Democrat El-Sayed Makes Final 5-Day Push in Michigan’s High Stakes Senate Primary

CANTON TOWNSHIP, Mich.—In one of the most expensive and highest-stakes primaries of the 2026 midterms, Democratic Senate candidate for Michigan Abdul El-Sayed depicted his race as a “fight between the money and the many” on July 29.

“The money wants us to believe that there is no way past the challenges that we have,” El-Sayed told a room of voters at Qahwah House Coffee in Canton, Eastern Michigan.

“[The] worst we can do is what we’re doing now—that there can’t be any better. That you can dream of healthcare but you can’t actually achieve it.

“The money wants you to believe that they own our democracy and that it’s no longer ours. And on the other side of the money is the rest of us. It’s the will we have to take our country back; government ought to be by the people, and for the people.”

El-Sayed’s team began the rally by helping interested attendees sign up to canvas in the final five days left of campaigning. Voters head to the polls on Aug. 4.

“This is our opportunity to talk to as many people as we possibly can—actually talk to them and move them to support Abdul,” a campaign staffer named James said on Wednesday as he gave canvassing instructions to the crowd.

The race has drawn national attention, in part due to the flood of outside money. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its affiliated groups spent more than $32 million on the race as of last week, backing El-Sayed’s more centrist competitor, according to an Open Secrets analysis of Federal Election Commission (FEC) reports.

That makes it AIPAC’s largest investment into a single election in history.

With all the other investments from various PACs and political groups, now up to $52 million, Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary is second only to Texas’s Republican Senate primary in the volume of outside spending, according to Open Secrets.

Democrats hope voters will give them a rare pickup opportunity in the Texas Senate race this year, amid recent polls by super PAC Americans for Prosperity Action and Washington Post/Ipsos indicating waning enthusiasm among Republican respondents nationwide. They see Michigan as a “must-win” for any hope of flipping the Senate from GOP control next year.

Unlike Texas, the Democratic Party is on the defense in purple Michigan this year.

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) declined to seek reelection and has recently endorsed El-Sayed’s opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), who also has the support of AIPAC and its affiliated groups.

Stevens argued during a debate on Monday that she is more electable in the general election against Republican candidate Mike Rogers, while El-Sayed criticized the flood of outside money into the race, arguing that groups like AIPAC are trying to “buy” the race from Michigan voters.

A recent Glengariff Group poll showing a hypothetical matchup between Rogers and the two Democratic candidates saw the Republican with a double-digit edge over El-Sayed but trailing Stevens by less than one percentage point.

Rogers narrowly lost to Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) in 2024 in a year where President Donald Trump was simultaneously at the top of the ticket and had managed to clinch the Great Lakes State for the first time since 2016.

It’s not clear where exactly voters will swing by the general election in November, particularly with two diverging options in Stevens vs. El-Sayed as Rogers’s potential foil.

Stevens is backed by the Democratic Party’s establishment wing, as well as Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, and El-Sayed has received a flood of endorsements from progressives, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

Currently, El-Sayed is enjoying a comfortable lead in recent polls between him and Stevens leading up to next week’s primary.

He is leading by 8 percentage points overall in RealClearPolitics’ poll aggregate average, with several individual polls putting him up by double digits ahead of Stevens.

Stevens began her career in Washington working on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, and then Barack Obama’s campaign after he clinched the party’s nomination.

She worked in the Obama administration on the president’s Task Force on the auto industry, and was later elected to Congress in 2018, serving Michigan’s 11th District.

El-Sayed is an epidemiologist who initially worked in the Detroit Health Department before running against Whitmer in the 2018 Michigan gubernatorial primary.

From 2023 until last year, he was the director of Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human, and Veterans Services.