{"id":4271,"date":"2026-11-02T17:17:19","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T17:17:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/?p=4271"},"modified":"2026-11-02T17:17:19","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T17:17:19","slug":"haley-stevens-endorses-mike-rogers-over-abdul-el-sayed-who-has-a-better-chance-of-winning-michigans-marquee-senate-battle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/?p=4271","title":{"rendered":"Haley Stevens endorses Mike Rogers over Abdul El-Sayed. Who has a better chance of winning Michigan’s marquee Senate battle?"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Election Day, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers will face off in what may be the marquee battle of the 2026 midterms: the race to succeed retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters in Michigan.<\/p>\n

It’s a contest that could decide which party controls the U.S. Senate.<\/p>\n

Democrats currently hold 47 Senate seats, including two independents who caucus with them. They need 51 to win back the chamber. (A 50-50 split would give Vice President JD Vance the tiebreaking vote.) Polls suggest that flipping four Republican seats is very possible<\/u>, but Democrats are also playing defense in Georgia, New Hampshire and Michigan. The Great Lakes State looks like the closest of the three.<\/p>\n

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Democrats are pinning their hopes on El-Sayed<\/u>, an unapologetic 42-year-old progressive who’s pushing policies such as Medicare for All and ending U.S. military aid to Israel; who’s willing to confront his critics and his own party’s establishment; and who’s vying to become America’s first Muslim senator.<\/p>\n

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Republicans have handed the reins to Rogers<\/u>, a 63-year-old former congressman who lost an extremely close<\/u> Senate race to Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin two years ago, and who has since broken with President Trump on tariffs and the war in Iran.<\/p>\n

The race has been rocked by several controversies, and the biggest came Sunday, two days before the election. Rep. Haley Stevens, the Democrat El-Sayed narrowly defeated in the primary, endorsed Rogers after the two worshipped together at Perfecting Church in Detroit.<\/p>\n

“Our Democratic nominee for Senate said I was no longer welcome in his campaign and that I should stay away,” Stevens said in a video. “And he’s right. And that’s why I am endorsing Mike Rogers for the United States Senate today.”<\/p>\n

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Stevens had said days earlier that she would vote for El-Sayed, and the two were due to appear together Sunday for the first time since August. That plan collapsed after she called on him to condemn an outside group’s ad tying U.S. support for Israel to grocery prices. His campaign then asked her to stay away, NBC News reported.<\/p>\n

Defending her stance, Stevens told CNN on Sunday the decision was a “weight off my shoulders” and said she had decided to switch allegiances because El-Sayed had been getting “angrier and angrier” throughout the campaign.<\/p>\n

When Stevens announced her change in support for Rogers, she maintained that she was “still a very proud Democrat.” Michigan’s Democratic Party chair, Curtis Hertel, fumed over the decision in a Sunday post on X, writing, “Congresswoman Stevens is not a current member of the Michigan Democratic Party, nor will she be in the future.”<\/p>\n

Trump told a rally in Iowa on Sunday that he’d “love” Stevens to join the Republican Party and said she’d been “very brave” to endorse Rogers.<\/p>\n

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Rep. Debbie Dingell, who helped arrange the event, told the AP before the endorsement that she had called it off. “I’m the one who pulled it because it had become way too distracting,” she said.<\/p>\n

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“I would rather not distract from the key issues of this campaign,” El-Sayed said Saturday. He attended a different Detroit church Sunday with Dingell and other Democrats, and did not address the dispute there, the AP reported. Stevens’s longtime chief of staff resigned after the church visit, and more staff were expected to leave, the AP reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.<\/p>\n

On Sunday, El-Sayed spoke with reporters before a unity event with other Democrats and reacted to Stevens’s endorsement, saying, “At the end of the day, I actually don’t think about Haley Stevens.”<\/p>\n

“This is a state of 10 million people who deserve a lot better from their government. I’m a lot more focused on the 9,999,998 that are not the ones you guys are talking about,” El-Sayed said, referring to Stevens and Rogers.<\/p>\n

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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote on social media on Sunday that Stevens’s reversal was a “despicable betrayal.”<\/p>\n

Jason Turkish, Stevens’s fianc\u00e9, said last week that he would vote for Rogers because of El-Sayed’s criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza.<\/p>\n

“Every time [El-Sayed] talks about genocide, Jews get death threats,” Turkish, a Michigan lawyer and registered Democrat, claimed Oct. 28 at a Rogers campaign event<\/u>. “We have never seen a candidate for U.S. Senate act so recklessly toward the safety of Jews in the community as we have seen from Abdul.”<\/p>\n

Further raising the stakes is the fact that Michigan couldn’t be more purple, having swung to Trump in 2016, then Democrat Joe Biden in 2020, then back to Trump in 2024 \u2014 always by slim margins.<\/p>\n

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Here’s everything you need to know about the Michigan Senate contest.<\/p>\n

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Who’s winning? Here’s what the polls say.<\/h2>\n

Twelve polls have been conducted in October. Eleven of them have shown El-Sayed with leads ranging from 1 to 7 percentage points<\/u>. New surveys from both CBS Detroit<\/u> and CNN<\/u> give El-Sayed a 7-point lead. The only recent poll to show Rogers ahead (by 2 points) was sponsored by a group affiliated with the former congressman<\/u>. All of those polls were taken before Stevens’s endorsement.<\/p>\n

To close the gap on Election Day, Rogers has been reaching out to two groups who backed Stevens over El-Sayed in the primary: Black and Jewish Democrats.<\/p>\n

In August, Stevens won a majority of Michigan’s large counties with significant Black populations by an average of 8.5 percentage points<\/u>. She also won Detroit with more than 60% of the vote, making El-Sayed the first Michigan Democrat since 2018 to win a statewide primary without winning the state’s largest city.<\/p>\n

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