John James and Mike Rogers: Election Deniers for Michigan

John James and Mike Rogers are, respectively, the Republican nominees for Governor and Senator in this year’s election in Michigan. Both men once acknowledged that Joe Biden won Michigan in 2020, and both have lost Senate races of their own. Now, as they court Trump and the MAGA base, both claim those losses, and Trump’s, were the product of fraud.

Worst moments:

• James contested his own 2020 Senate defeat for three weeks, now claims both his loss and Trump’s were “rigged and manipulated” by his general-election opponent, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, and has refused to commit to certifying the 2028 presidential results.
• Rogers urged Michigan officials to certify Biden’s win in 2020 and conceded his own 2024 loss, then began telling Republican audiences that a van of “ballots” in Detroit stole his race. He has two county chairs that served as Trump-pardoned fake electors and advocated stationing off-duty and retired police as party poll watchers in Detroit.
• Both support the federal SAVE Act, with Rogers pledging to pass it if it isn’t law by the time he reaches the Senate and James promising equivalent restrictions at the state level.

History of election denial

James and Rogers both accepted the reality of Biden’s 2020 win in Michigan before aligning themselves with election denial to regain standing with Trump and the MAGA movement.

James began his conspiracy career by contesting the results of his own 2020 Senate race, which he lost to incumbent Senator Gary Peters by over 90,000 votes while Biden carried Michigan by an even larger margin. The day after the election, James retweeted a post claiming he had won and accusing Democrats of making up numbers and cheating. After the AP called the race for Peters, James refused to concede, citing deep concerns that “millions of Michiganders may have been disenfranchised by a dishonest few who cheat” while offering no evidence. His campaign and the RNC formed a joint legal fund to oppose Peters’s victory, and James conceded only after the Board of State Canvassers certified the election, three weeks after election day.

While James held out, Rogers was urging Michigan to move on. In a November 2020 op-ed, Rogers urged Michigan officials to certify Biden’s victory and called Trump’s attempts to influence Michigan’s electoral processes “cause for both concern and alarm.” He also wrote that independent observers, the courts, and both parties had found the election “free and fair,” called Trump’s pressure on Georgia’s secretary of state “more gangster than presidential,” and warned that refusing to accept results without proof of fraud “must end for the sake of our democratic republic.”

For a time, both men kept at least one foot in reality. In 2022, James was asked by PBS whether Biden had been duly elected and answered: “Of course. Yes. That’s how the process works.” Rogers began to hedge once he needed Trump’s endorsement for his 2024 Senate run against Elissa Slotkin: in June 2024 he refused to say directly whether Biden won, and asked whether he would defend Detroit voters’ rights in a future election, said he preferred to look forward rather than back. He lost to Slotkin and conceded promptly, making no fraud allegations at the time.

Both have since gone all in. At a September 2025 meet-and-greet his campaign kept closed to reporters, an attendee called Michigan’s voting system “totally corrupt,” and James replied that Republicans could “get consequences for those who did you wrong” by electing a governor who was “screwed in 2020.” After receiving Trump’s endorsement, James said on a podcast that the 2020 election was “rigged and manipulated” against himself and Trump, naming Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson as the culprit.

Rogers, a year after conceding, began telling Republican audiences his race had been stolen. At a Muskegon gathering in October 2025, he said he was winning at 5:30 in the morning before a van in Detroit showed up with “ballots,” and that he lost by about 17,000 votes. Official results and a standard post-election audit confirm Slotkin’s win. Christopher Thomas, Michigan’s elections director for more than three decades, said flatly: “Mike Rogers knows better.”

After Trump’s July 2026 primetime address on elections, which revived debunked 2020 claims and directed the FBI to reopen a Muskegon voter-registration case the bureau had closed in September 2025, Rogers posted that he was “thankful for President Trump’s commitment to transparency,” calling it “a voter fraud scheme right here in Michigan.” Rogers’ claims bear no resemblance to the actual case: fraudulent registration applications were submitted in Muskegon in 2020, but every agency that examined it — the Muskegon clerk, Muskegon police, Michigan State Police, and the attorney general's office — found the forms were caught, invalidated, and never became ballots.

Additionally, two county co-chairs on Rogers’ campaign, Meshawn Maddock and Kenneth Thompson, were given their positions after being pardoned by Trump for their roles in the 2020 fake electors plot, seeking to cast false electoral votes for Trump despite Biden winning Michigan. Another Rogers county co-chair was the lone member of the Board of State Canvassers who refused to certify Michigan's 2020 results, and nearly a dozen others “made statements online promoting conspiracy theories on the presidential election or the Jan. 6 riots.”

Influence over election administration

If elected, James and Rogers would both have substantial ability to wield power on behalf of the election denial movement. James would appoint all four members of the Board of State Canvassers, the only body authorized to certify statewide and federal results and determine who won. The board’s partisan balance is fixed at two seats each, so he would not control it, but he could fill at least one Republican seat with a conspiracist who shares his views before 2028. Under the Electoral Count Reform Act, James would also submit the certificate of ascertainment for Michigan’s 2028 electors, a signature state law now aligns with federal procedure, and one he has refused to commit to giving. Rogers would be a vote for the restrictive SAVE Act, which could disenfranchise millions of eligible American voters, disproportionately affecting women, and a vote to confirm any conspiracist nominees to senior roles at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security.

But while their powers mostly exist separately, James and Rogers are aligned on restricting access to the ballot. Standing beside Trump at a July 2026 rally, Rogers pledged that if the SAVE Act isn’t law by the time he arrives, he will pass it. James has supported the federal bill and promised to bring equivalent standards to Michigan, including tighter absentee rules. James also said he would “enthusiastically” support a potential ballot proposal requiring citizenship verification for registration. With the legislature currently split, a Governor James paired with a Republican legislature would be the first configuration in years capable of moving Michigan’s election law rightward.

Rogers’ plans for this year are even more troubling. The Detroit News obtained audio of Rogers addressing the Kalamazoo County GOP in April 2026, where he said he was cooperating with the RNC on voter “integrity” efforts, and reported that he has advocated stationing retired or off-duty police officers as party poll watchers in Detroit. The proposal mirrors Trump’s scheme to send sheriffs and police to polling places in 2020. Federal and Michigan law prohibit voter intimidation, and one local election official accused Rogers of singling out Detroit to intimidate the state’s largest concentration of voters of color.

Taken together, the two campaigns sketch what a captured election system in Michigan could look like. Rogers’ county co-chairs include two pardoned fake electors who tried to cast false electoral votes for Trump in 2020 and the lone canvasser who refused to certify that year’s results. A Governor James would appoint the Republican members of that same board and hold the signature on Michigan’s 2028 electors. Whatever methods Republicans use to try and prevent a democratic transfer of power, the pardons for Rogers’ co-chairs could serve as a blueprint for consequence-free sabotage, and an election-denying governor would be positioned to finish the job those co-chairs started.