I've done politics in Michigan for 26 years, and I usually have some sense of what's going to happen, but the Aug. 4 primary defied all expectations.
Let's jump right in.
El-Sayed won without Wayne, Oakland or Macomb counties
Metro Detroit is home to the state's three most populous counties, and for at least the quarter-century I've lived here, they've been must-wins in statewide contests. For any candidate to claim a statewide victory without Wayne, Oakland or Macomb is unprecedented.
But Stevens won all three, taking Wayne County and the city of Detroit by wide margins, edging El-Sayed in Oakland and Macomb ‒ and lost the race, by about 15,000 votes; Stevens' tally was 727,431, or 47.5% of ballots cast,
with 742,206, or 48.4%, for El-Sayed. (State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who exited the race in July but still appeared on the ballot, got 61,386 votes. Anecdotal reports suggest voters who initially supported McMorrow split between Stevens and El-Sayed.)
Most Democratic politics center around southeast Michigan, but in a statewide contest, this isn't the only place to find blue votes. There are four times as many Democratic votes up for grabs in rural Michigan as there are in the city of Detroit. In the 2022 gubernatorial election, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer won 164,947 votes in the city of Detroit ‒ and 723,605 in Michigan's 73 smallest counties.
Stevens won a lot of those counties, but El-Sayed won Kent County and Grand Rapids, Lansing and Ingham County, the Democratic enclave in Berrien County, Washtenaw County, Traverse City and Charlevoix, Marquette and other parts of the Upper Peninsula ‒ and Alpena. I don't know anything about Alpena, or why it would be El-Sayed country; someone email me and clue me in. He ran up the total in Michigan's most educated, affluent outstate communities while accruing enough votes in metro Detroit to get across the finish line, an electoral feat I don't think most political strategists even considered a viable option.
This is a wild shake-up of Democrats' electoral map.
Stevens wasn't 'safer' than El-Sayed
I've got a hot take on Michigan's U.S. Senate race: Haley Stevens wasn't safe.
Stevens, a four-term U.S. Representative, was considered by many to be the most electable candidate in a general election match-up with Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers; it was a central premise of her own pitch to voters.
There's a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth in certain circles, bemoaning what some see as Democrats' inevitable loss to Rogers. Nay-sayers point to two reliable polls in the week before the primary that showed Stevens just one to two points ahead of Rogers in a general election match-up, with El-Sayed trailing by a range of three to 10 points. But there's another way to look at it: After a punishing primary cycle, El-Sayed is, at least per one poll, within margin-of-error of Rogers, a former U.S. rep who ran uncontested in his own party's primary. That's not bad news for El-Sayed; it's bad news for Rogers.
Stevens is an intelligent and capable person who has been an effective member of Congress, but with more than $60 million in outside spending, she still lost to El-Sayed, whose detractors have claimed, loudly, that he's a socialist (he's not), and pointed to his Muslim faith and Arab American heritage as evidence of nefarious, hostile other-ness.
Winning the general election won't be a slam dunk for El-Sayed, but Democrats are just as likely to beat Rogers in the November general election will El-Sayed as they'd have been with Stevens at the top of the ticket.
Most polling in this race was bad
In the run-up to the primary, it seemed like a new poll was coming out every day. And nearly all of them were bogus. A series of dubious polls, at least some conducted by unsecured text link, showed El-Sayed with a double-digit lead; a pollster whose survey found Stevens and El-Sayed tied was vilified by El-Sayed's supporters.
If you take away one thing from this primary, let it be this: If you get a text asking you to take a poll, and you can forward that link to another person who can also use that link to take the poll, that poll is not reliable.
Reliable polling from the Glengariff Group and Epic MRA showed a much closer race, and that's what we got on Tuesday night.
What we got wrong
Every election cycle, the Free Press Editorial Board makes endorsements in competitive races, working on a short timeline, with limited resources. The filing deadline is at the end of April, and absentee ballots go out in June; endorsements publish around that time.
Long story short: We have more races to consider than time, and have to be fairly brutal about which races are truly competitive and where we think our endorsements can make a difference. Even after an intense triage, we were left with two gubernatorial primaries, the Democratic U.S. Senate primary, three U.S. House races and 20 state legislative contests. During the month of June, we interviewed 55 candidates.
In the 13th District U.S. House race, U.S. Rep. Shri Thanedar was challenged by state Rep. Donavan McKinney. In Detroit's 8th District state House race, Chris Gilmer-Hill ran against incumbent state Rep. Helena Scott. Both candidates
In our assessment, the quixotic Thanedar, who has a track record of electoral victories, was likely to win re-election by a significant margin ‒ regardless of my personal preference, and I do live in the district. Scott, it seemed, was an unremarkable incumbent who'd given her constituents no reason to unseat her. We didn't include either race in our line-up of endorsement interviews.
We were wrong. Both challengers were strong candidates who ran remarkable campaigns, promising fresh, vigorous representation; McKinney beat Thanedar with 51% of the vote, and Gilmer-Hill defeated Scott with 48% of ballots cast. Neither needed our nod to win ‒ but if we had a do-over, I'd give it to them.
Nancy Kaffer is the editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters, and we may publish it in print or online.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: El-Sayed's electoral feat in Michigan U.S. Senate race | Opinion
