At 2 a.m. on Aug. 5, NBC News called the Michigan Democratic Senate primary for Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.
Soon after, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who dropped out of the race last month, endorsed El-Sayed, as several other state and national organizations also called the race for him.
Finally, at about 10 a.m. the day after the primary, CNN and Fox 2 Detroit called the race for El-Sayed, who won by about 0.8%.
El-Sayed won despite over $60 million in outside spending on behalf of his opponent, U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens.
El-Sayed was ahead ever since the polls closed at 8 pm, but the spread kept changing, and his initial 5-point lead kept shrinking. Stevens was counting heavily on winning in Detroit and Wayne County -- and she did.
Both candidates spoke to
their supporters around 1 a.m. At that time, Stevens told supporters that it wasn't over, because County and Detroit hadn’t finished counting yet, and pivoted a little towards the general election, talking about the importance of defeating Republican nominee Mike Rogers.
El-Sayed talked more about the movement he has built, and the importance of the Democrats uniting to defeat Rogers. He actually sounded, at that time, like he was priming his supporters for the possibility that he might lose.
But wait! What about the polls that said that El-Sayed was ahead by 10 to 15 points?
Those of us who watch these things every election know that polls don’t vote; people do. Several election experts said that pollsters, even Emerson, had totally oversampled young voters, who still are notorious for not showing up to vote.
As an OG native Detroit voter, I admit that I was getting discouraged when it seemed like Haley might pull ahead, because of the Black vote in Detroit. The Michigan Black Caucus and the Fannie Lou Hamer PAC both endorsed Haley Stevens, seemingly counting on the fact that Black voters in Wayne County and Detroit would prefer the status quo.
As an OG native Detroit voter, I admit that I was getting discouraged when it seemed like Stevens might pull ahead because of the Black vote in Detroit. The Michigan Black Caucus and the Fannie Lou Hamer PAC both endorsed Stevens, seemingly counting on Black voters in Wayne County and Detroit preferring the status quo.
But those of us watching closely knew El-Sayed could win. Along with Wayne and Macomb, Stevens won her native Oakland County – where El-Sayed was also born – but just didn’t have a big enough lead to offset losses statewide. Stevens won a lot of the rural counties in Michigan, but their populations were not enough to overcome the larger outstate urban centers that Dr. El-Sayed won, particularly around Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor and Lansing.
As a native Detroiter whose earliest memories reach all the way back to the original “Nat King Cole” show of the early 1950s, I understand but do not agree with Black Detroiters seeming to back the “safe,” moderate candidate. It reminds me of the difference between the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. view and the Black Panther view of civil rights in the 1960s: Baby steps or seismic change? I’ve always been in the seismic change camp, even though that is often the harder way.
I’ve supported El-Sayed since 2018, when he ran in the Democratic primary against Gretchen Whitmer for governor. I remember personally putting Abdul signs in front of our polling place, not far from our home on Election Day. To me, El-Sayed stands for progress toward the future, not more of the same, or worse, going backward. Like my late Dad, he worked in public health administration, choosing to work with and for the many. With what is going on with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services these days, we need El-Sayed’s medical education and expertise more than ever.
As a native-born, proud brown Muslim and the son of African immigrants, El-Sayed, like Black Americans, has had to fight daily to prove that he is just as American as everyone else, even as he is the most qualified for any position he goes after. To me, he is proving that a person can be completely serious about the issues, and be a fun person at the same time, when he dances to Aretha while perfectly articulately expressing and promoting his progressive stances. We need a seismic change in the Democratic Party and in our politics writ large, and El-Sayed has long convinced me that he will fight for the rights of “We the People”; all the people.
So where do we go from here? The Michigan Democratic Party's “Unity Breakfast” is scheduled for Thursday morning. There's a Friday night rally with Pete Buttigieg as the headliner. Stevens previously said she would support the winner. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, we know that AIPAC will double or triple their efforts to defeat El-Sayed in the general, so we Democrats, including Black Detroiters, will have to quadruple our efforts to defeat Mike Rogers.
Free Press contributing columnist Pamela Hilliard Owens is a local writer, CEO of Pam Speaks 2 You Branding and Marketing Academy and podcast, and co-founder of the We Are Speaking Substack newsletter and podcast. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters, and we may publish it online and in print.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Black voters have to get behind Abdul El-Sayed in Senate race | Opinion
