Polls consistently predict a close race between El-Sayed and Rogers, showing El-Sayed with a substantial advantage over Rogers among black voters.
But margin matters. A recent YouGov survey of likely general election voters found El-Sayed winning 84% of the black vote, while Rogers got 11%, about the same gap as Michigan exit polls showed in 2024, when Harris narrowly lost the state to Trump in the presidential election. A Fox News poll of likely voters in late September measured Rogers’ support among black voters at 22 percent.
NBC News visited an early voting location in Detroit on Saturday, ahead of Obama’s rally. Voters who spoke with NBC News said they were voting for El-Sayed.
“I admit I skipped it before,” Tony Gooden, a Detroit voter, said in an interview, after not voting in previous midterm elections.
Gooden added that he felt it was important to vote this fall because of “the state of the economy, the state of our country.”
“I feel like someone needs to put a stop to what’s going on in Washington,” Gooden said. “So I can either sit on my couch and complain or I can go ahead and do something.”
Mary Waters, a Detroit City Council member who supported Stevens in the Democratic primary, said she was not yet committed to either candidate but expressed warmth toward Rogers. She said skepticism toward El-Sayed may have stemmed less from a personal dislike of him than from strained relations between Detroit’s Arab American and black communities.
“I don’t think President Obama himself understands the racial divisions, the class divisions in the city. He doesn’t live here,” Waters said when asked about the impact Obama’s appearance might have, acknowledging that some of his voters might be swayed by Obama’s speech.
In a recent interview with The Root, an online publication that covers black news and culture, El-Sayed acknowledged the tensions highlighted by Waters.
“Most of that spending was to break my relationship with the black community,” El-Sayed said of the money spent to oppose him in the Democratic primary. “And unfortunately, you know, it wasn’t that hard to break up, because for too many black people in Detroit, in particular, their experience with someone who looks like me is not a good one.”
“You walk into a gas station, you go into a party store, they talk to you behind bulletproof glass,” he continued. “If you’re a woman, you’re challenged. … I’ve always tried to be on the good side. But I also understand that if that’s your experience with someone whose name is like mine, it leaves a terrible taste in your mouth.”
Gilchrist, meanwhile, told NBC News that he placed little importance on Rogers’ attempts to appeal to black voters and believed Obama’s rally would help unify the party.
“He occupies a singular place in our consciousness as Black Americans, and so his voice and his perspective matter,” Gilchrist said. “I think this will be extremely helpful in letting people know that this is an opportunity for them to step up and make a difference to get the right senator from Michigan.”
El-Sayed, however, has previously expressed criticism of Obama, saying he has failed to make changes. He explained his thinking ahead of Saturday’s rally.
“Do you love your father? Do you agree with everything your father did?” El-Sayed said after his debate in Grand Rapids with Rogers on Oct. 8: “It’s a normal thing to love someone, to really appreciate everything they’ve done and say, ‘Hey, here are some things I would have done differently.’ But they still did important things to create opportunities for you. There is no world in which I can run for office without someone like President Obama. »
Obama responded to past criticism Saturday.
“Abdul shares my values of wanting everyone to receive health care,” he said. “He shares my values that if you work hard every day, you should have a decent wage and you should be able, if you’re a young person starting a family, to be able to buy a house that you can afford, and that you shouldn’t have to pay six dollars every time you fill up your gas tank to get to work. We share those values of making sure that everyone has a fair chance in this society and that the system doesn’t just work for those at the top.”
Gn headline
