Apologies in advance to my international readers. This is going to be an Election Eve Post. A very grumpy, ranty Election Eve Post. I wasn’t planning to make an election post at all, frankly, because as a fellow writer observed when we met in D.C. recently, I’m just not a political journalist. I am a nerd, an occasional historian, and a culture critic. Sometimes I diagnose the ills of our impermanent culture, sometimes I write about the permanent things. I try to keep these things roughly balanced so that neither I nor my readers lose sanity. Rarely, in any of this, do I comment on the state of things in D.C. But this election cycle has made me depressed and cranky (more so than usual) and so there is nothing for it but to write about it. International readers, talk among yourselves. We will return to our regularly scheduled programming soon.
As even said international readers might be vaguely aware, we have some tight Senate races right now, and in particular all eyes are on my home state of Michigan. (A very temporary state of affairs, as Michiganders know.) Historically, this has been a “blue seat,” but GOP candidate Mike Rogers is attempting to flip it red. He faces Abdul Al Sayed, who embodies the most extreme forms of leftism across multiple issues and has additionally alarmed even Jewish Democrat voters by playing to rabid anti-Semites. Infamously, he observed that “Hurt people hurt people” after a Lebanese terrorist rammed his car into Michigan’s largest synagogue. Meanwhile, in a newly released CBS interview, the ever-fiendish Ross Douthat gave him yet more rope to hang himself with on the issue of parents’ rights to protect their children from offensive sex ed or “trans” people on sports teams. Without batting an eye, Al Sayed proposed that these conversations are moot, because kids can go find anything on the Internet anyway. Parents who want to protect their kids from “seeing something” (like what, we ask? something in a locker room, perhaps?) need to realize it’s 2026 now and parent accordingly.
The big 11th-hour news of the race is that Democrat congresswoman Haley Stevens has decided to cross the aisle and campaign for Rogers after being slighted by Al Sayed’s campaign. The party of love and tolerance is raking her over the coals for this, despite her insistence that she remains staunchly Democrat and leftwing. Leftists are scum. The sky is blue. The grass is green.
I still think Al Sayed will win, but these are self-inflicted reasons for him to be nervous, and so he has fallen back on a well-worn Democrat trick: Change the subject to abortion. On Twitter, he posted a clip from a week-old radio interview with Rogers, in which the earnest conservative host asks the GOP candidate whether his listening audience of evangelical Christians can count on him to be staunch on social issues. Please, he asks, reassure us that we don’t have to worry about you “joining Democrats when it comes to things like eroding away parental rights, supporting gender mutilation for minors, abortion for all 9 months of pregnancy for any reason whatsoever,” etc. “You don’t even have to think about it twice,” says Rogers. He reminds the audience that he has a 100% pro-life rating. “This is the only way that I know how to be when I go back to the United States Senate.” Al Sayed shares this with the hysterical caption, “A vote for Mike Rogers is a vote for a national abortion ban. Let me say that again. A vote for Mike Rogers is a vote for a national abortion ban.”
Now, at this point in time, Mike Rogers had a variety of options available to him. If he wanted to play it safe, he could have punted to something about Al Sayed and the Democrats’ rabid pro-abort extremism. Or he could have simply stood by his comments on the show and allowed people to discuss among themselves what it might concretely mean about his future votes. Or he could (radical thought) have boldly and specifically addressed those respects in which abortion is in fact not just “an issue for the states” now, most obviously in the transportation of abortion pills across state lines, which accounts for the vast majority of abortions in the year of our Lord 2026. Despite the fact that Michigan is now among the most liberal states on the abortion issue, there remain options to continue moving the ball down the court at the federal level, if lawmakers had the political stomach for it. If.
But Rogers didn’t do any of these things. Instead, Rogers protested loudly that Al Sayed was playing a dirty rotten trick, scaring everyone like that, when Rogers had recorded a campaign ad back in 2024 assuring them that he would “do nothing” in the Senate to contradict the almighty will of Michigan voters. To refresh all our memories, he reshared the spot: About 15 seconds of Rogers addressing the camera while his wife holds his hand and scrunches her face and nods significantly to emphasize his regurgitated platitude that “this decision is one of the most difficult and personal decisions a woman will make.”
I was already aware of this ad, although I hadn’t seen it, only read the quote. But it was, let’s say, a choice for Rogers to reshare it now. And when I watch it, it feels an order of magnitude more despicable, just for his wife’s reactions alone.
People are asking who this is for. Clearly, it’s for those disaffected Democrats Jewish and otherwise who have never had any love for the GOP but are watching leftists go full “excuse the terrorists, trans the kids.” Rogers is anxious that Al Sayed’s last-minute subject change might panic them back into line. So, he calculates, he needs to change the subject right back.
Aside from the obvious moral cowardice of this calculation, there’s a good argument that it’s also tactically foolish. Those Democrats who were going to be swung have very likely swung already. Odds are good that Rogers will succeed only in losing pro-life votes he’s been taking for granted. As I’ve been writing, I see that political action group CatholicVote has officially suspended their endorsement. Other pro-lifers are reacting with dismay and disgust, including respected voices like Dr. Robert P. George. Like Dr. George, I am not a so-called “abortion abolitionist” in the sense that I reject incrementalist tactics out of misplaced purism. Nobody needs to lecture me about politics being the art of the possible, etc. Generations of pro-lifers have understood this. But this is not about incrementalism versus absolutism. It’s about holding our candidates to a certain baseline standard of integrity and intestinal fortitude. If you signal to us that your core principles consist of “whatever I need to say in the moment to get elected,” you should expect us to believe you. No candidate gets to count our votes before they are cast. They have not been reserved with little red dots on them. We do not owe them to the Republican Party. We do not owe them to anyone.
