Haley Stevens

The Democratic primary in Michigan’s U.S. Senate race is still anybody’s to win.

The first poll to capture the state of the race following the departure of state Sen. Mallory McMorrow on July 5, conducted for Politico, showed Congresswoman Haley Stevens with 42% of the vote and former public health official Abdul El-Sayed with 41%.

The second, a Detroit News/WDIV-TV poll released Tuesday, showed Stevens with a 7-point advantage overall, but among voters who said they were “definitely” voting for one candidate or the other, the race becomes a dead heat: Stevens 34.1%, El-Sayed 33.7%.

It is also a contest between two very different visions of the Democratic Party’s future.

Stevens, D-Birmingham, has run a familiar and in many ways cautious campaign, touting her support for and wonkish knowledge of Michigan manufacturing and her four terms in Congress.

She calls herself a “workhorse” and has endeavored to paint El-Sayed, who has never held public office, as more of a show pony.

“I’m the only one on this stage who doesn’t have a talent agent trying to pitch me for paid speeches,” Stevens said during a July 8 debate in Grand Rapids. “And unlike my opponent, I’m not running at the first mic or camera I see.”

El-Sayed, who trained as a doctor, earned a doctorate in public health and went on to lead the Detroit and Wayne County health departments, is an outspoken progressive, critical of both the Trump administration and a quiescent Democratic establishment.

He’s running on a promise to serve the interests of ordinary people rather than the very wealthy and has worked to paint Stevens as a politician beholden to corporate donors and to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, better known as AIPAC, the hawkish and influential pro-Israel lobbying group that has spent millions promoting her candidacy.

“The system that allows big corporations, billionaires, special interests to buy and sell politicians, to rig the system against us,” El-Sayed said in a June interview with MLive. “I’ve got an opponent who is the spitting image of that. I mean, AIPAC’s going to spend $30 million to convince you that you should elect a politician who thinks that the best use of our tax dollars is to send them abroad to a foreign government. That’s wild to me.”

The race is one of the few competitive U.S. Senate contests in the country. Democrats need to hold the seat to have any realistic chance of retaking control of the Senate. The outcome could determine the entire country’s political direction over the coming two years. Both parties are heavily invested in victory.

With the Aug. 4 primary weeks away, the race is turning, in part, on the question of which candidate stands a better chance of defeating former Congressman Mike Rogers, R-White Lake, the Republicans’ likely nominee, in a head-to-head matchup.

Several members of Michigan’s Democratic establishment, including former U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, former Gov. Jennifer Granholm and retiring U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, D-Bloomfield Township, whose decision not to seek a third term created the open seat, have come down in favor of Stevens.

El-Sayed has found support from other quarters, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont and New York Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who will be campaigning alongside him this weekend, and the United Auto Workers.

“This is Michigan’s installment of the battle for the Democratic Party,” said David Dulio, a professor of political science and director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Oakland University. “It’s the progressive darling that has a national following versus a pretty pragmatic U.S. rep.”

Beating Mike Rogers

Stabenow, who served as a U.S. senator from Michigan for a quarter century, had taken her place alongside Stevens at the front of Democratic activist Marcie Paul’s airy West Bloomfield living room.

“I’ve never ever in local, state, federal office endorsed in a primary,” Stabenow told the few dozen women in attendance at the early June event. “I’ve always felt, ‘Let the primary run,” and then I looked at the stakes right now and I said, ‘You know what, I can’t do that because, if the wrong person wins, we’re in trouble.”

“We have to be smart in order to make sure we don’t blow the moment here, to be able to take back the U.S. Senate as well as the U.S. House,” she said.

Stevens, she said, “is the right person at the right time who can beat Mike Rogers,” Stabenow said

A poll released by the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce in early May found that Stevens was the candidate who would fare best in a matchup with Rogers.

But more recent polls by Quantus Insights and Wedgewood Polls show El-Sayed with a slight advantage in a matchup with the former Republican congressman.

“I worry that we’re learning the wrong lessons,” said former U.S. Rep. Andy Levin, a fellow Democrat who Stevens defeated in a 2022 primary race and who has endorsed El-Sayed. “The lesson is not that when times are tough, we have to be the most cautious and run to the middle. What the voters are actually saying is, ‘We don’t even know what the Democratic Party stands for anymore.’”

Political consultant Jeff Timmer believes El-Sayed would make easy work of Rogers because he’s “a far better and natural political athlete, while Rogers’s is like a GOP Austin Powers, with a campaign platform and rhetoric deep frozen in the ‘90s only to be defrosted in 2023 and now clumsily saying, ‘Yeah, I’m MAGA, baby.’”

