Abdul El-Sayed talked like the Senate seat already had his nameplate on the door.
His Democrat allies kept rushing in reinforcements anyway, all the way up to Barack Obama.
And El-Sayed just met one old boast of his with two very quiet words.
The Guarantee That Shrank Into a Shrug
El-Sayed never ran a humble campaign. During the Democrat primary, fellow Democrats warned that he couldn’t beat Republican Mike Rogers, and he brushed them off with four words: “I’m not going to lose.”
He predicted a double-digit primary win, too, according to Breitbart. Then he spent primary eve at a Detroit pool party for content creators, where far-left streamer Hasan Piker turned up among the guests.
But the swagger peaked on primary night. Before the polls even closed, El-Sayed fired off a post on X aimed squarely at Rogers.
“Gimme three months and his golf buddies in Florida wouldn’t even vote for him. I’ll smoke him by 7,” El-Sayed wrote. “Bet on it.”
Three months came and went. Then Politico asked the obvious follow-up: did he still stand by that seven-point call?
“We’ll see,” El-Sayed said.
Two words. No “bet on it.” No golf buddies. Even Politico noticed the bravado had cooled off considerably.
His Friendliest Polls Couldn’t Buy Back the Bluster
Here’s the odd part. Some public numbers still look pretty good for El-Sayed. A Mitchell Research poll for CBS Detroit put him ahead of Rogers 51 percent to 44 percent among likely voters in late October, and a Glengariff Group survey for WDIV and the Detroit News showed him up about six.
So a fellow sitting on a seven-point poll got asked about a seven-point prediction, and he flinched.
Candidates usually crow louder when the numbers back them up. A man who suddenly can’t repeat his own boast probably has his eye on different numbers. Maybe the internal kind that never make the evening news.
And Michigan State University’s latest State of the State Survey hints at what those might look like. The October poll had El-Sayed ahead of Rogers by a thin 48 percent to 45.5 percent, down from a 5.5-point edge in the August version.
The Detroit News reported that El-Sayed has spent the closing weeks trying to “tone it down,” sanding the edges off his rhetoric and turning in a more restrained debate performance. A confident front-runner doesn’t usually go hunting for the volume knob in late October.
But plenty of Michiganders had already made up their minds by then. The same Mitchell survey found 28 percent of likely voters said they had already voted or planned to vote absentee.
The Democrat Voters Who Stop at the Governor’s Line
MSU buried its most revealing number below the headline. Democrat Jocelyn Benson led Republican John James in the governor’s race 53.3 percent to 40.9 percent, a cushion of more than 12 points.
Same ballot. Same party. Same voters.
According to the survey, Benson now outruns El-Sayed among independents, Wayne County residents, Catholics, Black voters, and moderates. Only voters under 30 prefer El-Sayed.
“The gap between the governor and Senate races has grown, with centrist voters more likely to support Benson than El-Sayed,” said Dr Matt Grossmann, director of MSU’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research.
That one sentence wrecks the Democrats’ favorite alibi. If voters simply wanted to punish President Trump’s party, Benson and El-Sayed would run roughly side by side. Instead, a slice of Michigan looks ready to vote Democrat for governor and then skip right past the party’s Senate nominee.
Those voters have no quarrel with the Democrat label. Their quarrel is with the man wearing it.
And the closing stretch of the race shows why. During the final debate, Rogers pressed El-Sayed on alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, an allegation El-Sayed denies, and on his refusal to condemn Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
“My opponent can’t even condemn the IRGC, which is the terrorist enforcement arm of Iran, and doesn’t believe Iran is any more dangerous than Israel. This is an absolute nonstarter if you’re going to send somebody back to the United States Senate,” Rogers said.
Breitbart later reported that El-Sayed collected more than $25,000 from fellow signers of a 2012 letter supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, a letter that called on then-Egyptian President Mohamad Morsi to “purge” the country’s media and police.
The New York Times, hardly a Rogers house organ, wrote about tensions between Black and Arab communities dragging on El-Sayed’s numbers. And the Jewish Insider concluded that a letter El-Sayed wrote to Jewish voters did little to settle their doubts.
There’s the policy side, too. El-Sayed has championed Medicare for All, a plan to hand Washington, DC the keys to every Michigan family’s healthcare. Moderates who drift toward Benson but stall at the Senate line may simply have read the fine print.
The Party Sent the Cavalry
When the swagger runs dry, the establishment shows up with buckets. Former President Barack Obama held a rally in Detroit to help El-Sayed win over Black voters, and the campaign has leaned on familiar party names to close the sale.
But those same party names spent the spring warning that El-Sayed couldn’t do this. Former Senator Debbie Stabenow backed US Representative Haley Stevens (D-MI) in the primary and declared that “every single poll shows that Haley is the person that beats Mike Rogers.”
Stevens endorsed El-Sayed after losing. She still went on Fox News and said, “It certainly makes sense to get rid of this Hasan Piker affiliation.” And according to Breitbart, Stevens’ own fiancé has now thrown his support to Rogers.
Vice President JD Vance has spent the fall hammering El-Sayed across the state. At a rally in Monroe, Vance called him “one of the craziest, one of the most far-left, and one of the most radical people running for high office in the history of the United States of America.”
Strong words. But El-Sayed’s own retreat may say more than anything Vance has thrown at him.
Broadway Joe Never Needed to Say “We’ll See”
In January 1969, Joe Namath guaranteed the New York Jets would beat the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. Then he went out and did it, 16-7, and the guarantee turned into legend.
Namath didn’t walk anything back the week before kickoff. A guarantee only means something if the man who made it still stands behind it when the lights come on.
El-Sayed borrowed the swagger and skipped the follow-through. Republicans haven’t won a US Senate race in Michigan since 1994, so he could still cash his ticket on Election Day. But a candidate who once swore he’d “smoke” his opponent now sounds an awful lot like a man hedging his bets.
So if Jocelyn Benson’s voters won’t follow her down the ballot, who exactly does Abdul El-Sayed expect to cover that seven-point bet?
Sources: Breitbart, “Abdul El-Sayed Backtracks from Seven-Point Win Prediction”; Breitbart, “El-Sayed Closes Michigan Senate Bid at Pool Party with Hasan Piker”; Newsweek, Michigan Senate race coverage of El-Sayed’s seven-point prediction; Jewish World Review, El-Sayed primary interview; CBS Detroit, “Abdul El-Sayed widens lead over Mike Rogers to 7 points in newest Michigan Senate poll”; ClickOnDetroit/WDIV, “Democratic candidate El-Sayed leads Michigan U.S. Senate race, new poll finds”; The Detroit News via Yahoo, “El-Sayed leads Rogers in final days of Michigan Senate race, poll shows”; Michigan State University IPPSR, “MSU Poll Shows Benson with large lead while El-Sayed/Roger race tight”; ClickOrlando/AP, “In final Michigan Senate debate, El-Sayed and Rogers question each other’s loyalties”; Fox News, “Haley Stevens urges El-Sayed to ditch Hasan Piker affiliation after Michigan primary”; KDH News, “Stabenow picks a side in Michigan’s Democratic primary for US Senate”; Wikipedia, “2026 United States Senate election in Michigan”