Michigan's underdog pays 175% and leads the honest polls

Michigan Democrats vote on August 4. They are choosing who runs for the Senate seat Gary Peters is giving up.

Polymarket's primary market has Abdul El-Sayed at 65 cents and Haley Stevens at 36.3. But the polls say something completely different.

Two firms with no client in this race have polled it since Mallory McMorrow dropped out on July 5.

• Tavern Research asked 2,211 likely voters and found Stevens ahead by a point.
• Glengariff asked 500 likely voters for the Detroit News and found Stevens up 48.2 to 41.4.

Two other polls have El-Sayed ahead by 13 and 16 points. However, both were paid for by groups supporting El-Sayed.

Glengariff also broke its numbers down by race. Black voters backed Stevens 67% to 21%. They are about 1/5 of everyone who turns out for a Michigan Democratic primary, so a 46-point lead inside that single group hands her close to 9 points of the whole electorate before anybody else votes. Some of that is old anger at El-Sayed for urging Democrats to vote uncommitted in 2024 rather than for Kamala Harris.

Then the governor Gretchen Whitmer endorsed Stevens on July 24 in Detroit with Jim Clyburn beside her, which is quite important because more than 80% of Michigan Democrats approve of her. Jennifer Granholm, Peters, and Debbie Stabenow were already there.

One could argue El-Sayed has the money and the noise, and that is true. He raised $4.6 million between April and June against Stevens' $2.1 million, about a quarter of it from people giving under $200. The UAW endorsed him. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez filled a hall for him in Detroit on July 18. Absentee requests statewide are up 68.5% on the last midterm primary, and a bigger electorate is usually a younger one.

But look at where those ballots are coming back from. Oakland County leads the state with about 97,000, and Oakland is the county Stevens has represented in Congress since 2019. Washtenaw, the college county where El-Sayed is strongest, has managed only 31,000.

Against all of that sits roughly $50 million of outside money on Stevens' side, most of it from AIPAC's political arm, whose $30 million here is its largest bet on any primary ever. Some of it paid for ads built on 2018 footage of Barack Obama, who has not endorsed anyone in this race. Although some voters told reporters they were backing Stevens "because Obama said so."

Buying Stevens at 36.3 cents returns about 175% if she wins on August 4, eight days from now. This market had El-Sayed at 87 cents in the spring and has spent the months since walking him down to 65, one piece of evidence at a time. The market is, for some reason, priced closer to the two polls that were bought than the two that were not. Everything above argues for one candidate and one candidate alone.