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Former Rep. Justin Amash — who announced on Monday that he did not vote for Abdul El-Sayed or former Rep. Mike Rogers in Michigan’s U.S. Senate race — said he thinks El-Sayed would “be far less dangerous in practice than Rogers.”
Rogers, a Republican candidate endorsed by President Donald Trump, is facing Democratic candidate El-Sayed in the widely-watched Senate contest.
“It goes without saying that I have major disagreements with both Mike Rogers and Abdul El-Sayed, and neither one particularly likes me,” Amash wrote in a thread on X. “I also don’t vote for ‘the lesser of two evils.’ I believe you should support a candidate only if you truly want the person to hold that office. I’ve already voted, and consistent with the above principle, I didn’t vote for Rogers or El-Sayed. But I do know which one would be more dangerous in the U.S. Senate — and it’s not even close.”
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Former Rep. Justin Amash is seen on the House floor on Jan. 4, 2023. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Amash pointed to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., as a political figure who resembles El-Sayed. Sanders has supported El-Sayed in the Senate race.
“To assess who is the greater threat to American freedom, let’s take a look at my time in Congress with Rogers and Bernie Sanders, who shares many of El-Sayed’s views and can serve as his stand-in,” Amash wrote. “Several of Sanders’s key proposals, in my opinion, would be exceptionally bad for our country. But given the structure of our government, he’s in no position to get those ideas enacted and enforced.
“In contrast, Rogers is extraordinarily bad on all the issues on which an individual member of Congress may be the deciding vote. Again, these are issues like war powers, surveillance, privacy, the freedom of speech, criminal justice, and government oversight and accountability,” he asserted. “In this world — the real world, not the imaginary one that partisan pundits on the right and left live in — Rogers poses a far greater threat to individual liberty and the Constitution than Sanders. Moreover, it’s not just that Rogers is awful here; it’s that Sanders is actually much better on these issues than the median member of Congress.”
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Former Rep. Mike Rogers, left, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate, and his Democratic opponent Abdul El-Sayed. (Sarah Rice/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Katie McTiernan/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Amash asserted that between Rogers and El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate would be “less dangerous.”
“I think it’s fair to view El-Sayed as someone who mostly will follow in Sanders’s footsteps on policy and therefore will be far less dangerous in practice than Rogers,” Amash wrote, adding in parentheses, “(Again, El-Sayed as a senator will do many things that are bad. The question addressed at length is not whether he’s good but simply whether he’s better on the whole than Rogers.)”
The Rogers and the El-Sayed campaigns did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment on Tuesday.
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Amash, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from early 2011 until early 2021, voted to impeach President Donald Trump in late 2019. While he served most of his congressional tenure as a Republican, Amash switched to Independent in 2019 and then to Libertarian in 2020.
He lost the 2024 GOP Michigan U.S. Senate primary to Rogers.
Rogers went on to lose the general election that year to Democrat Elissa Slotkin, who was a House lawmaker at the time.
Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., who lost the Democratic Senate primary to El-Sayed this year, shook up the 2026 general election when she endorsed Rogers on Sunday.