Some Michigan voters who helped return President Donald Trump to the White House in 2024 plan to vote for Democrat Abdul El-Sayed for U.S. Senate, a crack in the president's coalition that could matter in a race most polls show is separated by a few points. Several of them live in Dearborn, a majority Arab American city that broke for Trump two years ago, largely out of anger over U.S. support for Israel's war in Gaza, and residents who backed him told The Washington Post this week that El-Sayed is now the one carrying the "America First" banner.
El-Sayed, a physician and former Wayne County public health director, is running against Republican former Representative Mike Rogers for the seat Democratic Senator Gary Peters is giving up. He will be the first Muslim in the U.S. Michigan hasn't sent a Republican to the Senate since 1994.
Rogers nearly ended that streak in 2024, losing to Democrat Elissa Slotkin by less than a percentage point on the same night Trump carried the state. Newsweek reached out to the El-Sayed and Rogers campaigns for comment via email. El-Sayed has led every major public poll released in the last two weeks, mostly by margins inside the error range.
His best number came from Glengariff Group, which surveyed 600 likely voters for The Detroit News and WDIV-TV from October 19-22 and found him ahead 51 percent to 45 percent. Four percent were undecided. For the first time this cycle, Glengariff had El-Sayed winning them, 45.5 percent to 40 percent.
"The margin you're leading by among independents tends to be the margin that you win by," pollster Richard Czuba told The Detroit News. The survey even put El-Sayed slightly ahead in the Upper Peninsula and northern Michigan, Trump country for years. Marist University had the race at 50 percent for El-Sayed to Rogers' 48 percent among 1,185 likely voters polled October 15-18.
InsiderAdvantage, surveying 1,200 likely voters October 21-22, found El-Sayed up by a point, 47 percent to 46 percent, with four minor-party candidates at 1 percent apiece. A Michigan State University Institute for Public Policy and Social Research survey conducted with YouGov over a longer window, October 2-19, showed El-Sayed up 48 percent to 46 percent among 836 likely voters. Trump took about 42 percent of the vote in Dearborn in 2024, beating then-Vice President Kamala Harris in a city Democrats had treated as safe.
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