The Michigan “pollercoaster” continues. After a Democratic U.S. Senate primary in which polls wrongly projected a landslide win for Abdul El-Sayed, the start of the general election features wildly divergent poll data.
In the days before the August 4 primary, none of the four general election trial heats released had El-Sayed—who did win the primary by a hair—leading Republican nominee Mike Rogers. And the first poll sampled after the primary, sponsored by Fox News, had Rogers up 4 points. The bipartisan duo used by Fox News, Beacon Research, and Shaw & Company Research, has been christened a “Select Pollster” by The New York Times poll aggregators. And since every other Fox News poll of competitive Senate races this year has shown a Democratic lead, its Michigan survey raised the question of whether El-Sayed was in serious trouble.
However, in the past week, four more post-primary polls dropped with El-Sayed’s leads. An internal poll for Senate Majority PAC, the Super PAC run by allies of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, which has fallen behind El-Sayed, has the Democrat up 6. Another is sponsored by League of American Workers, a one-man conservative operation, with El-Sayed leading by 3. AARP, using the bipartisan team of Fabrizio Ward and Impact Research, sees a 1-point race.
The most recent sample, from August 11 to 17, shows El-Sayed’s biggest lead to date: 7 points. That one comes from Susquehanna Polling and Research, a Republican firm yet one that is also a Select Pollster in the eyes of The New York Times.
The data can be interpreted in different ways. The average of the four trial heats surveyed in July is Rogers +3.5, and the five from August are El-Sayed +2.6, suggesting the end of a heated Democratic primary has reunited the party faithful, given El-Sayed fresh momentum, and brought along enough of the swing to win.
However, 2.6 points is hardly a comfortable lead. If we toss out the internal poll (and we should), El-Sayed’s average lead dwindles to 1.4 points, well within margins of error.
Furthermore, three of the August polls also sampled the Michigan gubernatorial race. In each, Democrat Joyce Benson runs stronger than El-Sayed, leading by 5 in the Fox News and AARP polls, and by 16 in the League of American Workers poll. At minimum, even if El-Sayed is slightly ahead, he could be doing better in a state that has been reluctant to vote for Republicans not named Donald.
Given all the challenges facing the polling industry, and how terrible some of the polling has been this primary season, an understandable conclusion is that we should just ignore all the polls. That’s fine for most of us, but it’s a luxury El-Sayed cannot afford. He needs to know, now, whether he is ahead or behind. If he’s ahead, he can feel confident that his core messages and communications strategy are sufficient to win. If he’s behind, then he needs to be clear-eyed about his weaknesses and address them, fast.
El-Sayed brims with confidence, arguably to the point of cockiness, and that can impede clear-eyed assessments. In the run-up to the primary, he and his campaign seemed to believe the polling that showed him coasting to a double-digit victory. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have spent the day before Election Day partying with the controversial Hasan Piker and other content creators. He would have been knocking on more doors.
Did that political near-death experience infuse his operation with more humility, or will his team gravitate to the more optimistic data to tell themselves major adjustments aren’t needed?
We have some indications that the El-Sayed campaign knows it has work to do to shore up components of the Democratic base. For example, among Black voters, in the AARP and Fox News crosstabs we can see El-Sayed running roughly 10 points behind Benson. Lo and behold, this very evening, the Wayne County Democratic Black Caucus is hosting a meet-and-greet at a Detroit club that’s open to the public. The chair of the caucus said he hopes the event will clear up “misconceptions” such as that “he disrespected Michelle Obama” and that “he’s gonna have this Sharia Law and that he’s gonna do all these different things that are against our community.”
Two weeks ago, I wrote, “To Mend Fences in Michigan, El-Sayed Should Stop Talking About Israel.” Since then, he hasn’t. On his social media feed in the run-up to the primary, mentions of “AIPAC” and “genocide” were common. After the primary, no mentions at all. Nor was Israel mentioned during his media availability on Wednesday. It appears El-Sayed understands that further emphasis on such a contentious subject is not the way to reunite the party.
