A Progressive Victory in a Nail-Biter Primary

Michigan voters have sent a message to establishment Democrats, but it wasn’t the romp many expected.

Photo courtesy of NBC News

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed has narrowly won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, defeating Rep. Haley Stevens. The victory establishes a Midwest beachhead for a progressive left wing of the Democratic Party that has been on the march this midterm cycle.

Despite many polls showing a likely blowout victory for El-Sayed, the final margin was a nail-biter. Decision Desk HQ’s tally had him at about 48.5% to Stevens’s 47.5%. Turnout reflected the attention the race drew: the vote count already exceeded the previous record for a non-presidential Democratic primary in Michigan.

At the Majestic Theatre in Detroit last night, El-Sayed aimed his remarks at the coming general election: “[H]owever we might feel about the campaign we’ve just come through, I want you to understand that it pales in comparison to the cynicism, in comparison to the corporatism, in comparison to the lies that Mike Rogers and Donald Trump are going to tell,” he told supporters. “However much we might disagree with our Democratic opponent, there is so much more that unites us than divides us,” he continued. “Tomorrow, we begin to mend fences.” Turning to his Republican opponent, he said directly: “I know you’re listening, Mike. Mike, we are coming for you.”

Stevens, addressing her supporters, previewed the fight ahead in blunter terms. Republicans, she said, “are going to do everything they can to throw all the dirt, all the mud, the kitchen sink at us,” adding, “we’re going to have to get ready to show Mike Rogers what a little stick it to ‘em looks like.”

The primary had been cast for months as the latest proxy battle between the party’s establishment and progressive wings and the biggest such fight yet. The left flank’s recent wins had all come in safe blue enclaves, but Michigan is a swingy state: It went for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary, then Donald Trump that same year, then Joe Biden in 2020, then Trump again in 2024. A Democratic loss in November would jeopardize the party’s narrow path back to a Senate majority.

It is now up to El-Sayed and Michigan voters to keep the state in the blue column.

Building the campaign

El-Sayed entered the race in April 2025 as a former Wayne County health director seeking a political comeback. He had lost the 2018 gubernatorial primary to now-Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who decisively won that race with 52.1% of the vote to El-Sayed’s 30.3%. Over the next 16 months, according to his campaign, he held 459 events in 104 different towns and cities across Michigan, from the Upper Peninsula to Detroit. His “We Can Do Better” tour deliberately targeted neighborhoods that flipped for Trump in 2024, where he held roundtable discussions on the issues that most affected voters’ lives.

El-Sayed built his campaign on a rejection of the same outside money that would ultimately flood the race to oppose him. He refused to accept corporate PAC money, touting, “Our movement is powered by everyday people, rather than corporations or special interests.” He added, “I’m so grateful for the outpouring of support from folks who believe in our shared vision. So many Michiganders have given a bit of their paycheck, a bit of their time, or a bit of their story because they believe that their government should work for them.”

The fundraising numbers bore that out. By late June, according to FEC filings, El-Sayed had raised $12.2 million, practically all of which came from individual donations. Bridge Michigan’s reporting on the most recent full quarter before the primary found El-Sayed ahead of Stevens in nearly every financial metric. He raised nearly $4.6 million in the period, compared to $2.1 million for Stevens, and collected $1.2 million from donors who gave less than $200, compared to Stevens’s roughly $227,000 from small-dollar donors.

He also built institutional muscle beyond the online donor base. According to his campaign, he racked up 81 endorsements, most notably from the UAW and National Nurses United, and expanded a volunteer operation with more than 4,388 sign-ups, as canvassing, door-knocking and phone- and text-banking accelerated as the primary approached.

What El-Sayed ran on

Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign featured a three-part slogan he repeated at nearly every stop: money out of politics, money in your pockets, Medicare for All. Of the three, Medicare for All was the most specific policy proposal. It was one he leaned on most heavily in his stump speech, and it was the issue he had championed since his 2018 run for governor and as the co-author of a 2021 book on the subject.

Beyond that core message, as Time magazine reported, El-Sayed called for cutting off U.S. aid to Israel and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He also pushed for taxing billionaires at 7% of their wealth and enforcing antitrust laws against corporate price collusion. He singled out donor conflicts directly on debate stages, at one point asking rivals in a forum sponsored by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan to raise their hands if they’d never taken money from the insurer. He was the only one who did.

