Nobody actually know if El-Sayed is the weaker Michigan Senate candidate
The difference between Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed is tiny — and the uncertainty is huge
Programming note: This week’s live podcast taping will happen at 2:00 PM Eastern today, Thursday August 6, 2026, and be all about the current state of the midterms through the lens of our new election forecasting model at FiftyPlusOne.news. Join David and Elliott as they talk through the model, reflect on some of Elliott’s thinking for model design, and do some meta-discussion about election forecasting in general.
Former Wayne County health director Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic primary for Michigan’s open Senate seat on Tuesday night, defeating Rep. Haley Stevens by roughly 1 percentage point. The result was closer than pollsters projected — which some centrist, pro-Stevens Democrats cheered on social media as evidence of El-Sayed’s lack of general-election appeal.
In recent weeks, the Stevens campaign and its allies spent much of their time and money arguing El-Sayed is too progressive to win Michigan in November, and that Stevens would have been a more “electable” candidate. The New York Times reported the day after the primary that El-Sayed’s “narrow win” sets up a “critical test” for the “insurgent” left: Can progressives win in swing states?
I find these debates about electability tiring and, usually, damningly devoid of data. The reality is if you look at the data — the polls and the “fundamentals,” to use the parlance of election forecasters — the two candidates look like they would have done roughly the same this November.
What the polls actually say about El-Sayed and Stevens
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