters is one of the most closely watched in the midterm elections and could decide control of the Senate. The Cook Political Report rates it a toss-up. In the RealClearPolitics average as of October 14, El-Sayed led Rogers by 2.6 percentage points, though several recent polls put the race within the margin of error, and a conservative-commissioned poll this week showed Rogers leading by 2 points. Republicans have not won a Senate race in Michigan since 1994.
Most of the votes Ocasio-Cortez cites can be found in the congressional record. Rogers, who served in the House from 2001 to 2015, voted against the Affordable Care Act in 2010, along with all other House Republicans, and has since worked to repeal it, including in 2011, when he voted against its establishment.
According to House records, Rogers voted twice in 2010 against the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, which established a federal program to monitor and treat those hurt by the attacks and reopened the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. In committee debate over the bill that year, Rogers warned that the measure could put the nation’s financial stability at risk. When El-Sayed brought up these votes earlier in the campaign, Rogers dismissed the charge as a lie.
On prescription drugs, Rogers opposed importing cheaper medicine from Canada and, in the 2003 debate over establishing the drug benefit under Medicare, fought a motion to allow the government to negotiate drug prices, as reported by Bridge Michigan. At the time, he argued that imports could bring in counterfeit drugs. In his 2024 Senate campaign, Rogers called Medicare drug price negotiation “sugar high politics,” as the Michigan Advance reported.
Democrats, based on reporting by the Michigan Independent, say Rogers’ campaigns and political action committee have raised more than $1 million from the pharmaceutical and health products industries since 1999. Rogers’ campaign says he will work to make health care more affordable, including by lowering drug prices, and his record supports that.
Ocasio-Cortez’s quip about the Canadian border relates to Rogers’ campaign ads filmed along the Detroit River with Windsor, Ontario in the background. In one ad, Rogers says that a drug costing $200 per month in Windsor would cost a Michigan family $800, and vows to take on the drug industry.
Rogers’ health care plan, dubbed “Healthcare That Works for Working Families,” focuses on price transparency and the private market instead of a government overhaul. The plan would fine hospitals and insurers for not disclosing their true prices, expand TrumpRx drug discount program, accelerate the approval process for generics, and require insurers to disclose their claim denial rates, penalizing those with excessive denials.
“Whereas Abdul tries to destroy our healthcare system, Mike is fighting to fix it,” said Rogers’ campaign spokesperson Alyssa Brouillet to the Detroit Metro Times.
According to Bridge Michigan, some federal price transparency rules are already in effect, and Rogers’ plan does not impose new requirements on drug manufacturers.
El-Sayed, 41, an epidemiologist and former health director of Detroit and Wayne County, has made Medicare for All the centerpiece of his campaign. He says a single public insurance program would reduce costs by removing overhead from private insurers. His plan would also allow people to buy private insurance alongside the government plan, a change from many previous Medicare-for-All plans that his opponents criticized him for during the Democratic primary.
Rogers opposes such an approach. “The way we don’t do it is blow up the system that we have,” he told reporters in September. He also said that if El-Sayed wanted a system like Canada’s, “he should move to Canada.”
Ocasio-Cortez says Republicans usually tend to go after El-Sayed instead of addressing health care costs. Rogers and his team have spent the fall portraying El-Sayed, who would be the first Muslim U.S. senator, as dangerously radical. On Thursday, while Ocasio-Cortez was campaigning in the Upper Peninsula, Rogers toured with Vice President Vance in Monroe and released a video in which he claims that El-Sayed “cannot be allowed anywhere near the United States Senate.” He has also tried to tie El-Sayed to terrorist organizations without any evidence, as reported by Michigan Public.
Rogers’ spokesperson described Ocasio-Cortez’s visit as “the latest trick up the Democrats’ sleeve” and called El-Sayed a radical leftist, Semafor reported.
Former President Barack Obama will rally with El-Sayed in Detroit on October 24, while President Donald Trump is expected to visit Michigan on October 25, according to NewsNation. In the latest fundraising period, Rogers has raised about $6.5 million, while El-Sayed has raised $3.8 million.
Election Day is November 3.
