The Primary Before the Storm
Jul 17, 2026
I’ve lived in two different Michigan districts, and they could not be more different from each other.
For years, I organized in Macomb County — a place that’s flipped so many times it’s practically a coin toss with a memory. Now I technically live in St. Clair County, mailing address planted firmly inside one of the safest red seats in the entire state. Same state, two completely different political realities. That contrast is what got me digging into this race in the first place, and the deeper I went, the more it looked like Michigan is sitting at the exact kind of inflection point this country tends to hit right before something shifts hard.
I wrote about that shift back in America in Arrested Development. The short version: this country moves in a pendulum, and the farther it swings one direction, the harder it swings back. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 is the example I keep coming back to — a regressive, isolationist policy that backfired so badly it triggered a political realignment. Democrats controlled Congress for most of the next five decades.¹ I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think it’s a pattern. And with Zohran Mamdani’s wins in New York rattling the establishment wing of the party, and a genuine leftward energy showing up in districts all over the country right now, I think Michigan is about to be one of the places we find out whether that pattern holds again.
Absentee ballots are already out. Early voting starts July 25. The primary is August 4th. So this piece is Part 1 — where the races stand right now, who’s running, who’s backing them, and what’s actually true versus what’s spin. Part 2 comes after the primary results are in, when we know who’s actually on the ballot for November.
Let’s start at the top of the ticket.
U.S. Senate: El-Sayed vs. Stevens
Gary Peters is retiring, and this seat is one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country — Democrats need a net gain of four seats to flip the chamber, and holding Michigan is part of that math.
The primary was a three-way race until July 5th, when state Sen. Mallory McMorrow suspended her campaign without endorsing either remaining candidate.² That left a clean two-person contest: Abdul El-Sayed, running from the party’s progressive wing, and Rep. Haley Stevens, the establishment-backed choice.
I met Abdul in person once, on a demonstration line outside John James’s district office at a demonstration. My first impression was, honestly, bro energy — but not the red-pill kind. That hasn’t held up, a genuinely smart, kind, well spoken man. What’s actually on his platform: Medicare for All, an end to unconditional military aid to Israel, and a refusal to take corporate PAC money. He’s endorsed by the UAW, National Nurses United, MoveOn, the Working Families Party, Indivisible (both state and national chapters, following an 80% vote among Michigan’s Indivisible groups), Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Rashida Tlaib.³ ⁴
Stevens has the institutional backing — Chuck Schumer, Michigan AG Dana Nessel, and years of establishment relationships from her time on Obama’s auto industry task force and her semiconductor manufacturing votes.⁵ She’s also a longtime ally of AIPAC, which helped elect her in both 2018 and 2022.
Here’s where it gets ugly, and where the money actually is. AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, has spent more than $10 million directly boosting Stevens and attacking El-Sayed — one of its largest Senate investments anywhere in the country this cycle. It’s also raised additional money for her through donor portals that don’t show up cleanly in public filings.⁶ El-Sayed puts total outside spending against him closer to $40 million once you count every group working against his campaign, not just AIPAC.⁷
And there’s a documented hypocrisy in how AIPAC is spending that money. Its new ad praises Stevens for confronting Trump’s ICE policies and calling for Kristi Noem’s resignation. But earlier this year, AIPAC spent over $2 million attacking a different Democrat, Tom Malinowski, in New Jersey — for voting to fund ICE as part of a border bill. Stevens voted for that same funding bill. She also voted for a House resolution thanking ICE agents for “protecting the homeland.” AIPAC simply chose not to run that attack against her.⁸ Same vote, different candidate, different treatment. That’s not neutrality. That’s a thumb on the scale.
El-Sayed isn’t running without outside help either, and it’s worth being straight about that instead of pretending one side is pure. A group called Fighting for Michigan PAC has spent multi-million-dollar sums on digital ads and organizing to support him — technically independent of his campaign, since he’s pledged to refuse Super PAC money directly. His father-in-law is its second-largest donor, at $200,000 out of roughly $478,000 raised as of the most recent filing.⁹ That’s a real detail, and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t.
But look at who else is actually behind that PAC: its treasurer, Peter Sarasohn, was Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign budget director. Its institutional backers include National Nurses United, the Working Families Party, and Common Defense Action Fund, a veterans’ advocacy group focused on ending endless wars.¹⁰ That’s not the same animal as a foreign policy lobbying organization quietly funneling over $10 million through donor portals designed to obscure its own fingerprints. One is a family member’s contribution routed through a PAC backed by labor and veterans’ groups. The other is a single-issue lobbying operation spending eight figures to protect one vote in the Senate. Treating those as equivalent because both are technically “outside money” flattens a distinction that actually matters.
