In Michigan, the CIA Beat the FBI

Michiganders had to choose between a hawkish Democrat with an intelligence background and a hawkish Republican with an intelligence background for Senate.

Whichever way the elections in Michigan swung, the intelligence community would have gained a new ally. Retired CIA analyst and incumbent Rep. Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat, was running for a promotion to the Senate, facing off against retired FBI agent and former Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican. In the end, the former CIA officer prevailed. Slotkin has won her race, according to the Associated Press, becoming the first CIA veteran to serve in the U.S. Senate.

Michigan's elections were not just about Michigan. They were about the place of the American national security state in the world. In the presidential race, local Muslim and Arab-American communities became an unexpected swing demographic when they peeled off in protest of the Biden administration's support for wars in the Middle East. And the Senate race between two hawkish intelligence veterans attracted a lot of out-of-state donations, many of them linked to the Washington, D.C., beltway.

Slotkin received two-thirds of her campaign donations from outside of Michigan, one of the largest out-of-state money influxes to a House incumbent, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks campaign finance. Meanwhile, Rogers received around half of his donations from out of state. Both candidates drew a lot of support from Washington and the surrounding areas. Slotkin was especially popular in the ZIP code around Langley, Virginia, home of the CIA headquarters.

Along with his FBI service, Rogers is a former member of Congress who chaired the House Intelligence Committee from 2011 to 2015 and sponsored the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a surveillance bill hated by civil libertarians. Slotkin is a former CIA analyst who has put her intelligence experience front and center in her campaigns. In a particularly spooky moment in 2018, Slotkin was being followed to her car and questioned by a rival campaign operative. Smirking, Slotkin asked the operative how "Sloan and Leroy" were. "How do you know my dogs' names?" the operative gasped, as Slotkin slammed her car door.

Interestingly, both candidates had positioned themselves as doves in the past, calling for restraints on the president's war powers. But this year, as Democrats and Republicans have been in a competition to out-hawk each other, Rogers and Slotkin became enthusiastic supporters of U.S. proxy wars around the world. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that two intelligence veterans would be more eager for indirect meddling than direct military conflict.

Rogers previously argued Congress should have voted on the war against the Islamic State. "It's wrong that Congress has not authorized military force when we know the president is doing it and Congress is funding them doing it. I think it's wrong. I think it's, candidly, one of the weakest points of our national security strategy," he said in 2016, shortly after leaving office. "It's a vote that has to happen if you're going to ask these young men and women to risk their lives for the United States."

A few years later, Slotkin sponsored a resolution to stop the president from going to war with Iran. "Congress has long abdicated its responsibility, as laid out in the Constitution, to make the hard decisions we owe our troops when it comes to authorizing war," she said on the House floor. But Slotkin also hedged her words carefully, emphasizing that Iran is a threat and claiming that her resolution was just meant to stop a "longer term war."

For all their qualms about direct American involvement, at least without a congressional vote, both have enthusiastically supported U.S. military aid to Ukraine and Israel. On the campaign trail this year, Slotkin said that "we have a responsibility to defend democracies and arm the Ukrainians," and Rogers called for the same kind of "lend-lease program" for Ukraine. 

Rogers has positioned himself as somewhat more hawkish on the Middle East. He claimed that the Biden administration was "wrong" to cut U.S. support for the Saudi war in Yemen and has been tying Israel's hands at war. And as has been the Republican fashion this year, Rogers argued that escalating against Iran is actually the only way to avoid becoming "more involved in the Middle East."

Although she has voted for massive U.S. military aid packages to Israel—and has received more donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee over her career than Rogers did, according to The New York Times—Slotkin has also called for a ceasefire and said that she is "willing to have a conversation about putting conditions on offensive aid, not defensive."

Distancing herself a little from the Israeli military campaigns in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon may have allowed Slotkin to avoid the fate of Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost in Michigan. Slotkin slightly outperformed Harris in Dearborn, a heavily Arab and Muslim suburb that swung heavily for former President Donald Trump.

On the campaign trail, Slotkin claimed her experience "as someone who's served three tours in Iraq, who watched the American military fail" there gave her "deep concerns" about the Israeli military campaigns in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon.

But Slotkin also used that experience to play up how "hawkish" she is about a different Middle Eastern country. And while hammering home that point at a televised debate last month, she made an interesting Freudian slip. "There's one of us who has sat in a war zone and taken Iranian mortars, Iranian rockets, one of us who's gone on dangerous convoys, dodging Iranian [improvised explosive devices]," Slotkin said. "I take back seat to no one on how hawkish we're going to be on Iraq."