He has resisted the socialist label attached to him by both allies and opponents. Pressed on his relationship with Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez and asked to explain the difference between his politics and democratic socialism, El-Sayed said he was “simply not a socialist,” adding: “We’re so concerned about what they’re going to say about us that we forget that we also have mouths and can talk about that. Let’s talk about Mike Rogers. Mike Rogers is the worst kind of corporatist.”

Elsewhere he described his own economic philosophy in similar terms. “I’d rather think of myself as a capitalist who’s actually read about capitalism, in the sense that the biggest risk to capitalism was always going to be corporate consolidation and monopoly rather than government regulation.” He was explicit that he did not want his coalition defined by ideology or by the DSA label some in the party used against him. “I don’t do ideology,” he said. “You want a coalition of all people. You know who else are going to be part of my coalition? Three-time Trump voters who want health care, who want to keep our money here at home.” He acknowledged some would try to pin the socialist label on him regardless, but framed his appeal instead around a shared frustration with the political establishment rather than shared ideology.

Big money didn’t win the day

Money out of politics was the first plank of El-Sayed’s slogan, and the primary itself became the clearest illustration of why he was making the argument. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) poured more than $100 million into the 2026 midterm elections overall, with around $30 million of that dedicated to defeating El-Sayed in Michigan alone. It was the most money AIPAC’s political action committee and super PAC, the United Democracy Project, had ever devoted to a single race, according to an analysis by Sludge.

By the final stretch, Stevens’s campaign and the six super PACs backing her had spent more than $61 million on ads compared with $2.3 million in outside support for El-Sayed. Total outside spending made it into the most expensive Democratic U.S. Senate primary in U.S. history.

Set against that imbalance, El-Sayed’s own fundraising was itself part of his argument. He made his case directly on a debate stage, saying of Stevens, “If you need a $60 million crutch, you probably can’t be elected on your own terms.”

Stevens did not disavow the outside spending on her behalf. Asked about it, she drew an equivalence between the two campaigns’ outside support: “I don’t think there’s much difference between super PACs going in for Abdul or super PACs going in for me. We have a problem with campaign finance reform in this country,” she said.

On the question of Israel

El-Sayed argued the U.S. should stop selling weapons to Israel, saying “we cannot continue to sell weapons to a country that is doing human rights abuses, genocide and apartheid,” and in one debate called Israel a “rogue state” and said the country needed to “stop running cover” for what he described elsewhere as a push to “annex Lebanon.”

Stevens has disputed characterizing the events in Gaza as a genocide and said of El-Sayed, “He equivocates. He will not recognize Israel’s right to exist as a state,” pointing to an interview in which he had avoided the question. She positioned herself as supporting a two-state solution while also critical of Netanyahu: “It is very clear that Mr. Netanyahu has not made us safer, has not brought us closer to peace, and he is a danger to Jews in America and around the world.”

El-Sayed explicitly linked the arguments over money and Israel, framing AIPAC’s spending as proof of his broader point about outside money buying influence: “For too long, our foreign policy has been handed to us by the likes of the state of Israel and AIPAC,” he warned, “who has made sure that Democrats and Republicans are doing their bidding.”

The establishment lines up

The primary field narrowed to a two-way race in July after state Sen. Mallory McMorrow suspended her campaign and endorsed El-Sayed. McMorrow remained on Tuesday’s ballot, however, and still drew about 4% of the vote.

Other state lawmakers and leaders lined up behind Stevens. With 11 days until the primary, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer endorsed Stevens, a move CNN reported surprised even some of Whitmer’s own staff. The endorsement was notable given that Whitmer had run against El-Sayed in the 2018 gubernatorial primary and beaten him. “As governor, I’ve had one strategy: Get things done,” Whitmer said. “And that strategy informs everything that I do.” She appeared with Stevens at a Teamsters hall in Detroit that same day, praising her work on the CHIPS and Science Act and other initiatives. Sen. Gary Peters, the retiring incumbent, had already endorsed Stevens, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had recruited her into the race in the first place.

Not every prominent Michigan Democrat followed Whitmer’s lead. Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who holds the state’s other Senate seat, stayed neutral in the race, citing a stated principle of not endorsing in contested primaries.

