The political world’s attention has turned this week to Michigan, where the Democratic primary for Senate has become the party’s most expensive — and ugliest — fight of the summer.
The contest, between Representative Haley Stevens and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official, is an ideological battle between establishment and progressive Democrats, as Reid Epstein wrote this morning. We’ll learn a lot about Democratic voters’ rapidly shifting views on Israel, and what they see as the best way to fight President Trump.
But it will also be a test of two very different Democratic coalitions, and will tell us the degree to which the base itself is changing. Tonight, I’ll explain how.
Will Black voters and older voters lift Stevens?
Stevens, 43, who has the support of Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, is relying heavily on two pillars of your typical Democratic primary electorate: Black voters and older voters.
She has appeared dozens of times at Black churches, and her allies have leaned heavily on her association with former President Barack Obama. Stevens’s work as the chief of staff for Obama’s bailout of the auto industry figures prominently in a television ad paid for by a super PAC funded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee; the ad shows Obama praising her, even though she does not actually have his endorsement.
Recent polls show Stevens ahead with Black voters by 30 or even more than 40 percentage points. She also performs better with voters who are older than 60, according to a poll late last month by Emerson College.
El-Sayed, however, is hoping that the voters who come out tomorrow will represent a different, ascendant coalition.
“That’s a big question,” said Matt Grossmann, the director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University. “Is there going to be a changed electorate? Or is there going to be the same electorate?”
Will younger voters carry El-Sayed?
El-Sayed, who has campaigned on progressive rallying cries like “Medicare for all” and who has appeared with the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, vastly outperforms Stevens with young voters.
Polls show he also performs better with white voters and those with college or graduate degrees — a group that, Grossmann said, has grown as a portion of Michigan’s Democratic electorate.
Michigan has open primaries, which means voters don’t have to be registered Democrats to participate. El-Sayed has a double-digit lead among voters who consider themselves independents, according to the Emerson poll.
El-Sayed and his allies are hoping that the primary will look like progressive victories in New York this summer, when young voters helped lift progressive newcomers over establishment-backed Democrats.
Usamah Andrabi, the communications director for Justice Democrats, a progressive group that has not endorsed a candidate in Michigan, said those victories represented a bigger change in who is coming out to vote in primaries, one that could shape the future of the party.
“The base is moving underneath this party and our candidates are responding to that movement, and the establishment refuses to even acknowledge that the ground is shifting,” Andrabi said.
The general-election question
The primary could be decided by questions of turnout. Does Michigan have enough young voters to power a victory for El-Sayed? Will Stevens run up enough of a lead with Black voters?
But the bigger question will come when the dust settles: How can the winner of such a divisive primary knit the party’s coalition back together?
Catch up on the race:
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Can a pro-Israel Democrat still win a big primary? She’s going to try.
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How Haley Stevens’s accent became a flashpoint in the Michigan Senate race
ask the polling editor
The polls in Michigan have shown big swings. A Detroit News poll in early July showed Stevens up by seven percentage points; last week, the Emerson poll I mentioned above showed El-Sayed up by 16. I asked The Times’s polling editor, Ruth Igielnik, to help us make sense of them.
Ruth, help! What’s going on with the polls in Michigan?
In any poll of likely voters, but especially in primaries, pollsters are making assumptions about who will turn out to vote. Some pollsters assume that in a Democratic primary, most voters will be people who consider themselves Democrats. Others assume a good chunk will be independents.
Those different assumptions are producing very different results.
While most recent polls show El-Sayed with a lead, there is also some uncertainty. With an unsettled electorate, small differences in the way polls are conducted — and who they consider to be likely voters — can produce big differences in results.
A lot of polls in our Michigan Senate poll tracker show El-Sayed with a big lead — but only a few are considered high quality. Why?
To be considered a “select pollster” on our page, pollsters need to meet two of three criteria: have a track record of accuracy in recent elections, be a member of a professional polling organization, or conduct their polls with probability-based sampling — a scientific method where every voter has a known probability of being selected for the poll.
Some of these polls from “select pollsters” show El-Sayed with a large lead; others show a narrower race.
There are also a number of polls that have been released in recent weeks by political groups aligned with El-Sayed. We try to be clear on our page when polls are sponsored by political groups, because sometimes groups aligned with a candidate can release polls to try to build a narrative about the race.
That is not to say he is not ahead by a wide margin! Pollsters who have conducted multiple polls in the race do show El-Sayed gaining ground over time.
quote of the day
“I would vote for him again, yes.”
That was Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, reflecting on her 2018 vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. The vote, to confirm a justice who would help strike down Roe v. Wade four years later, has shadowed her like no other as she runs for re-election, Lisa Lerer and Beth Reinhard write.
One Number
564
That’s the number of pages in Paul Rivera’s independent review of Democrats’ loss in 2024. He was the author of the Democratic National Committee’s autopsy of what went wrong for the party that year.
Rivera now claims that the D.N.C. left out a chapter, which the party disputes. My colleague Shane Goldmacher got the missing chapter and the first public interview with Rivera.
take our quiz
This question comes from a recent article in The Times. Click an answer to see if you’re right. (The link will be free.)
Which of the following did my colleague Kellen Browning not see when he spent the weekend at the Democratic Socialists of America summit in Chicago?
Ruth Igielnik, Taylor Robinson and Steven Moity contributed reporting.
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