Hugh Hewitt, writing in his Morning Glory column at Fox News on August 6, offered Republicans a tidy path to a Michigan Senate seat. His words, quoted: "Republicans need only turn out the same electorate as voted in 2024 and Rogers will win the 2026 race." [1] The trouble is that the same electorate did vote in 2024, and it did not hand the seat to Mike Rogers. It went the other way.
In November 2024, Democrat Elissa Slotkin took 2,712,686 votes, or 48.64 percent, against Rogers's 2,693,680, or 48.30 percent. [2] That is a margin of 19,006 votes, 0.34 of a percentage point. The electorate Hewitt wants Republicans to reproduce is the one that already sent a Democrat, not Rogers, to the Senate.
Read charitably, Hewitt is not making an arithmetic mistake. He may mean composition rather than outcome: that the 2024 turnout mix, its presidential-year size, its partisan and demographic balance, ran close enough that a sharper Rogers campaign could convert the near-miss. That is a defensible strategic read, and it deserves to be stated in its strongest form, because a columnist is entitled to argue that a 0.34-point loss is a seat within reach.
What that is not is the claim as written. "Turn out the same electorate and Rogers will win" describes a counterfactual that already ran. The 2024 electorate turned out, in full, and Rogers lost it by nineteen thousand votes. Hold the turnout composition constant and the result does not migrate to his column, it stays where the certified canvass left it.
The 2026 race is also not a rerun of the last one. Abdul El-Sayed won the August Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, so Rogers now faces a different opponent and a different coalition than the one that edged him in 2024. A midterm electorate will be smaller than a presidential-year one, and it will be shaped by forces, incumbency, the national mood, turnout intensity, that a 2024 snapshot cannot forecast in either direction.
Label this what it is: a columnist's prediction, not a finding, and predictions are allowed to be wrong. The point of setting it beside the record is not to score Hewitt. It is to keep the readers who take the column as reassurance from mistaking a race Rogers lost for a plan by which he wins.
