Tomorrow is primary day in a number of states. Michigan is the state that will get the most attention. There are several big primaries but the Senate one on the Democratic side will get by far the most attention. It pits Abdul El-Sayed against Rep. Haley Stevens. Unless the polls are wildly far off the mark (not impossible in a primary election), El-Sayed will win handily. About a half dozen polls conducted over the last two weeks show El-Sayed winning by 10 points or more, many in the mid to high teens. Meanwhile the balance of general election polls show Stevens very narrowly beating former Rep. Mike Rogers while El-Sayed very narrowly loses to him.
On the general election polls, if we look only at the four polls released in July, they’re sort of scattershot. (I’m going by the polls listed on the NYT website.) One is very bad for El-Sayed, showing him losing by 10 and Haley winning by one. Another shows El-Sayed tied with Rogers and Stevens losing by three. Two other polls show Stevens narrowly winning and El-Sayed narrowly losing. One of those is Republican sponsored. The other just came out today and is from EPIC-MRA, generally considered the marquee pollster in the state. That one shows Rogers beating El-Sayed by 3 points and losing to Stevens by 2 points.
Michigan Democrats definitely have their work cut out for them. That’s not so much because the likely primary winner, El-Sayed, is currently behind by three points, according to EPIC-MRA, but because this has been an incredibly hard fought, personal and increasingly nasty battle. El-Sayed has a lot of work to do getting Stevens supporters coalesced behind him (the same if Stevens wins in an upset).
I know Stevens supporters in Michigan who think El-Sayed is unelectable. Republicans will run a kind of campaign against El-Sayed a Democrat either cannot or will not, etc. Rogers’ campaign has already taken to referring to El-Sayed by his full name, “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed,” as a taste of the kind of campaign they’ll run.
This prediction may or may not be the case. Maybe it is, maybe it’s not. I’m not without anxiety that it might be. But I don’t think that’s set in stone. In any case, for Democrats who need that Senate seat, the question is moot. It’s El-Sayed or Rogers, a zero sum equation with power going to Trump or the opposition. El-Sayed will have to find a way to bring Stevens supporters over to him. That’s the responsibility you take on when you win, which it seems all but certain he’ll do tomorrow.
I wanted to add a bit of a cautionary note to anyone who thinks that El-Sayed is toast, either because of these polls or because of El-Sayed’s politics generally.
The first is that Mike Rogers lost to Elissa Slotkin in 2024, which turned out to be a pretty rough year for Democrats and in which Trump actually won the state. Just on the merits, Rogers is not a strong candidate or a particularly able one. That’s an important part of the equation. The other is that these general election polls come after a few months of relentlessly negative campaigns against both Democrats but especially against El-Sayed. Outside expenditures attacking El-Sayed dwarf those attacking Haley, with a lot of it coming from AIPAC. Meanwhile, Rogers is running basically uncontested in the GOP primary. He’s taking zero incoming fire.
You would expect both Democrats to be softened up by that torrent of negative ads while Rogers has yet to face any. The nastiness of the Democratic primary meanwhile has likely pushed a number of each Democrats’ supporters at least into the undecided category in these polls. That’s why reconsolidating Democrats will be so critical for El-Sayed.
What that all amounts to is that there’s at least a credible argument that El-Sayed’s numbers have room to grow while Rogers’ may not.
Polls in Michigan close tomorrow night at 8 p.m. local time.
