The Democratic Party’s surest midterm bet, and its riskiest, were on display Thursday night at a pair of debates in the battleground states of Georgia and Michigan.
In one, Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., pummeled his Republican challenger with accusations that his votes led to high costs on consumer goods, and that he employed “half the Third Reich” in his congressional office. In the other, Michigan’s Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed pivoted away from criticizing his Republican opponent’s alignment with President Donald Trump’s policies in order to defend his family, asking at one point, “You going after my mom?”
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Trump tries to make the midterms about him
The debates were the latest test of Democrats’ ability to capitalize on Republican vulnerabilities, including voter dissatisfaction with Trump’s job performance, the war with Iran and the stubbornly high cost of living. The party in the White House historically has lost seats in the midterm elections, as voter turnout drops off and the outparty targets White House policies that supporters say have not had time to show results. But Trump has sought to buck that trend, urging voters to act like he is on the ballot.
“I’m not running per se,” Trump told supporters in a phone call Thursday night, before adding, “In a way, you can view this as my fourth campaign.” After saying he planned to hold nearly three dozen rallies before Election Day on Nov. 3, Trump said, “We never did this before. We never worked much on the midterms. This one we’re working very hard.”
Georgia
In Georgia, Ossoff went from Republicans’ top target a year ago to shoring up his own re-election well enough that his name was floated as a possible presidential candidate in 2028. That reversal of fortune is due, in part, to Ossoff drawing Republican opponent Mike Collins, whom Georgia GOP leaders felt would not be strong in the general election. Ossoff has raised more money than any Senate candidate running this cycle.
Pocketbook issues dominated Thursday’s debate in Georgia. Ossoff’s opening statement referenced his work to cap the cost of insulin, followed by attacks on Collins for “voting for tariffs” that raised grocery prices, “health care cuts that doubled your insurance premiums,” and supporting “the war that sent diesel to its record high.” After two more questions from reporters about the high cost of living, the debate’s moderator asked Collins why the federal deficit climbed to $2 trillion “on your party’s watch.”
Collins defended the concept of lower taxes, but then quickly shifted to foreign trade policy in the abstract.
“As we continue to become more independent, as we continue to make sure we have a fair shot for America, it should be America first,” Collins said in response to the moderator’s question about the deficit. “We have bowed down to the rest of this world, and took it from companies, or countries, charging us tariffs over and over again. We shouldn’t be doing that. We should set it up where we have the advantage, and you should always have America first.”
Later on in the debate, Ossoff referenced Collins ties to white supremacists and noted his history of sharing racist content online. After the moderator described Collins’s son-in-law as “a white supremacist social media influencer,” the two-term congressman said, “I’ve condemned racism, anti-semitism, hate — I don’t care where the source is. And I tell him that too. It’s wrong.”
Michigan
In Michigan, Republicans had reason for optimism. Trump flipped the state in 2024 and nearly had long enough coattails to help Republican Mike Rogers capture an open Senate seat there. That led Rogers to run again this year, for the state’s other open Senate seat. But now, it’s Democrats who are energized. Public polling shows Rogers consistently, though narrowly, trailing his Democratic rival, El-Sayed, who spent the first part of the year battling through his party’s bruising primary.
If elected, El-Sayed would be the first Muslim to serve in the U.S. Senate. It’s against that backdrop that some of his supporters have criticized Rogers’ campaign for repeatedly invoking the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, during the race. Rogers was a former FBI agent during the attacks and falsely claimed he “saw the dead body of Osama bin Laden with my own eyes.”
At the debate, El-Sayed sought to pre-empt attacks by telling viewers, “My opponent is going to make this about him and about me. But really, in the end, this is about you. It’s about whether you can afford your gas, you can afford your groceries, whether or not you can see a doctor.”
Rogers, who served in Congress from 2001 to 2015, said he was running for Senate because Michigan lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs, suffered declines in education and energy and auto-insurance costs.
“You did that, man,” El-Sayed said in a terse reply. “That was your policy. NAFTA, your policy,” he said, referring to the North American Free Trade Agreement signed by President Clinton that economists now say hastened the loss of manufacturing in the U.S.
But the most explosive moments came toward the end of the hour-long debate when Rogers defended his previous support of surveillance policies that El-Sayed said violated people’s privacy.
“Why would that bother you?” Rogers asked rhetorically. “Well, if you have someone in your family that might be on a watchlist — ”
“Go ahead and say it,” el-Sayed interjected. “You’ve been tiptoeing around it the whole time. Just say it. Say it. Go ahead and say it.”
“I haven’t been tiptoeing [around] it,” Rogers responded. Later, he said, “I’ll tell you what my mother did.”
“You going after my mom?” El-Sayed asked.
“I’m not going after your mom.”
“That’s exactly what you’re doing.”
“What your mom was working at — I was going after that organization, that was indicted for funneling money to Al-Qaeda. That’s your mom,” Rogers said. Fact-checkers have noted the claim is missing important context, namely conflating the Islamic American Relief Agency where el-Sayed’s birth mother worked, with its parent organization — the Islamic African Relief Agency —whose activities drew scrutiny from the U.S. The Treasury Department. “[N]o charges of terrorism or knowingly supporting terrorism were ever brought against IARA-USA or its officers,” the fact-checking website Snopes reported in August.
El-Sayed said the attack was proof that Rogers “wants this to be about anything but his own record.”
