RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 28 sourcesOver the past week, prior to far-left candidate Abdul El-Sayed squeaking to a possible victory over Rep. Haley Stevens in Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary , the contest was treated by almost everyone in the news media as over, with El-Sayed a shoo-in.
I had been in Michigan reporting on the race, and what I wrote was the exact opposite: It was clear to me the race was tightening, especially after the endorsement of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer . So when I saw every subsequent poll giving El-Sayed double-digit leads, I was shocked and a bit nervous.
Maybe, for the first time, the ground had lied to me and the numbers guys had this one right. But once again, the ground coverage defeated the aerial polling.
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But by Wednesday morning, this race, in which El-Sayed held a 95% to 5% advantage in prediction markets, had not been called, with El-Sayed seeming to head toward a meager 1- to 3-point victory, with his total under 50%.
Notably, Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow , who dropped out of the race, still netted 4% — or, put another way, the difference.
As for the polling , the last five public polls had El-Sayed winning by 19, 17, 14, 16 and 11 points, respectively. The news media took this as gospel, and instead of covering a surging Stevens with a real chance to win — as I did — they covered an El-Sayed coronation pre-party.
What surprised me so much about this polling was that in Detroit , after dozens of interviews, I couldn’t find anyone voting for El-Sayed who wasn’t already an activist in some way. The more ordinary the politics or occupation of the voter, the more likely that person was to support Stevens.
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As I put it in these pages then, "Many Democratic voters I talked to wanted a steadier hand on the system, and they want to beat Trump and the GOP. But they don’t want to blow up the system."
Those voters, whom I met in Detroit diners and bars, were invisible to the pollsters. Yet, in the end, between Stevens and McMorrow, they were the majority of Democratic voters.
There needs to be a serious reckoning over how journalists use polls and prediction markets in the wake of this historic polling miss, because there is every reason to believe Stevens could have won if her very real momentum had been accurately described.
Elections are stories, and they have arcs. The last week of this campaign, by all rights, should have been about "The Stevens Comeback," but instead, the polls told the story: "El-Sayed Blowout."
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How many potential Stevens voters stayed home on Tuesday as a result? We will never know.
The national coverage throughout the week leading to Election Day was that even with Whitmer’s endorsement and that of Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., to shore up the Black vote, El-Sayed and his communist-aligned podcaster ally, Hasan Piker , were cruising to victory.
Let’s be honest: It is the story everybody wanted. It is the sexy story of young socialists upending the Democratic Party establishment, but the embellished polls may well have become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
For Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers, this is all excellent news. He wanted to run against the socialist-aligned El-Sayed, and now he will. He also has the advantage of El-Sayed’s being wounded by what turned into a humiliating underperformance.
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Rogers should also be buoyed by El-Sayed surrogate Piker’s statement Tuesday night about possibly reaching out to Stevens voters. Piker said: saying, "Everyone being like, 'Abdul has a f--- ton of work to do mending bridges' … You are all unbelievably Islamophobic pieces of sh---. You literally called the dude a f---ing terrorist for months on end … And now you're going to say sit there and be like, 'you really gotta come to me now.'"
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These are not the sweet, sonorous sounds of intraparty unity.
The race between Rogers and El-Sayed will be close and hard-fought, and I will find my way back to the Great Lakes State to take the temperature. In the meantime, the news media must be much more skeptical of polling because it may have turned this primary.
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