The polling industry is taking another hit after getting Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary wrong, predicting a runaway Abdul El-Sayed victory in the race that instead ended in an overnight nail-biter.
Michigan Democrats on Tuesday elevated the leftist firebrand to the party’s U.S. Senate nomination, marking the biggest triumph yet for the ascendant far-Left and a humiliating defeat for the establishment’s old guard, who failed to stop him from advancing to a pivotal November clash with Trump-endorsed Republican Mike Rogers.
With more than 95% of ballots counted, media outlets called the race for El-Sayed, who led Stevens 48.49% to 47.51%. The unexpectedly narrow margin defied a flurry of public opinion polls showing the DSA-aligned candidate with a commanding double-digit lead.
Before Tuesday night, surveys consistently pointed to a sweeping El-Sayed victory. RealClearPolitics’ polling average gave him a 10-point lead, and an Emerson College survey released a week before the election showed Stevens down by 15 points.
For weeks, the flawed surveys circulated widely on social media and blasted on cable news, fueling the perception that one of the nation’s most closely watched Democratic primaries was over before voters even went to the polls.
“Polling is imperfect, but I would encourage all media going forward to decline to publish results from these outfits unless they can explain the size of this polling error,” Caitlin Legacki, a public affairs specialist who served as a spokeswoman for the Stevens campaign, said on X. “It sure looks like it was a coordinated strategy to me!”
In fact, four separate surveys commissioned by a super PAC supporting El-Sayed showed him winning by margins ranging from 13 to 19 points, a pattern highlighted by Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg.
“I also want to note the El-Sayed campaign and their allies have deployed a tactic in this race that’s been used by Republicans in recent years, and not by us — flooding the zone with favorable polls to shape the narrative of the race,” he warned in an August 2 Substack post.
Rosenberg argued that the decline of legacy media is opening the door for partisan groups to shape election narratives through selective polling, prediction markets, and online campaigns designed to sway public opinion.
“So if I counted correctly, El-Sayed’s world released 8 of the 18 polls we’ve seen in Michigan these past two months — 44%, again almost half. This was a major effort to shape the understanding of the race. I’m not sure there has been anything like this on our side of the game in recent years,” he said.
Michigan’s red-hot primary marks the latest polling miss for an industry already struggling to rebuild trust after flawed polling convinced many Americans that Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris were on track to defeat Donald Trump in the presidential races.
Conservative political consultant Ryan Girdusky argued that the Michigan polls oversampled white progressives with advanced degrees over other key demographic groups.
Looking ahead, the latest polling misses raise new questions about the accuracy of election forecasts predicting a Democratic sweep heading into the midterm elections, where control of the U.S. House and Senate hangs in the balance.
“Whatever happened there was a massive polling miss in Michigan, they had El-Sayed up by 15, and he’s just barely going to squeak by,” Will Chamberlain, senior counsel at The Article 3 Project, said on social media. “Take all those Talarico +3 polls with a very healthy grain of salt.”
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