Twenty-five years ago on Friday, Todd Beamer recited the Lord's Prayer on a phone line from 30,000 feet, then said two words — "Let's roll" — and led a group of passengers into the cockpit of United Flight 93 to try to overtake the hijakers who had taken over the plane. The plane went down in a Pennsylvania field instead of into the United States Capitol.

His father just picked a Senate candidate.

David Beamer, Todd's father, has endorsed Michigan Senate nominee Mike Rogers with a message timed to land two days before the 25th anniversary of September 11. His words were not complicated: "I'm going to vote for an American, a real Michigan man. His name happens to be Mike Rogers."

Then he widened the scope. "Democrat, Independent, Republican, vote American this time."

That phrase — "vote American" — is doing exactly what it's designed to do. It reframes the Michigan Senate race around a question that has nothing to do with party registration and everything to do with whether the people asking for your vote actually like the country they want to govern.

Rogers, a former FBI special agent and former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is running against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed has appeared at a conference alongside 9/11 truthers and has been associated with figures who have said "America deserved 9/11." That context turns the Beamer endorsement from a strong symbolic gesture into something considerably sharper.

The passengers of Flight 93 — Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick, Tom Burnett, Mark Bingham, and others — had minutes. They had butter knives. They had a phone line. They knew the plane was a weapon and they decided to fight anyway. The Capitol building is standing today because of what they did on September 11, 2001.

2,976 Americans died that morning. The men and women on Flight 93 are the ones who kept the number from being higher.

Opponents will frame any 9/11-adjacent endorsement as "politicizing a tragedy." Which is an interesting objection to raise about the father of the man who stopped the attack. David Beamer isn't borrowing someone else's sacrifice for a campaign ad. He buried his son because of what happened that day. If he wants to tell Michigan voters who he trusts with the country Todd died protecting, he has standing that no political consultant, editorial board, or campaign strategist can manufacture.

The 25th anniversary is tomorrow. A quarter-century since the worst attack on American soil. A generation of kids who weren't alive that morning will vote in November for the first time. Some of them will have never heard Todd Beamer's name.

David Beamer just made sure they will.