My friend and podcast partner Andrew Malcolm sent this to me last night, asking what I thought. My response: "I don't think it's that close."
The bloom appears to have fallen from the rose quickly in Michigan, even if one takes this poll at face value, which in Michigan especially is something of a risk. Fox News conducted a survey of registered voters in the five days following Abdul El-Sayed's unexpectedly narrow primary win. Republican nominee Mike Rogers had mainly kept his powder dry until after the August 4th contest, waiting to confirm who won the Democrat nomination to the US Senate. El-Sayed, on the other hand, has been spending money and maintaining a high public profile all the way to the primary finish.
And even then, El-Sayed is dragging anchor in the head-to-head survey, in a voter profile that should benefit him. Rogers leads El-Sayed by four points, 51/47, without even fully unleashing the Republican argument for the seat currently held by retiring Democrat Gary Peters.
David covered this earlier, but it's worth drilling down further into the demos. The topline is barely within the margin of error, but the crosstabs tell the real story:
From new Fox poll on Michigan Senate race. https://t.co/K0rHKsgra4 pic.twitter.com/kSZXAASGJJ
— Byron York (@ByronYork) August 14, 2026
First off, let's stipulate to the unreliability of polls in general, and in Michigan specifically. Five different pollsters went into the field in the last four weeks of the primary, and all five predicted that El-Sayed would win by double digits. Every single one of them. As I wrote yesterday, the candidate chaos that might explain a similar polling debacle in Wisconsin's gubernatorial contest did not exist in Michigan. There is no explanation in which these results came from honest errors in methodology, not with five different pollsters coming up with similarly deranged results simultaneously in the same electorate.
Fox News was not amongst these pollsters, it should be said. However, Fox News' polling has also had reliability issues, more nuanced but generally in the same direction. Frankly, the entire polling industry, except established pollsters that generally stay out of election polling (Gallup, for instance), has reliability and trust issues. At some point, the need to cover polls becomes more of a hygienic, pre-emptive exercise than an attempt to analyze the direction of a campaign.
Nevertheless, let's take a look at the demographic results in this survey. It doesn't look good for El-Sayed, and the gender gap alone makes it clear that he's in big trouble right off the bat. The numbers will be expressed with El-Sayed's first and Rogers' second:
- Men: 45/55
- Women: 49/48
- White: 42/56
- Black: 22/75
- Under 30: 57/43
- Independents: 43/48
- Trump Unfavorable: 74/23
- Income under $50K: 50/49
- College degree: 52/46
Byron York pointed out a few others:
From the Fox poll, Rogers vs. el Sayed in Michigan:
— Byron York (@ByronYork) August 14, 2026
White men, no college degree: Rogers 63 el Sayed 37
White men, college degree: Rogers 55 el Sayed 43
White women, no college degree: Rogers 60 el Sayed 38
White women, college degree: Rogers 37 el Sayed 60
These are easily predictable outcomes based on El-Sayed's radical appeal. What should have Democrats worried – and which clearly had them worried enough to spend $50 million to boost Haley Stevens – are the demos I've highlighted. Rogers has a +9 in the overall gender gap, which is bigger than Trump's plus-six gap two years ago. Rogers appears to have doubled Trump's share of the black vote from two years ago, which matches up very well with El-Sayed's flop in Detroit/Wayne County. Islamist socialism does not sell well with black voters, as it turns out, and Democrats are about to discover that the hard way. It doesn't sell with low-income voters either, at least not in the kind of numbers El-Sayed needs to win. (Kamala Harris won the under-$50K demo by nine points and still lost the state.)
Even the Trump Unfavorable demo points to disaster. The argument from El-Sayed, Hasan Piker, and inevitably the DSCC will be that Orange Man Bad is the real issue rather than El-Sayed, and that the big ambition is to wrest control from Trump. Almost a quarter of people unhappy with Trump think El-Sayed is a bigger problem than the president, at least so far. When Rogers really gets done defining El-Sayed, this result may turn out to be a floor rather than a ceiling.
If these numbers don't change, El-Sayed will lose this race by more than the four points the toplines suggest. And when Rogers and the NRSC get done defining El-Sayed for the general election, those numbers will change ... for the worse.
Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.
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