Obama Steps In to Soothe Fighting Democrats. They Should Name Him Interim Leader Until November’s Midterm Election.

Mike Rogers built a career catching election-doubt operations. Ninety days out, he’s running one — and Wisconsin votes on the Democrats’ split tomorrow.

Abdul El-Sayed on primary night in Detroit. Photo: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

Mike Rogers spent a career learning how hostile governments teach Americans to distrust their own elections. Now he’s teaching Michigan. The Republican nominee for Senate — a former FBI agent who chaired the House Intelligence Committee, until recently a Trump critic — has drifted into election skepticism as his race hardens, with 90 days still to run, the New York Times reported Sunday night. Rogers hasn’t lost anything yet. He’s preparing his voters to disbelieve a count that doesn’t exist.

Seeding the idea that elections are not run properly — that they’re rigged, that American democracy is one big rigged game — is the operation itself. The count never has to be wrong if voters stop believing it. People believe it. Donald Trump ran that operation in 2020 and holds the White House now. Rogers chaired the committee that watched foreign intelligence services aim the same operation at American voters. He built a career catching it. He has decided to run it.

The same Sunday evening, Rogers rehearsed disbelief in one paper while Obama dialed for unity in another. Rogers can afford the rehearsal because the Democrats are still shooting at each other. Moderate Democrats described their own $15 million campaign against Abdul El-Sayed — the physician and former Detroit health director — as a war. El-Sayed won it anyway. Sunday night Barack Obama phoned him to talk unity, the Times reported — the party’s elder statesman courting the winner its donors spent eight figures trying to bury. Obama called because El-Sayed holds voters the party cannot win without.

Obama is right to push unity — and a phone call is not a campaign. No Democrat alive commands the coalition Obama commands, and nobody else can hold the donor wing and the insurgents in the same room until November. He should run this party until election day — publicly, daily, state by state. The alternative is ninety days of ceasefire talks while Rogers teaches Michigan to distrust the vote. The party has a peacemaker. It needs a commander.