On the contrary, he said, the “blunt force trauma that is required to blunt Abdul and nominate Stevens might cause the perfect storm needed for Mike Rogers to win.”

But Peters, who announced his endorsement Monday, believes Stevens is the better choice in a swing state like Michigan.

“The world is going to look a whole lot different after the primary is over,” he said. “We know already right now that the Republicans have over $45 million of expenditures that are going to hit the day after the primary” from the Republican-affiliated Senate Leadership Fund.

“That starts moving numbers,” he said, “and you want to have a candidate who is battle tested, someone who can appeal to a broad cross section of Michigan, because a race will look a lot different in September than it does in July.”

Manufacturing

Stevens grew up in Rochester Hills and Birmingham, left Michigan to attend college at American University in Washington, D.C. and returned in 2017 at the age of 33 to run for Congress.

She came out on top in a crowded Democratic field then flipped a Republican-held seat in the 11th District, buoyed by a wave of anti-Trump sentiment, a robocall recorded by Hillary Clinton and an endorsement from Barack Obama. She had worked on both of their 2008 presidential campaigns.

“It was a tough,” said her mother, Maria Marcotte, the former CEO of Brogan & Partners, an advertising and public relations firm founded by Stevens’ aunt Marcie Brogan. “She was an unknown. She was up against some people that were more known and a couple celebrities that came in. But nobody outworked her.”

“One of Haley’s really big strengths that she’s just had since she was a peanut: people talk to her and they like her because she’s a genuine person,” Marcotte added, “and so she and I door knocked, oh my God, all over town.”

A key part of Stevens pitch to voters, both then and now, is the fact that she served as chief of staff on Obama’s auto rescue and understands the state’s manufacturing sector in a way that few politicians do.

“We saved over two hundred thousand jobs and strengthened Michigan’s advanced manufacturing economy,” she said in one of her first television ads. “That’s our future.”

Stevens was 25 when she began working on the auto rescue and was more a functionary than a visionary.

Steve Rattner, who led the effort, wrote in his book “Overhaul” that Stevens was “tireless, cheerful and blessed with a social conscience and a talent for improvisation.”

When he mentions her elsewhere in the book, it’s largely with reference to her day-to-day administrative tasks: securing meeting rooms, picking up lunch, finding a rental car for a trip to Detroit, in one instance researching the political donation history of a potential appointee.

It felt like being a part of history, Stevens said in an interview, and gave her a chance to represent her home state at a crucial time.

“I was the person from Michigan on the team,” she said. “No one asked me to do this, but I stayed late at work returning phone calls from scared Michiganders, just helping them, doing constituent services, walking them through it.”

“I learned a ton in a short amount of time,” she said.

She would carry the issue with her into Congress, where, last year, the Center for Effective Lawmaking named her Michigan’s most effective House Democrat.

“I’m a proven, effective lawmaker for Michigan, a manufacturing geek who puts up a hand for our state in tough moments, uncertain moments, and wins for our state,” Stevens said.

Israel

When Michigan’s Independent Redistricting Commission redrew the state’s political map in 2021, it merged a portion of Stevens’ district with the district represented by Andy Levin. Both of them ran in the new 11th District.

AIPAC had not previously given money to Steven’s campaigns. It spent more than $5 million on her that year, counting both campaign donations and independent expenditures,

Levin is Jewish, but he had been critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and had introduced a bill that would have barred the U.S. from aiding Israel’s efforts to exert permanent control over Gaza and the West Bank.

David Victor, a former president of AIPAC, wrote in a letter to prospective donors that the primary “presents a rare opportunity to defeat arguably the most corrosive member of Congress to the US-Israel relationship”.

Levin may have been the scion of a Michigan political dynasty, but Stevens beat him soundly.

AIPAC has supported her since. The United Democracy Project, a political action committee connected to AIPAC has reported spending close to $15 million promoting Stevens and opposing El-Sayed in this election cycle.

Stevens has remained a staunch supporter of the U.S. relationship with Israel, even as public opinion has shifted in the wake of Israel’s war in Gaza. A February Gallup poll found that, for the first time, Americans of all political leanings are more sympathetic to the Palestinians than the Israelis.

“The goal is always long-term peace,” Stevens said.

As the primary race has heated up, she’s made more of her disagreements with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but said in a June interview that she still believes in the “the trade relationship, standing by democracy abroad.”

“The beautiful thing is we’ve got the freedom to have disagreement and dissension here,” she said. “And, you know, one of my primary opponents in this race is outwardly campaigning with somebody who said that America deserved 9/11, who is fanning the flames of antisemitism and bringing him to college campuses when they have already been very divided. That is not me.”

