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Detroit News backs Rogers: El-Sayed 'is not someone who can be trusted'

Detroit News, Which Never Backed Trump, Endorses Rogers and Says El-Sayed Is Hiding His Past

by
M.A. Rothman

By M.A. RothmanSeptember 17, 2026 · 4 min read
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The Detroit News endorsed Republican Mike Rogers for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat on September 16, and it did so in an editorial that dismantled his Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed. “Mike Rogers is clearly the best choice for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat,” the paper’s editorial board wrote, while warning that about El-Sayed, “It’s impossible to know who he really is or where he would stand in the Senate.”

What gives the endorsement its weight is who wrote it. This is not a MAGA paper. The Detroit News has never endorsed Donald Trump. In 2016 it backed Libertarian Gary Johnson, and in 2020 and 2024 it made no presidential endorsement at all. And in this very editorial, the board went out of its way to say Trump’s policies “have, without question, harmed” Michiganders.

The problem the board couldn’t get past

The editorial’s sharpest charge against El-Sayed was not about a policy position. It was about what he has erased.

According to the board, El-Sayed has deleted social media posts that reportedly called into question his attitude about America after the September 11, 2001, attacks. He has also, the paper wrote, “taken down roughly 100 YouTube videos” that paint an unflattering picture of him.

The board’s conclusion was blunt: “A candidate who feels the need to hide his past from voters is not someone who can be trusted to be the same person after Election Day as he was on the campaign trail.”

That is a remarkable sentence for a mainstream newspaper to print about a major party’s Senate nominee seven weeks before an election. Voters can argue about health policy or tax rates. A candidate who scrubs his own record is asking them to vote for someone they are not allowed to see.

Piker, the radical wing, and Israel

The News also raised El-Sayed’s apparent ideological alignment with Hasan Piker, the far-left online streamer, as well as his friendliness with democratic socialists. The board warned that, if elected, El-Sayed “would vote with the Democratic Party’s radical wing” and add to the ranks of the anti-Israel members of Michigan’s Democratic congressional delegation.

For voters who care about America’s alliance with Israel, that line matters. Michigan’s House delegation already includes some of the Jewish state’s harshest critics. The Detroit News is telling readers that El-Sayed would carry that outlook into the Senate, where votes on arms sales and aid to Israel are decided.

The “physician” question

El-Sayed built his campaign identity around his medical background. He previously led Detroit’s health department and the Wayne County health department. But the editorial called out a gap in that story: while El-Sayed holds a medical degree and has described himself as a physician, the board noted, “he does not have a license to practice medicine.”

The board’s overall verdict on his rĂ©sumĂ© was withering. El-Sayed, it wrote, “has a thin career background that contains little to recommend him for one of the nation’s most powerful leadership jobs.” He has never held elected office.

Why Rogers

The contrast the paper drew could hardly be sharper. “Mike Rogers is the prototype of a United States Senator,” the editorial said. Rogers served 14 years in the House, “rising to chair of the vital Intelligence Committee,” after earlier service as an Army officer and an FBI agent who investigated organized crime. He was “elected to his House seat seven times by his mid-Michigan constituents,” left Congress at the end of 2014, and later worked largely in cybersecurity.

The board predicted that “Rogers’ experience, clear thinking, and temperament are bound to quickly vault him into the Senate’s leadership ranks,” and described him as mature, trustworthy and prepared to sit at the table with national and world leaders.

The paper’s closing argument was aimed squarely at Democrats and independents who dislike the president: “Voters should not lock themselves to a radical senator just to spite Trump.”

The Rogers campaign welcomed the nod. “Michiganders deserve solutions, not slogans—and that’s exactly what Mike will bring to the U.S. Senate,” communications director Alyssa Brouillet told JNS. The El-Sayed campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

A race on a knife’s edge

The endorsement lands in a dead heat. An Emerson College poll of 1,000 likely voters taken September 12 to 14 had El-Sayed at 48% and Rogers at 46%, with 4% undecided. A Detroit News/WDIV poll by the Glengariff Group released September 8 had Rogers narrowly ahead, 45.8% to 44.4%. The RealClearPolling average shows El-Sayed up by two points.

In a race that close, a paper that has spent years criticizing Trump telling its readers to cross over for a Republican is not a small thing. It hands independents and soft Democrats a permission slip, and it puts El-Sayed’s deleted record at the center of the campaign’s final weeks.

When a newspaper that has never once endorsed Trump looks at Abdul El-Sayed and sees a candidate hiding his own past, Michigan voters should take the hint.

Sources

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