El-Sayed’s campaign read the Whitmer endorsement as confirmation of its core argument. Spokesperson Roxie Richner said: “The corporate establishment has closed ranks and made their pick. Now Michigan voters will get to make theirs.” The UAW, which had endorsed El-Sayed, responded to Whitmer directly: “UAW is committed to electing candidates who don’t waver when it comes to fighting for workers. We know who is on our side, and who is on the side of corporations.”

On El-Sayed’s side of the ledger were Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, who barnstormed the state together for him, along with Rep. Rashida Tlaib. Sanders framed the race in stark class terms at a July 18 rally: “In all due respect to Congresswoman Stevens, everyone knows that this is not an election between her and Abdul El-Sayed. This is an election between Abdul and the billionaire class.”

The clearest counterpoint to the establishment’s caution came a few states east, in New York City, where Zohran Mamdani had won the mayoralty as a democratic-socialist outsider after twice beating former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. El-Sayed had advised Mamdani early in his campaign, and Mamdani’s win “transformed El-Sayed’s Senate campaign overnight by validating the idea that victory was plausible,” according to Time magazine. In June, Mamdani’s backing helped propel three progressive candidates to victory New York’s congressional House primaries. Two of them, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, are members of the Democratic Socialists of America, and the third, Brad Lander, is a former member. Two of the three defeated Democratic incumbents. Republicans, for their part, saw the same pattern and moved to exploit it. The GOP began working to tie both El-Sayed and Colorado’s 8th District candidate Manny Rutinel to Mamdani directly, hoping the association would hurt Democrats outside deep-blue turf.

Not everyone in the party was convinced Michigan would, or should, follow the same script. Matt Bennett of Third Way, a leading center-left Democratic group, cautioned against reading too much into a single race. Bennett said, “I don’t think that even if El-Sayed wins, that means the national party is moving dramatically to the left, as the left will insist if that happens.”

Nor was the pattern uniform. On the same Tuesday night, in Missouri’s 1st District, Rep. Wesley Bell, who had unseated progressive Cori Bush in 2024 with AIPAC’s help, handily beat back Bush’s comeback bid, again with its help, winning 59.2% to 36.9%.

The demographics show where El-Sayed’s work is cut out

Despite his message of economic populism, El-Sayed’s support came largely from college-educated white and young voters. Among older voters, Black voters and working-class voters without a college degree, Stevens proved far stronger.

The closest look at how each coalition performed came from Wayne County, the state’s largest and a critical source of Democratic votes. The county was still working through a heavy load of absentee ballots and reconciling precinct tallies well after other counties had reported, and for hours was giving Stevens an 8-point advantage even as El-Sayed led statewide. CNN’s live coverage captured the swing inside the county itself: Stevens gained ground as mail ballots came in, then lost it again as Election Day votes from Detroit and heavily Arab-American Dearborn were counted.

The pre-election polling turned out to be a poor guide to the final margin. The last seven surveys tracked by the New York Times had El-Sayed ahead by margins ranging from 10 to 19 points, and some of the most favorable of those came from firms affiliated with his campaign, according to Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin newsletter. Even so, those polls offer the clearest picture available of who made up each candidate’s coalition heading into the vote.

The clearest divide was age. Emerson College Polling’s late-July survey found voters under 50 breaking for El-Sayed by 42 points, 67% to 25%, a gap that tightened to 12 points among voters in their 50s before flipping to Stevens by 14 points, 53% to 39%, among voters 60 and older. A Mitchell Research survey the following week found similarly stark numbers, with El-Sayed winning 68% of voters 18 to 29 and 62% of those 30 to 44, while Stevens won 50% of voters 65 and older.

On race and education, the Detroit News/WDIV survey conducted by the Glengariff Group found El-Sayed leading among white voters by 12 points, while Stevens led among Black voters by 46. On education, the same poll had El-Sayed up by 7 points with college-educated voters and Stevens up by 22 points among voters without a college degree.

