ICYMI: JEWISH DEMOCRATS OVERWHELMINGLY PLAN TO VOTE FOR MIKE ROGERS
In case you missed it… Conman and extreme candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s record is catching up with him. A recent bombshell report by the Free Press shared that about 70% of Jewish congregants at Temple Israel plan to vote for Mike Rogers this November.
They Were Lifelong Democrats. Then a Terrorist Attacked Their Synagogue.
Olivia Reingold
September 22, 2026
Elise Otis and Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed agree on just about everything, she said—from abortion rights to DEI to taxing the rich. There’s just one thing standing in the way of her casting a ballot for him: what Otis alleges is “his hatred of Jews.”
“Everything else I 1,000 percent agree with,” said Otis, a 55-year-old Jew and lifelong Democrat. “But I can’t support someone I don’t think will keep my family safe.”
Otis is one of more than a dozen members of Temple Israel, one of the largest Reform synagogues in the country, who told me they will not be voting for El-Sayed this November. The synagogue, which sits about 30 minutes outside of Detroit, has historically been home to a liberal congregation—performing gay commitment ceremonies as early as the ’90s—and a bastion of Democratic support. And yet, a member of the temple’s leadership said she expects about 70 percent of congregants to vote for El-Sayed’s Republican opponent Mike Rogers on November 3. Some of the Temple Israel members I spoke with have never voted for a Republican in their lives. A few, including Otis, are still considering whether to vote at all in the Senate race.
“I’m nowhere near a Republican,” said Otis, who shared that she will likely vote for Rogers, the Donald Trump-endorsed former House representative. “He’s the lesser of two evils.”
She added: “He will help keep the Jewish population safe, and I have to support that because I’m raising Jewish kids.”
Six months ago, Otis, a teacher at Temple Israel, was putting her classroom of toddlers down for a nap when she heard a bang so loud she thought the roof had caved in.
Instead, Hezbollah supporter Ayman Ghazali had rammed a truck loaded with ammunition, $2,000 worth of fireworks, and 35 gallons of gasoline into a side entrance beside the synagogue’s day-care program. One hundred forty children were inside. The attacker’s truck became wedged in the hallway, preventing him from exiting his car. Ghazali exchanged gunfire with security guards, one of whom suffered a shattered leg in the attack. Then Ghazali shot himself in the head as his car caught on fire. Smoke billowed down the hallways, and sprinklers drenched every crevice.
No one else died that day. But for many congregants at Temple Israel, the attack was a wake-up call. Several told me they thought antisemitism was largely a relic of the past—something that had happened to their grandparents or in other places, not in America.
A second trauma, some congregants have told me, was how 41-year-old El-Sayed, a staunch anti-Israel advocate, responded to the attack in the aftermath.
“Hurt people, hurt people,” El-Sayed said in a video message uploaded to YouTube the day after Ghazali’s assault.
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Many Michigan Jews agree with the Rogers camp that El-Sayed would fan “the flames of antisemitism.”
In late August, a public letter dropped from a coalition of Democratic and independent Jews in the state who said they were voting for Rogers due to concerns that El-Sayed would be “harmful to a safe and thriving Jewish community.” So far, nearly 500 Jews have signed onto the effort. When asked about this effort, the El-Sayed campaign pointed us to reporting from Drop Site News—whose co-founder a Palestinian Authority official once called a “fervent apologist for Hamas and jihadist elements”—claiming that 90 percent of signatories are “either connected to pro-Israel activist groups, GOP aligned, Jews for Mitt voters, or may not live in Michigan.”
What is happening at Temple Israel may reflect a broader shift among some Jewish voters in the state, according to a Democratic consultant who has worked on campaigns for pro-Israel Democrats in Michigan. A poll by The Mellman Group for the Jewish Electorate Institute conducted earlier this month found that the vast majority of respondents identified as Democrats—71 percent—whereas only 23 percent marked themselves as Republicans. But among those Jewish Democrats, the same poll found that 35 percent said that the rise of anti-Israel candidates on the left had made it harder for them to identify as Democrats.
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Continue reading at the Free Press here.
Learn more about Mike Rogers and his plan to Get Michigan Working Again at RogersForSenate.com.
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