This, I realize, is not the most popular position among many of my fellow conservatives. Even National Review (et tu?) just ran an article huffing and puffing and ‘splaining that this is simply how the sausage is made, and we could hardly have expected Rogers to do otherwise, and it will all be our fault if we stay home and Al Sayed wins. We have heard all the greatest hits over the last 24 hours: “Lesser of two evils!” “You may as well vote Democrat!” “But SCOTUS!”
The truth is that the Republican party is functionally pro-choice now. Many Republican politicians have been quietly so for a long time, but as Leah Libresco Sargeant has vividly put it, “When the tide goes out, you see who’s been swimming naked.” In the age of Roe, there were many who voted on pro-life bills so they could say they did, knowing full well that Roe meant those bills would be, as it were, stillborn. Post-Roe, suddenly they are not so eager. We’re shocked, shocked. Well, not that shocked.
“Stop yelling at Mike Rogers,” some are saying, “and get busy actually convincing people to agree with your wildly unpopular pro-life views, because they don’t like them and you need to deal with it.” I mean, yes? And? When were we ever under the illusion that people would flock en masse to pro-life philosophy? What alternative history is this? And what would you like to propose the generations of saints in the trenches for life should have done differently, or should do differently now? Be specific. Use examples.
But this is all much bigger than Mike Rogers. And it’s bigger than the abortion issue, although spinelessness on abortion is how the GOP’s inadequacy is manifesting in Rogers’s particular case. Meanwhile, in Texas, the intolerable and despicable Democrat James Talarico is locked in an equally tight Senate race with Republican Ken Paxton, who is also intolerable and despicable for different reasons. Those reasons include sexual profligacy, which has bled into the business of his office in the usual corrupt way of things, along with assorted other cronyistic wheelings and dealings. In 2023, over half of his fellow Republicans voted to impeach him. Naturally, he lived to wheel and deal another day.
Meanwhile, in Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy is running for governor against Amy Acton, whose mother appeared in a now-infamous Ramaswamy campaign ad calling her daughter a liar. When it was demonstrated as a matter of documented fact that Acton was abused as a child by her father and her mother covered it up, Ramaswamy doubled down. J. D. Vance doubled down as well. He was “disgusted,” no less, to see Republicans “whining” about the ad instead of focusing exclusively on how bad the Democrats are. Speaking of, have you seen the ads they’ve run against Vivek, or against Vance himself, or Trump? We should all be talking about those instead. “If you actually believe in the things you say you believe in,” Vance advises us all, then stop whining and go start winning.
I wonder, what does Vance think we believe in? Because I know what I believe in. Is it what Vance believes in?
There are those whose reaction to a corrupt GOP is to defect to the Democrats, while pretending they still care deeply about Making the GOP Conservative Again. Long-time readers will already know what I think of these people, and what I invite them to do with their opinions. They surrendered their right to be taken seriously long ago.
Then there are actual conservatives like Peggy Noonan, who in the Wall Street Journal this week expresses a wistful hope that maybe if the Republicans lose “bigly,” as Trump would say, it will be a traumatic jolt that launches a new healing era for the party. By this, she does not mean that she pines for a return of the zombie establishment, as people are predictably misrepresenting her. “Healthy doesn’t mean ‘the establishment returns,’” she explicitly writes. “It will never return. The GOP establishment of 1990-2016 ran things into the ground, is discredited and over. Also they’re 80. They destroyed the party by detaching from the legitimate needs and pleas of its base and by secretly regarding that base as stupid nobodies.” What she hopes for is a clean slate on which to write something new, something that deserves to be remembered.
I’m afraid I am more pessimistic. We may indeed see a blue wave tomorrow. I would like to believe inadequate Republican candidates might learn something from it. I don’t count on it. It is entirely possibly, nay likely, that Republicans will lose everything and learn nothing.
Returning to Rogers, perhaps the cliché that’s made me shake my head the most this week is “It’s just words. Words aren’t actions.” Really? Do I have to start quoting A Man for All Seasons at people? Do I have to replay 2017 Jordan Peterson clips in which he refuses to “say the words” pretending people can change genders, because words mean something, because words are actions?
In The Free Press, Ross Douthat observes that “In the last 10 years, there is no example—not one—of a first-time senator who won a seat in a state that tilts toward the opposition party and successfully defended that seat six years later.” This is Rogers’ likely future even in the unlikely event that he wins enough disaffected Democrats to make up for the pro-life voters slipping out of his back pocket where he thought he could count on them. Another decade from now when he’s completely forgotten, will he look back and still think it was worth it?
As Thomas More sadly rebukes his old friend turned traitor Richard Rich, who’s been appointed attorney-general of Wales as reward for his treachery, “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for Wales?”
We have been given a reprieve. The rot continues.
Sorry Bethel, if Michigan voters stay home over abortion and help get a radical progressive elected, that is an insane choice. Rush Limbaugh had it right in his first book: abortion is a heart issue. We have to transform hearts and minds to win the debate and limit abortion. I know, I am terrible and stupid for writing such things, but inaction that leads to Al Sayed getting elected is worse.