Sanders 2016 to El-Sayed 2026: Two Different Paths to Narrow, Progressive Primary Wins in Michigan

KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE

— Last week, Abdul El-Sayed captured the Democratic nomination for Senate in Michigan over Rep. Haley Stevens (D, MI-11).

— That El-Sayed narrowly won the nomination running as a progressive was one of the many parallels this primary had to the state’s 2016 Democratic presidential contest.

— However, there was considerable change between the two Democratic primaries, as El-Sayed fared better than Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in metro Detroit but worse in rural areas.

Another narrow progressive primary win in Michigan

Over the past decade in Democratic politics, it seems that if one tried hard enough, they could reconfigure any key primary into a rerun of the 2016 presidential primary. But few offered as clear of a parallel to the race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders as last week’s Michigan Senate primary.

On the “establishment” side, Rep. Haley Stevens (D, MI-11) had much of the party’s institutional support; though Clinton herself did not endorse Stevens, many of Clinton’s primary backers in the state from 2016 did. While Stevens was criticized from the left for the support she received from pro-Israel groups, she made her work during the Obama Administration, specifically on its efforts to prop up the auto industry, central to her campaign. Meanwhile, Sanders made several appearances on behalf of former Wayne County (Detroit) Health Director Abdul El-Sayed; aside from his calls to curtail foreign aid to Israel, El-Sayed emphasized the need for Medicare for All.

In early July, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D), who tried to straddle the “establishment” and “progressive” lanes, exited the race, setting up a two-way race that allowed the 2026 primary to fall even more neatly into the 2016 framework.

El-Sayed eventually captured the nomination as the topline result was eerily similar to the 2016 primary: his 48.5%-47.5% margin over Stevens was only somewhat smaller than the 49.7%-48.3% vote that Sanders defeated Clinton by in the state. Last week’s result also saw a 2016-style polling error, although there was something of a twist. A decade ago, the handful of public polls released during the week leading up to the primary gave Clinton seemingly solid double-digit leads. After McMorrow dropped out of the race, polls of the Senate primary typically showed El-Sayed leading Stevens by spreads that were outside of the margin of error.

Had Stevens actually pulled off a win, it may have represented a “reversal” of 2016—but instead, each primary resulted in a narrow win for the more progressive candidate. To be fair to pollsters, open primary states are likely harder to poll, especially ones like Michigan that don’t have truly competitive statewide primaries every cycle.

Even while Sanders and El-Sayed both won with narrow pluralities, the two progressives did so with noticeably different coalitions. In what follows, we’ll see how the more detailed results from last week compare to what we saw in 2016.

Map 1 shows the results side-by-side and broken down by Michigan’s current congressional districts—we will discuss these maps below.

Map 1: 2016 vs 2026 primaries in Michigan

Starting with the left map, Clinton carried 5 districts, including the core Detroit-area seats as well as the 8th District, which is anchored by Flint and Saginaw, both of which had sizable Black voter blocs that strongly favored her. Sanders carried the other eight districts and generally ran best in western Michigan.

The Grand Rapids area has trended toward Democrats over the past decade, so some of Sanders’s strength there may have reflected voters he brought into the Democratic primary electorate. But he also likely benefited from being the “not Hillary” option among voters who were less attached to the Democratic Party. Broadly, Clinton performed best in districts containing constituencies that showed the greatest loyalty to Democrats in general elections, while less regular Democratic constituencies tended to favor Sanders (many of whom were probably voting more against Clinton than for Sanders). Put numerically, the 5 districts that Clinton carried cast 47% of the primary’s total votes while the 8 Sanders-won districts accounted for 53%.

The district that was the biggest exception to this dynamic was the 6th District, which includes Ann Arbor. Sanders found enthusiastic support around the University of Michigan, although the district also extends east into Wayne County’s more blue-collar “Downriver” communities, where his “not-Clinton” appeal may also have helped him.

Getting to the right image, the districts also broke 8-to-5 in 2026, although this time the winner did not carry a majority of the districts. Part of why Stevens was able to beat expectations last week was that she held up especially well in rural parts of the state. Districts 2, 5, and 9, which are the most conservative districts in the state (each gave Donald Trump more than 60% all three times he was on the general election ballot) “flipped” from Sanders to Stevens. Of that group, District 2 saw the largest pro-Stevens shift in the state, as it moved 28 points to back her 50%-45% after it was Sanders’s best district on the left map. Stevens and her allies had a heavy spending advantage, which may have made them better-positioned in the state’s smaller media markets.