And on the “unelectable progressive” framing that’s been thrown at El-Sayed all cycle — I already dug into that data in a Substack note I posted called The “Too Far Left” Myth. Medicare for All polls at 65% support nationally, including 49% of Republicans.¹¹ Free college tuition polls at 63% support across party lines.¹² And for the first time in 25 years of Gallup polling, more Americans now sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis; only about 32% of registered voters view Israel positively.¹³ These aren’t fringe positions being sold to a fringe audience. The “unelectable” label was never really about electability. It’s about whose agenda gets protected when voters don’t realize how much they already agree with the person being called too radical.
Governor: Benson vs. Swanson, and a scrambled GOP field
Whitmer is term-limited, so this is an open seat, and the Democratic side isn’t close. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is the clear frontrunner, polling near 60% among Democratic primary voters against Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson.¹⁴ Both have real credentials — Benson as a former Wayne State law dean and two-term Secretary of State, Swanson as the sheriff who founded GHOST, a multi-agency human trafficking task force that’s become a national model, and IGNITE, an in-jail education program now running in facilities across the country.¹⁵ Notably, the Detroit News editorial board broke from the pack and endorsed Swanson over Benson — worth watching for what it signals, even if it doesn’t change the numbers.
The Republican field got upended on June 22nd, when Trump endorsed U.S. Rep. John James for governor. Senate Minority Leader Aric Nesbitt dropped out the same day and endorsed James too.¹⁶ Before that endorsement, polling had James and former AG Mike Cox in a near dead heat — 28% to 27%.¹⁷ No post-endorsement poll has been published yet, so despite the Trump nod, this isn’t a settled race. Perry Johnson, self-funding his own campaign, is still in it and still swinging, calling James “a two-time statewide loser” and pointing to Tudor Dixon, Matt DePerno, and Kristina Karamo as recent examples of Trump-endorsed Michigan candidates who came up short.¹⁸
James not seeking reelection to his House seat is what opens up the district I organized in for years. That’s where I want to spend the most time.
Michigan’s 10th District: My old district
Macomb County is the reason political reporters use the phrase “Reagan Democrat.” It is, hands down, the most genuine swing county in the state, and the numbers back that up going back decades. Al Gore won it by about 8,000 votes in 2000. George W. Bush flipped it by roughly 6,000 votes in 2004. Obama flipped it back by 36,000 in 2008 and held it by 16,000 in 2012. Trump flipped it again in 2016 by 48,000 votes.¹⁹ Presidential turnout in the county has climbed every cycle since — Trump’s margins grew from about 224,000 votes in 2016 to nearly 285,000 in 2024, while Democratic turnout also grew, just not quite as fast.²⁰ Even in a single election, Macomb voters split their tickets in ways that don’t fit a clean narrative — the same electorate that backed Trump in 2024 also elected Mark Hackel, a Democrat, as county executive by a wide margin.²¹
Redistricting is not incidental to any of this. Michigan didn’t always have an independent commission drawing these lines. Voters created the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission in 2018, passing Proposal 2 with 61.3% of the vote, specifically to take map-drawing power away from whichever party controlled the legislature.²² Even that wasn’t the end of the story — in December 2023, a federal court found that thirteen separate Michigan legislative districts, seven state House and six state Senate, had been drawn based heavily on race, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause, and ordered them redrawn before the 2024 elections.²³ Separately, going back further, Michigan’s congressional map used to route more Detroit territory into districts numbered differently than they are today — before the state lost a seat entirely after the 2020 census. None of this is ancient history. It’s the literal shape of the ballot you’re looking at right now, and it was still being fought over in court two years ago.
The lesson I keep coming back to isn’t “Detroit is blue and the suburbs are red,” because that’s too simple and, frankly, wrong in places — Oakland County, leans Democratic and has for years. The real mechanism is which specific precincts get shifted in or out of a district, and how that changes the math without anyone having to say out loud what they’re doing.
With James vacating the seat, the Democratic field to replace him is genuinely competitive. Christina Hines, a former SVU prosecutor in Wayne and Washtenaw counties, is currently the frontrunner by her own campaign’s internal polling — 30%, more than double her nearest opponent.²⁴ She refuses corporate PAC money and is running on overhauling ICE and DHS with funding tied to oversight and accountability reforms.
