Abdul El-Sayed enters Election Day ahead in the two most recent public polls of Michigan’s Senate race, each by 7 points. But the lead rests on a Detroit and Black turnout that his own party’s strategists are not taking for granted.
A Mitchell Research & Communications survey of 636 likely voters, taken Oct. 28 and 29, found El-Sayed at 51% and Republican Mike Rogers at 44%, with a 3.9-point margin of error. Pollster Steve Mitchell said El-Sayed “is in the driver’s seat for a big victory.” A Marist poll of 1,235 registered voters, taken Sept. 24 to 27 (margin of error 3.9 points), had the same 51% to 44%, El-Sayed’s biggest lead of the campaign. Five weeks separate the two. In August, a Fox News poll of 1,006 registered voters had Rogers ahead 51% to 47%. One poll is not a trend, and none of these is a prediction.
The early vote points the same direction. The Michigan secretary of state’s office reported 1,392,170 ballots cast a week before Election Day, 18.8% of active registered voters. Absentee returns stood at 1,176,375 on Oct. 27, against 1,126,246 at the same point before the 2022 election, according to figures reported by ClickOnDetroit. This is also the first midterm with statewide early in-person voting, which more than 215,000 people used in its first weekend. Deputy Secretary of State Aghogho Edevbie called that weekend “a great success.”
Those totals do not show who voted, and no official count breaks the early vote down by race or by candidate. That matters because the weak spot in El-Sayed’s coalition is Black voters. CNN reported that Democrats fear lower enthusiasm among them is making the race tighter than it should be. He beat Rep. Haley Stevens in the August primary by one point, and Stevens had the backing of Black voters around Detroit. One Black leader told CNN: “In a close race, even a sliver of doubt about Abdul could lead to defeat.”
Rogers knows it. He opened a campaign office in Detroit and pitched home-building incentives, apprenticeships and action on food deserts in Detroit and Flint. Barack Obama, Kamala Harris and Sen. Raphael Warnock have campaigned for El-Sayed in response.
The record is the argument we would put to those voters. El-Sayed ran Detroit’s health department and then led public health in Wayne County. He is running on Medicare for All, taxing billionaire wealth, lower drug prices and environmental protections, policies that reach Black households first: Black Americans are more likely to be uninsured and to live beside polluters. Rogers’s pitch is manufacturing jobs and lower costs, and he has proposed nothing on the scale of guaranteed health coverage. Black voters who wanted a different nominee in August have a clear choice on what each man would fight for.
Polls close at 8 p.m., and absentee ballots must reach clerks by then. Michigan counts many absentee ballots on Election Day, so Detroit’s result may not be known tonight. We will report what election officials and the wires report.
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