Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate in the Michigan Senate race, launched a new ad blitz on Tuesday attacking his opponent Mike Rogers for helping expand the government’s mass surveillance powers while he was in Congress.
The paid digital video and billboard ads mark a final-stretch effort ahead of the midterm elections to pin bipartisan voter anxieties about privacy concerns, recently spurred by Flock cameras, onto Rogers.
The video from the El-Sayed campaign intersperses clips of Rogers praising the Patriot Act of 2001, which, in addition to expanding law enforcement powers, also allowed the collection of Americans’ telephone data without a warrant after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Rogers’ career is dotted with support for government surveillance over the years, including in 2011, when Rogers introduced a bill that would have allowed companies to share emails with the NSA. (However, in 2014, Rogers introduced a bill that would have ended “bulk collection of metadata,” though it never made it to a vote.)
“You can’t have your privacy violated if you don’t know your privacy is violated,” the ad repeatedly quotes Rogers as saying in 2013, when he served as chairman of the House intelligence committee.
The video also includes Rogers’ remarks extolling surveillance by companies like Google.
In addition to the video, the El-Sayed campaign will run billboards with the tagline “Mike Rogers is watching you” in parts of Michigan, according to the El-Sayed campaign.
In tying Rogers to surveillance concerns, El-Sayed is leaning into one of the major technology-related complaints from voters this cycle as he battles in a Senate race rated a tossup by the Cook Political Report.
Among other privacy concerns surrounding AI, voters have increasingly voiced skepticism of law enforcement surveillance products like those of Flock cameras, which have begun to rapidly proliferate across the nation. While police agencies argue Flock has helped reduce crime, recent cases of abuse by individual officers to stalk ex-girlfriends and incidents of suspects being misidentified have sparked growing public opposition.
A spokesperson for Rogers’ campaign has previously said Rogers “vehemently opposes unchecked use of Flock cameras to track law-abiding citizens” and noted he left Congress before the technology was founded in 2017.
But the new slate of ads underscores the El-Sayed campaign’s unrelenting effort to draw a line from Rogers’ legislative record to current voter anxieties.
This kind of strategy appears to have proven effective in other close Senate races, like in Ohio, where Democrat Sherrod Brown cast incumbent Republican Jon Husted as “the face of data centers” in the state, according to a recent GOP memo.
El-Sayed’s race against Rogers has remained close, and most paths to Democrats taking the majority in the Senate rely on El-Sayed keeping the Michigan Senate seat in his party’s hands.
As part of a blitz to rebuild the Democratic coalition fragmented by the primary, where El-Sayed has weathered attacks of antisemitism after he called the war in Gaza a genocide and pushed for an end to US military aid to Israel, El-Sayed announced on Monday he will rally with former President Barack Obama in late October.
El-Sayed is also expected to launch an extended campaign swing through the state in the final weeks before the midterms with progressive allies including Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a source familiar with the matter said.
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