Glengariff pollster Richard Czuba, describing what he called the race’s competing “lanes,” put it this way: “For Stevens, it’s older voters, Black voters and voters without a college education… Non-college voters dominate in primaries.” Of El-Sayed’s coalition, he said: “El-Sayed is doing very well among young voters… Clearly, he’s winning very big among the Democratic Socialists. That is his base and the Bernie Sanders’ base. We also see him doing well outstate.” Czuba raised a question about the durability of that coalition, noting El-Sayed was “disproportionately relying on younger voters, especially those under 55 who are White and have a college education,” and questioning whether that group was large enough to overtake Michigan’s older electorate: “The difference in Michigan is our electorate is just so much older than, you know, New York. He’s got to broaden out his appeal. He’s doing reasonably well in outstate Michigan.”

Electability and what November looks like

Whether a candidate with El-Sayed’s positions can win a true swing state in a general election remains an open question heading into November.

Stevens made electability her central argument, almost to the exclusion of everything else. On the eve of the primary, she cast El-Sayed’s approach as insufficient for the fight ahead: “Abdul has also, you know, chosen a path of anger,” Stevens said. “He is really frustrated, which a lot of Michiganders are. But we also need plans… it is not just slogans and bullhorns and big rallies.” After a late poll showed her running stronger than El-Sayed against Rogers, Stevens made the electability case more bluntly: “MAGA Republicans are boosting my opponent because they know they can beat him in the general election. Today’s poll showing Abdul losing to Mike Rogers confirms it. I’m the only candidate who can keep Michigan blue and help us flip the US Senate.”

The available general-election polling largely backed her up. An EPIC-MRA survey conducted July 24-31 found Stevens edging Rogers by 2 points, 44% to 42%, while Rogers led El-Sayed by 3 points, 46% to 43%. Both results were within the poll’s margin of error. Two Glengariff Group surveys in late July showed the same pattern: one had Stevens leading Rogers 47 to 45 percent, while El-Sayed trailed 48 to 41 percent. The other had Stevens ahead 45.2% to 43.8%, while El-Sayed trailed 46.9% to 40.1%. A Mitchell Research survey of the same hypothetical matchups found Stevens running most competitive against Rogers, while El-Sayed trailed.

El-Sayed has answered doubts about electability by questioning the premise behind the argument, telling CBS News: “It’s always funny to me that people want to say that this state votes for moderates when it voted for Donald Trump twice. It may just be that the better explanation is not that the state wants moderates: It’s that it’s so sick and tired of the establishment bought off by corporations on both sides of the political aisle that it was willing to hold its nose and vote for Donald Trump twice.” He made a similar point to CNN a month earlier, framing the state’s swings between parties as evidence of anti-establishment frustration: “I mean, Michigan went for Bernie, then Trump, then Biden, then Trump,” he said. “Folks in the Midwest aren’t known for being scattered. They’re about as steady as they come.”

The New Republic’s assessment the morning after captured the ambivalence: “El-Sayed did not deliver a resounding defeat to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and other parts of the center-left Democratic establishment who backed Stevens, as his supporters hoped,” the magazine wrote, adding that the returns suggested El-Sayed had struggled with rural voters in particular. That’s a data point Democrats will need to reckon with heading into a general election that is historically decided in small towns. Still, the piece concluded, “this is still a huge win for progressives and a major defeat for the center-left.”

Nate Silver, writing the morning after in his newsletter, offered a similar note of caution paired with a path forward: “Tonight is probably bearish for Democrats in the general election, but I wouldn’t overstate that… one positive would be if El-Sayed takes tonight’s results as a signal that he needs to be more conciliatory between now and November.”

National Republicans made clear early on which Democrat they preferred to face. The National Republican Senatorial Committee produced a digital ad emphasizing El-Sayed’s progressive credentials and his endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders, a move widely read as an attempt to help El-Sayed clear the Democratic field rather than Stevens.

The stakes in November, of course, extend well past Michigan. Republicans currently hold 53 Senate seats, and Democrats need to flip four to reclaim the majority. This path requires defending battlegrounds including Michigan and Georgia while also picking up four seats elsewhere. A Democratic loss in Michigan would cost the party a seat it has held for decades and hand the opposing argument—that the party’s leftward primary wins can’t survive contact with a real swing-state electorate—its most concrete piece of evidence yet.

On the other hand, primary voters in Michigan have now sent a message to establishment Democrats that the old ways of trying to win swing states like Michigan aren’t working, and they’re ready to gamble with a fresh approach. Whether the party now unites behind its new Michigan standard-bearer in Dr. Abdul El-Sayed will be a key test of whether Democratic leadership is actually listening.