Steven Miller was not the point of the Michigan Senate race in Rochester, but the final hours before Election Day were. Marjorie Mehney and Tom Wright described voters crossing party lines between Mike Rogers and Abdul El-Sayed as the contest tightened.
Rochester voters split hard
Digital spoke with three voters on the streets of Rochester the afternoon before Election Day, and the clearest pattern was not party loyalty but crossover voting. Mehney said she voted for Rogers after once being a Democrat, while Wright backed El-Sayed even though he said he disagreed with 60% to 70% of the Democrat's policy positions.
Mehney put her own switch in blunt terms. She said she was a Democrat years ago and would be embarrassed to be one today with candidates like El-Sayed representing the party. Wright drew the opposite line: “I cannot bring myself to vote for a Trump minion under any circumstances.”
Marjorie Mehney's warning
Mehney said the signs in Petoskey and the broader support in front yards caught her off guard. “The majority are Republican. However, there's a great deal of signage for Abdul. So it's very mixed. We've never seen anything like the support that's going on with signs in front yards,” she said in downtown Rochester.
She added that the shift felt “a bit shocking” and said, “They are people I've known and never knew that they felt this way that Abdul does.” When asked why the support had moved, she said “no idea,” then added, “It's a little concerning.”
Rogers, El-Sayed, and the crossover
The race has become a test of how far those cross-party instincts can go in Michigan. Rogers represented Michigan's 8th District from 2001 to 2015, left Congress before Donald Trump launched his first presidential campaign, and has supported giving presidents broad authority to impose reciprocal tariffs.
That history did not stop Mehney from backing him, but it also did not stop her from predicting that El-Sayed would prevail over Rogers on Tuesday. In that contradiction sits the story of the final stretch: voters in Michigan describing a mixed political field, choosing against their own labels, and sending two candidates into Election Day with signs of support that cut across party lines.
Petoskey and Emmet County added to that picture. Donald Trump took more than 55% of the vote there in 2024, yet Mehney said she saw a great deal of signage for El-Sayed, including front-yard support she had never seen before. That is the landscape Rogers and El-Sayed carried into Election Day: one side backed by voters who normally would not cross over, and the other drawing the kind of local support that surprised even longtime residents.