Tim Greimel, Pontiac’s mayor and a former state House Minority Leader, has real executive experience but a genuinely mixed record on this specific issue. He accepts corporate PACs and has documented ties to the pro-Israel lobby. And in 2025, as Pontiac’s mayor, he vetoed a unanimous city council resolution opposing immigration raids. He’s since called for an end to what he calls “inhumane detentions,” but the veto happened, and it happened recently.²⁵
Eric Chung, a former US Department of Commerce attorney, doesn’t take corporate PAC money either and is running on overhauling ICE/DHS with the same accountability-tied-to-funding approach as Hines, plus a constitutional-law background he says he’ll use to hold the administration accountable directly.
Locally, Katrina Manetta — who founded Macomb Defenders Rising from a small group meeting in her basement in Shelby Township, according to state Sen. Stephanie Chang’s own endorsement of her — is running for Michigan House District 58. She’s picked up UAW, EMILY’s List, MI List, Detroit Action, and a slate of sitting state legislators.²⁶ Watching someone build an organization from a basement meeting into something state senators are citing by name in their endorsement letters is, frankly, the kind of thing that keeps me believing local work matters even when the federal picture feels impossible.
Michigan’s 9th District: Where I actually technically live now
This is the contrast. MI-9 covers all of Huron, Lapeer, St. Clair, and Sanilac counties, plus parts of Macomb, Oakland, and Tuscola.²⁷ It carries a Cook Partisan Voting Index of R+16 — sixteen points more Republican than the national average, making it the most Republican district in Michigan and the 63rd most Republican district in the entire country.²⁸
Its representative is Lisa McClain, and I’d heard her name plenty at MDR meetings before I became unhoused and stopped being able to attend in person. Her record backs up why. On January 6, 2021, hours after the Capitol was attacked, she voted to omit Arizona and Pennsylvania’s electoral votes from the count — the same effort tied to a fake elector scheme that Trump associates later pleaded guilty to or were convicted over in multiple states, including Michigan itself.²⁹ She sponsored the resolution to censure Rep. Jamaal Bowman over the fire alarm incident. She voted against the Respect for Marriage Act. And in January 2026, after an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Good, a 37-year-old US citizen and mother of three, in Minneapolis, McClain — who is now chair of the House Republican Conference, meaning actual party leadership, not a backbencher — posted that this is what happens when Democrats “demonize law enforcement,” and offered prayers for the ICE agents. She placed no blame on the agency at any point.³⁰ Good’s death is one I’ve already researched in depth for a separate piece, and watching McClain’s name turn up attached to it here was not a coincidence I enjoyed finding. (Stay tuned for that piece in the future.)
McClain isn’t even facing a real primary challenge this time. Her only announced Republican opponent, Daltson Atwell, switched races back in January to run for state Senate District 26 instead.³¹ She’s effectively uncontested on her own side.
But there is a real Democratic primary here, which genuinely surprised me — I didn’t expect this seat to draw any contest at all. Ray Pooley is a third-generation manufacturer and current CNC machinist from Highland, in Oakland County — one of the more conservative pockets in an otherwise blue-leaning county. He’s self-funded, refuses outside money, and explicitly brands himself a “Progressive Democrat,” but his actual positioning is careful and locally calibrated in a way that makes sense for an R+16 district: pro-2A paired with background checks and a domestic-violence-abuser loophole closure, border security paired with a real path to citizenship, term limits for Congress and the Supreme Court, a ban on stock trading by sitting officials.³² His opponent, Wyatt Clark, worked previously in corrections and frames his campaign around rejecting “tribalism” from both parties equally — a framing I’m openly skeptical of, because when you actually look at the record, one party has been the one dismantling rights and protections at scale. “Both sides do it” can be an honest read of some things. It is not an honest read of this moment.
I went looking for any coverage trying to smear Pooley the way AIPAC has gone after El-Sayed. I found nothing — no attack ads, no opposition research, nothing beyond his own campaign material. That’s not necessarily a good sign. It probably just means he hasn’t gotten big enough yet to be worth attacking. If that changes as the primary gets closer, I’ll be watching for it.
What I’m watching for in Part 2
Absentee ballots are already being cast as I write this, so nothing here is theoretical anymore — this is happening in real time. Part 2 will come after August 4th, with actual results instead of polling, and I’ll be tracking whether Michigan’s primary turnout backs up the pendulum theory or complicates it. Either way, I’ll be voting from inside one of the safest red seats in the state, watching a county I used to organize in decide whether it swings back one more time.