Progressive politics

El-Sayed has been an outspoken critic of Israel, calling it a “rouge state” and the war in Gaza a “genocide,” though he had categorically denied the suggestion that he’s antisemitic.

He did campaign this spring with left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who did once say that the U.S. “deserved” the 9/11 terrorist attacks, though he later apologized.

Stevens’ “whole argument is, ‘He’s scary,’” El-Sayed said. “I don’t think America deserved 9/11, and the idea that somebody else might have said something that I should be held accountable for is exactly what’s wrong with that campaign.”

El-Sayed, 41, is the son of Egyptian immigrants. He is also a Muslim and, on the campaign trail, will speaking joking about his 11-letter first name – Adbulrahman – and more seriously about how others have tried to frame him as different because of his faith.

He also says that experience has spurred him to defend others’ differences.

“Nobody will fight harder against antisemitism than somebody who intimately understands what it’s like to be discriminated against because of how I pray,” he said at an event with Piker at the University of Michigan.

It was at the University of Michigan, which he attended as an undergraduate, where he got his first inkling that politics might be his calling.

El-Sayed was the student speaker at the university’s commencement ceremony in 2007. He cracked jokes about the state’s long winters and late night burritos and told his fellow graduates that they were going out into a world that needed them.

“I don’t want to embarrass your senior speaker,” former President Bill Clinton, that year’s commencement, later told the audience, “but I wish every person in the world who believes we are fated to have a clash of civilizations and cannot reach across the religious divides could have heard you speak today.”

Clinton spoke to him after the event, “and he said, ‘You should run for office. You’ve got a gift for communicating.” El-Sayed said. “I was like, that’s insane. Did you see my name?”

But a decade later, after medical school, graduate school and a year-and-a-half as the executive director of the Detroit Health Department, he launched a campaign for governor.

“I didn’t know any better, so I was like, ‘If I’m going to do this, I’m going for broke,” he said.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer beat him by 22 points in the primary. He still got 30 percent of the vote and an endorsement from U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the longtime independent from Vermont.

His campaign is going better this time, not least because of the progressive moment in American politics.

He’s running on promises to take back government for the needs of ordinary people, to fight for Medicare for all, to “tax billionaires so you can make money to invest in the things that everybody needs, which is schools, healthcare, childcare, infrastructure.”

He called money in politics “the central problem, why we don’t have guaranteed health care in this country, why our foreign policy is so broken. It all goes back to the ways that big corporations, special interests, can wrap politicians around their interests to do their bidding.”

He is not taking money from corporate PACs and has been both outraised and outspent by Stevens.

Where Stevens and her supporters had bought or reserved $34.4 million in ad time as of July 1, El-Sayed and his supporters had just $2.8 million, according to the ad tracking firm AdImpact.

One recent ad, paid for by the United Democracy Project, claims he has a “history of disrespecting women” because he called Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign “ineffectual” in an article on childhood obesity and said voters were “sick of corporate politicians who are bought and sold” while running against Whitmer.

The ad also says he was accused in a discrimination lawsuit of “telling a woman he didn’t want to work with anyone over 40,” but El-Sayed wasn’t a defendant in the lawsuit. The complaint does say he told a female doctor he was excited not to be working with “anyone over 40.” El-Sayed was 30 at the time. The lawsuit did not accuse him of misogyny.

The final accusation, by an ex-employee who said he was offered money to remain quiet about misogynistic comments El-Sayed had made, is more difficult to vet.

El-Sayed campaign spokesperson Roxie Richner didn’t address that allegation directly but said his “record of delivering to improve the lives and health of Michigan women speaks for itself” and called the ad “a desperate attempt to distract voters.”

McMorrow, when she was still in the race, took him to task for implying that he was a medical doctor when he was never certified to practice medicine, going into public health instead.

“The question is not whether or not I’m a real doctor,” he said. “You can go ask Columbia University about that. The question is whether or not you can see a doctor.”

He said his counter to those sorts of attacks is to be “radically transparent.”

“There’s a reason I go everywhere and talk to everybody,” he said. “I want every direct platform I can have. Why? Because I want you to hear from me. Because for damn sure you’re going to hear about me.”

Nationalization

It’s possible that El-Sayed is benefitting from what Dulio called a “nationalization” of the race, “where some of the progressives, even some Democrats who find themselves caught in the middle, say to themselves, ‘Boy, there’s this national movement with all these progressives that are seemingly having success. Let’s get behind that.’”

But the progressive wing of the Democratic Party isn’t the whole party, he cautioned, and Stevens has won tough races in the past.

“Don’t sleep on Haley Stevens,” he said. “She’s a tough campaigner. She’s got allies in all the right places to be able to pull this out.”