No. 411 | August 7, 2026
🗳️ Michigan’s Senate primary was a win for El-Sayed but a disaster for pollsters
The highly-anticipated Michigan Democratic primary ended up in a photo finish between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens. The pre-election polls showed El-Sayed with a solid double-digit lead. What happened?
Yes, primaries are harder to poll than general elections. Because there are smaller ideological differences between candidates, primary voters are much more up for grabs than general election voters. That makes the races themselves more volatile, with last-minute shifts the rule rather than the exception. It’s also harder to weight primary polls. We don’t have reliable targets for the things most correlated with primary vote choice — ideology or what kinds of candidates the voter has voted for in the past (recalled primary vote is notoriously unreliable, unlike general election vote).
While it’s true that the Michigan polling error was well within range of a normal primary polling …
