Haley Stevens

Michigan’s increasingly bare-knuckled and wildly expensive Democratic primary for U.S. Senate comes to a head on Tuesday as moderate Congresswoman Haley Stevens faces progressive Abdul El-Sayed.

The race is considered vital for Democrats if they hope to retake control of the Senate and it has both national attention and tens of millions of dollars in outside spending, overwhelmingly on Stevens’ behalf.

But the most recent polls show El-Sayed, a former public health official, carrying a significant lead into Tuesday’s election.

Here are both candidates’ positions on key issues in the race.

Money in politics

El-Sayed has made reducing the role of money in our politics one of the central issues of his campaign.

He supports overturning Citizens United, the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision that eliminated campaign spending limits on corporations. He would like to ban outside spending through corporate 501(c)4s, SuperPACs, and 527 groups. He’s argued that, because he’s not beholden to wealthy donors, he’ll be able to stand up to them more effectively.

“We’ve got to make sure things don’t cost more and more every day, and that means addressing the monopolies and oligopolies that we’ve allowed to function in society for a long time as a function of the fact that these corporations can use their money to influence public policy,” he said in a June interview with MLive.

Related: El-Sayed, Stevens talk health care, immigration policy and passing critical legislation

Stevens has been the beneficiary of close to $60 million in outside spending over the course of the campaign, compared with roughly $4 million for El-Sayed.

And she has gestured to the idea that massive campaign spending is a problem.

“I don’t think there’s much difference between super PACs going in for Abdul or super PACs going in for me,” she said during a July 27 debate organized by Fox 2 in Detroit. “We have a problem with campaign finance reform in this country. I have an A-grade from End Citizens United. I have been endorsed by Defend the Vote.”

Stevens’ A-grade aside, End Citizens United endorsed El-Sayed last month.

Stevens has introduced legislation that would address a different aspect of money’s influence on politics by banning the trading of stocks, futures, commodities and cryptocurrencies by public officials and their families; permanently banning public officials from lobbying on behalf of foreign adversaries and extending certain ethics and reporting requirements to public officials’ spouses.

Affordability

Stevens says she’ll take a two-pronged approach to addressing the rising costs of everything from food to gas to rent.

The first part is about growing the economy.

“You do that by lowering the middle-class tax rate and taxing, at an appropriate marginal rate, the wealthiest,” she said. “The same thing goes for Social Security. We’ve got to secure Social Security.”

And you do it, she said, by securing equitable federal investment in Michigan for things like infrastructure and public services, by investing in education and job training and by protecting and growing the state’s manufacturing sector.

Related: Haley Stevens says ‘I don’t take it too personally’ after viral clip draws online mockery

The second part is pushing back on the things raising consumer prices. Stevens has been a stalwart critic of President Donald Trump’s tariffs and has introduced a bill to bar tariffs on grocery items.

She also told MLive that she would include “taking on utility companies to get very aggressive around the rate raising that has taken place.”

Stevens introduced a bill in March that would impose penalties on investor-owned utilities that raise rates.

But her commitment to opposing utility companies has been a point of contention in the race.

At the July 27 debate, Stevens denied taking donations from Michigan’s major utility companies for her Senate campaign.

But Stevens did receive $2,500 from Consumers Energy and $2,500 from DTE just prior to announcing her run for Senate and shifted that money from her House committee to her Senate committee.

El-Sayed has argued that, because he is not taking money from corporate PACs, he’ll be better situated to stand up to the companies pursuing their own economic interests at the expense of average Michiganders.

“When you’re bought off by DTE and Blue Cross and Big Pharma and Big Tech and AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), don’t be surprised that there’s a pro quo that comes with that quid,” he said during the July 27 debate.

Bringing costs down means “addressing the monopolies and oligopolies that we’ve allowed to function in society for a long time as a function of the fact that these corporations can use their money to influence public policy,” he said.

It means “making sure that they can’t beat down unions and that unions actually can form,” he said.

And it also means taxing billionaires on their wealth in addition to their earnings, he said.

U.S. support for Israel

El-Sayed has said that he believes Israel’s military actions in Gaza constitute a genocide.

He has said the United States should not be providing unconditional military support for any country, Israel included.

And, as the campaign has progressed, he has increasingly argued that the money spent on such military aid would be better spent at home.

“I’ve spent most of my career taking care of kids who did not have the glasses they needed, whose families are in medical debt, who went to schools that didn’t have boilers in the middle of January, who were drinking leaded water in their schools,” he said. “I want my tax dollars spent here on them rather than to be spent over there to drop bombs on other people’s kids, to backstop apartheid, do genocide.”

El-Sayed has said he believes in self-determination for both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis, “that everybody ought to have peace, dignity and self-determination.”

“All of us love and revere Jewish folk, our Jewish neighbors, the faith of Judaism,” he said at an April campaign rally where he appeared with Twitch star Hasan Piker, a frequent critic of Israel. “And, trust me, nobody will fight harder against antisemitism than somebody who intimately understands what it’s like to be discriminated against because of how I pray.”

Stevens has been one of Israel’s staunchest backers in Congress. She has said she believes that Israel hasn’t committed genocide and that U.S. military aid to Israel should continue without conditions.

She said in a June interview with MLive that she doesn’t agree with all of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies but does believe in “the trade relationship, standing by, democracy abroad.”

“The beautiful thing is we’ve got the freedom to have disagreement and dissension here,” she said.

Stevens has been backed by more than $30 million in advertising from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, often known as AIPAC.

Asked during the July 27 debate whether she could understand why some voters might have problems with that level of spending, she detoured twice into a conversation about her desire for peace between Israel and Palestine and support for a two-state solution, but ultimately responded, “Well, I don’t think there’s much difference between super PACs going in for Abdul or super PACs going in for me.”

Data centers and AI

Stevens has said she wants data centers in Michigan because she wants “to secure Michigan being on the forefront of innovation and manufacturing.”

“I visited hundreds, uniquely hundreds, of manufacturing shop floors,” she said at a WOOD TV debate in early July. “They are using this technology. We want the jobs. We just can’t afford to force the workers to pay for it.

And, for that reason, she said, it’s important for the federal lawmakers “to secure the tax code so that these kajillionaire enterprises are paying their fair share.”

“It is unacceptable that rates would go up as a result” of data centers going online, she said. “I want to force these data centers to pay their utility bills and to pay water bills for folks.”

El-Sayed has taken a more oppositional approach, proposing conditions for data center construction ranging from not raising energy rates to using all union labor and entering into binding community benefits agreements, all of it enforceable with penalties that include shutting down the data center.

“These pose real dangers,” he said at the WOOD TV debate, “and the people that are pushing them are the richest most powerful CEO.”

He also supports a plan to give the federal government a 50% interest in major AI companies, which are driving the push for larger and larger data centers.

AI “holds the capacity to destroy our jobs, deny our healthcare and surveil us,” he said in a statement. “That power can’t sit solely within the control of a few billionaires.”