With the first substantial chunk of votes coming in to Oakland County, Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is claiming an early lead over his GOP candidate, Mike Rogers.
Oakland County, which is the home base of Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens, who issued a shocking endorsement to Rogers over the weekend, seems to be backing El-Sayed with just under 40% of its votes counted. Of course, there are still many votes to go, but El-Sayed’s advantage here indicates that he may not avoid a major hit from the endorsement.
The county has voted for Democrats in the past, with former Vice President Kamala Harris winning Oakland with a little bit more than 10 points in 2024, which was a disappointing number for Democrats here to win statewide in Michigan. They want to usually get this number more up into the mid-teens, and I think this area is a real interesting bellwether for El-Sayed.
There’s combination of the fact that this is Stevens’ backyard, the fact that there’s been so much attention to the politics of the Middle East in this race, and that there’s a substantial Jewish population in Oakland County, probably the largest population of any county in Michigan.
It tends to be a very Democratic vote, and one of the questions coming into this was if that Democratic vote, especially the Jewish Democratic vote in Oakland County, was going to stay away from El-Sayed.
Now this is not definitive, although we’re up to about 40% of the vote in Oakland County and the El-Sayed advantage here is much more in line with what Democrats in any given election want to be seeing out of Oakland County.
Good! I am praying that he wins!!