Related reading
America in Arrested Development lays out the pendulum framework this piece leans on — how backlash has historically bred political realignment, and why I think we’re due for another one.
The “Too Far Left” Myth breaks down the actual polling data behind positions that get labeled unelectable, and who benefits from that label sticking.
Sources & Footnotes
¹ Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 and the subsequent Democratic congressional realignment. Investopedia; National Archives ² Mallory McMorrow suspending her Senate campaign, July 5, 2026, without endorsing a remaining candidate. NBC News; Washington Post; Bridge Michigan ³ Abdul El-Sayed’s endorsements: UAW, National Nurses United, MoveOn, Working Families Party, Bernie Sanders, AOC, Rashida Tlaib. UAW.org; abdulforsenate.com ⁴ Statewide Indivisible Michigan and national Indivisible endorsement, 80% of participating chapters voting yes. abdulforsenate.com, June 2026 ⁵ Haley Stevens’ record: Schumer and Dana Nessel endorsements, Obama-era auto task force, semiconductor manufacturing votes. PolitiFact; Michigan Advance ⁶ AIPAC’s United Democracy Project spending over $10 million backing Stevens/attacking El-Sayed, including donor-portal fundraising. The Forward, July 2026 ⁷ El-Sayed’s claim of ~$40 million total outside spending against his campaign. CNN, July 7, 2026 debate coverage ⁸ AIPAC’s inconsistent treatment of ICE-funding votes between Stevens and Tom Malinowski (NJ). The Forward, July 2026 ⁹ Fighting for Michigan PAC funding and donor breakdown, including a $200,000 contribution from El-Sayed’s father-in-law. PolitiFact, July 8, 2026; FEC records ¹⁰ Fighting for Michigan PAC leadership (Peter Sarasohn) and institutional backers (National Nurses United, Working Families Party, Common Defense Action Fund). ¹¹ Medicare for All polling. Data for Progress survey, November 2025. ¹² Free college tuition polling. Pew Research. ¹³ Gallup 25-year polling shift on Israel/Palestine sympathy; NBC News favorability polling. ¹⁴ Jocelyn Benson polling near 60% among Democratic primary voters vs. Chris Swanson. Detroit Regional Chamber poll; michwomen.com ¹⁵ Chris Swanson’s record: GHOST human trafficking task force, IGNITE jail education program, Detroit News editorial endorsement. michwomen.com ¹⁶ Trump’s endorsement of John James for governor and Aric Nesbitt’s subsequent withdrawal/endorsement, June 22, 2026. Detroit News; Michigan Advance ¹⁷ Pre-endorsement polling showing James/Cox statistical tie. Mitchell Research & Communications/MIRS poll, June 11–13, 2026 ¹⁸ Perry Johnson’s public response to the James endorsement. X/Twitter, June 22, 2026, via voz.us ¹⁹ Macomb County presidential vote history, 2000–2016. County-level election records ²⁰ Macomb County presidential vote totals, 2016–2024. ²¹ Mark Hackel split-ticket county executive results. ²² Michigan Proposal 2 (2018), 61.3% approval, creation of MICRC. Ballotpedia; Voters Not Politicians; Brennan Center ²³ December 2023 federal court ruling on racially gerrymandered Michigan legislative districts. Voters Not Politicians; Ballotpedia ²⁴ Christina Hines internal polling, Global Strategy Group, April 2026. Michigan Advance ²⁵ Tim Greimel’s 2025 veto of a Pontiac City Council resolution opposing immigration raids. Macomb Defenders Rising Voter’s Guide ²⁶ Katrina Manetta’s endorsements: UAW, EMILY’s List, MI List, Detroit Action, state legislators including Stephanie Chang and Veronica Klinefelt. katrinamanetta.com; Michigan Advance ²⁷ MI-9 county coverage. Michigan Advance Voter Guide ²⁸ MI-9 Cook Partisan Voting Index, R+16. Ballotpedia ²⁹ Lisa McClain’s January 6, 2021 vote to omit Arizona/Pennsylvania electors. GovTrack ³⁰ Lisa McClain’s statement following Renée Good’s killing by ICE, January 2026. Michigan Advance, Jan. 8, 2026 ³¹ Daltson Atwell’s switch from MI-9 congressional race to Michigan Senate District 26. Wikipedia; abc12.com, Jan. 20, 2026 ³² Ray Pooley’s platform: manufacturing background, gun policy, immigration stance, government reform positions. pooley4congress.com; goodparty.org; Macomb Defenders Rising Voter’s Guide