The 1st District, which includes the Upper Peninsula, stands out as a geographically expansive seat that stuck with the more progressive candidate. El-Sayed held up well around the “cherry coast,” a region centered around Traverse City that gives MI-1 a sizable outdoorsy constituency that distinguishes it somewhat from the state’s other rural districts (this is a touristy part of the state and contains some of the few counties in Michigan where Kamala Harris ran ahead of Joe Biden’s 2020 margins).

Going back to the Grand Rapids area, El-Sayed actually expanded on Sanders’s margin in the 3rd District, making it his best in the state. During the closing weeks of the primary, El-Sayed held a large rally there where he was joined by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D, NY-14) as well as Sanders himself. El-Sayed’s strength in MI-3 was somewhat ironic because one of his most vocal intraparty critics leading into the election was Rep. Hillary Scholten (D, MI-3), who did not have any primary opposition herself. In another such intriguing result, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D, MI-12) was easily renominated to her Detroit-area seat as Stevens carried her district by almost 10 points.

Still, even though El-Sayed lost Tlaib’s MI-12, something that should stand out on Map 1 is that, in 2026, the 2 districts that account for most of Wayne County (MI-12 and MI-13) are lighter shades of blue than they were in 2016. In fact, El-Sayed’s relative strength in metro Detroit may have proved decisive in such a close race. To illustrate that, Map 2 focuses on the three large metro Detroit counties: Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb. The first image shows 2016, the middle image is 2026, and the last one shows the “swing.” The maps are broken down by municipalities, although for some more detail, Detroit itself is shown by precinct in the first two maps (a “swing” map of Detroit was not easy to generate, as there were many precinct changes over 10 years).

Map 2: Core Detroit metro counties, 2016 vs 2026 Democratic primaries

Something that probably hurt Stevens was that Detroit did not pack the same punch last week that it did for Clinton in 2016. Even as turnout was broadly up from 2016, Detroit’s total vote tally fell from about 126,000 to 98,000; Stevens also carried the city by a less than 2-to-1 margin after Clinton did so by close to 50 points (keep in mind, too, that there are 10 years of population changes between the two elections, and this also is comparing a presidential primary to a Senate primary). In 2016, Clinton lost a selection of precincts in southwest Detroit, where much of the city’s Latino population is. But by 2026, El-Sayed dominated that corner of the city. A centrally-located corridor of the city running from Downtown to Highland Park was also quite favorable to El-Sayed after it generally went for Clinton 10 years ago—that part of the city has seen considerable gentrification in recent years.

Not surprisingly, there was ample evidence of El-Sayed’s strength with Arab-American voters. El-Sayed took Sanders’s 59%-39% margin in Dearborn (which is right by the “NE” in “WAYNE” label on the map) up to 78%-20%. Hamtramck, which is a smaller city and is, visually, an enclave within Detroit, saw an even larger swing: it gave El-Sayed 82% after narrowly backing Clinton in 2016; its now-former mayor’s endorsement of Trump in 2024 underscored the Arab-American community’s frustration with the Democratic Party.

Something that was a little more surprising, given the campaign’s focus on Middle East policy, is that Stevens did not run especially well compared to Clinton in municipalities with sizable Jewish populations. While Stevens still carried the towns immediately south of Pontiac in Oakland County, directionally, they were a mixed bag: for instance, she underperformed Clinton in Bloomfield and Bloomfield Hills but ran a little bit better in Birmingham. Going into the election, these were towns that we thought could swing to Stevens even if she did much worse across the board than Clinton did. However, as the returns might suggest, it is worth emphasizing that while these cities have sizable Jewish populations, their Jewish communities make up a smaller share of the electorate than Arab-Americans do in Dearborn or Hamtramck.

Overall, for all the similarities between 2016 and 2026, Democrats will hope that the latest primary leaves fewer lingering divisions. The contest between El-Sayed and Stevens was close and often contentious, but many leading Michigan Democrats—including Stevens herself—have been quick to unify behind the nominee. Whether that unity holds as El-Sayed moves into a competitive general election against former Rep. and 2024 GOP Senate nominee Mike Rogers will be one of the race’s key questions this fall.

J. Miles Coleman is the associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the University of Virginia Center for Politics’ authoritative, nonpartisan newsletter on American campaigns and elections. He also serves as the Center’s Media Relations Coordinator. Follow him on Twitter @jmilescoleman.

See Other Political Commentary by J. Miles Coleman.

See Other Political Commentary.

Views expressed in this column are those of the author, not those of Rasmussen Reports. Comments about this content should be directed to the author or syndicate.