However, to win back skeptical Jewish Michigan Democrats, turning down the temperature on the Middle East may be necessary, but not sufficient.
State Senator Jeffrey Moss, a pro-Israel/anti-Netanyahu Democrat nominated to succeed Representative Haley Stevens in Congress, recently told Ben Jacobs in Slate that he needs to see more fence-mending from El-Sayed before he will endorse him. “I think we both recognize it’s going to take Jeremy Moss voters and Abdul El-Sayed voters to vote for the same ticket to beat Mike Rogers,” said Moss, “But we’re going to sit down, and Abdul’s going to have to demonstrate some serious outreach to Oakland County’s Jewish community.”
A big obstacle remains El-Sayed’s response to the March attack on a West Bloomfield temple by a Lebanese American follower of Hezbollah. At the time, El-Sayed undercut his statement that “there is no justification for what he did,” by referencing the fact that the assailant lost family members to an Israeli air strike and arguing that “hurt people hurt people.” Given the opportunity by a reporter to revisit that statement the day after the primary, El-Sayed stood by it. Moss told Slate, “There are areas of disagreement, and there’s still a lot of Jewish pain in this district, especially after the Temple Israel attack here.”
On X, Paul Jacobs, a Precinct Delegate in the Michigan Democratic Party, warned, “AES has deeply ruptured the Jewish community here in Detroit. Not sure if it’s possible to bring them back together. AES has work to do.” He reports that competing groups of Jewish Democratic donors are now fundraising for El-Sayed and Rogers. One of those Michigan Jewish Democrats who is fundraising for El-Sayed, Charles Gaba, counseled the candidate, in a X post, to “tell Piker to take a hike (and mean it)” and “apologize for justifying the Temple Israel attack (whether he meant to or not, that’s how it came off to a LOT of people).”
Beyond shoring up those Democratic constituencies, does El-Sayed need to adjust to win over swing voters? If we look at the roughest poll for El-Sayed, the one from Fox News in which he’s behind by 4, he’s losing independents to Rogers by 5 points. El-Sayed wins with moderates by 10, but that’s much worse than Benson’s 27-point margin.
What precisely could be done to strengthen El-Sayed’s standing with Michigan swing voters, without alienating his base with crude flip-flops, can’t be known without deeper research. So I won’t speculate.
But consider what Howard Dean once said, on a HuffPost podcast about his difficulty transitioning from an insurgent presidential candidate in 2004 to a frontrunner and plausible chief executive: “It was really a tug of war. I could actually feel the tugging as I would try to do it. I would try to give a measured speech, and the audience would be completely flat. And I wouldn’t let myself leave them flat … I knew I had to make the turn. And I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it.”
Twenty-two years later, social media is even more dominant, and the instant gratification candidates get from politically polarizing viral posts is even more craved. Should El-Sayed suppress that craving, and shelve his penchant for trash-talking bravado, because, while it enthralls his devotees, it does little for the middle? It would be worth considering if the Fox News poll closely reflects the political landscape.
Without more reliable polling, we can’t know for sure exactly where El-Sayed stands. But assuming the worst, and putting in the extra effort to woo the swing, is a safer bet for him than assuming all is fine. Certainly, Rogers—who lost the 2024 Senate race by about 19,000 votes—is running like he’s behind. He’s investing early time and resources to build up a “Democrats for Mike Rogers” operation, targeting those Black and Jewish voters who are soft on El-Sayed, to go beyond his political base.
In a political campaign, playing strong offense is not about talking tough, but about running smart—developing a strategy to win hard-to-reach voters, even if it means going beyond a candidate’s comfort zone.
Might Democrats reunite organically? Might the rising Blue Wave be enough to carry El-Sayed to victory without any adjustments? Of course. But a campaign should run scared, not strut arrogantly. One could crunch the numbers to conclude El-Sayed is winning. But plenty of folks have learned the hard way this year that polls aren’t votes. Better to assume you’re losing and hustle for those votes.
