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Abdul El-Sayed won a hard fight in Michigan’s Democratic primary race for U.S. Senate against Rep. Haley Stevens. He eked out a win by 15,000 votes, or about 1% of the almost 1.5 million votes cast during the election on Aug. 4, 2026.

El-Sayed had a consistent populist message during the primary campaign. He told The New York Times, “I can walk into almost any room, and I can say: ‘Money out of?’ and everybody’s like: ‘Politics.’ ‘Money in your?’ ‘Pocket.’ ‘Medicare for?’ ‘All.’ People know what we’re about.”

Now El-Sayed, the former director of the Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services of Wayne County, has to shift his effort and messaging to a general election campaign against Republican Mike Rogers.

I am a political scientist who studies campaigns and elections, both nationally and in the key swing state of Michigan where I live and teach.

El-Sayed ran a prototypical primary campaign, positioning himself as a progressive outsider against a moderate insider. Like Stevens, he appealed to specific segments of the Democratic electorate in an attempt to assemble a winning coalition.

But a run against a Republican with prior campaign and governing experience and the support of President Donald Trump is a different challenge – especially with the control of the U.S. Senate at stake. Republicans currently holds a three-seat advantage in that chamber; the Democrats are hoping to pick up four seats to gain control.

Historically expensive campaign

This election was the third-most expensive on record and the second-most expensive this year, following the Texas Senate primary. Based on end-of-July ad bookings, almost US$81 million was spent in the Michigan Senate Democratic primary race, but it was not close to evenly divided.

A total of $63.9 million was spent in support of Stevens, most coming from sources from outside Michigan, while $7.3 million was spent in support of El-Sayed. That’s a ratio of 9 to 1 in Stevens’ favor.

About 97% of Stevens’ ad placements came from groups supported by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, a powerful lobbying group that supports pro-Israel policies. This became a significant point of attack for El-Sayed’s campaign. He said he was not taking any funds from corporate political action committees, while at the same time portraying Stevens as a Washington insider beholden to special interests. Most of the ads paid for by AIPAC did not have anything to do with U.S.-Israel affairs or El-Sayed’s position on ending aid to Israel.

El-Sayed overcame funding disadvantage

The stark contrasts in candidate funding led to differences in advertising strategies and appeals to different groups of voters.

Stevens made implicit appeals to Black voters, concentrated in the Detroit metropolitan area, by including news clips of Barack Obama during his presidency touting her support for an auto bailout, although the former president never explicitly endorsed her. Other negative ads suggested El-Sayed had made disparaging comments about Michelle Obama.

AIPAC ads in support of Stevens suggested that El-Sayed is misogynistic and said he disrespects women, although independent fact checks concluded that his prior comments cited in the attack ads were taken out of context.

Because he had less money, El-Sayed produced a lot of social media content, much of it designed to get the attention of younger voters at a lower cost than TV ad rates. Some of his ads were produced by the Fight Agency, which also worked for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign in New York City.

Some of El-Sayed’s content looked like music videos. Other content contained traditional pleas to small-dollar donors.

Support from different wings of the party

Both candidates assembled an impressive array of political elites backing their candidacy, but the groups were quite different.

Stevens was endorsed by the Michigan Democratic establishment, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, former Gov. Jennifer Granholm, current U.S. Sen. Gary Peters and former U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, as well as many Democratic elected officials from Michigan. She was also endorsed by U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi of California.

Most visible among El-Sayed’s endorsements were Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. They all campaigned alongside El-Sayed at various Michigan rallies to demonstrate his progressive bona fides. Each visit produced extensive local media coverage for his campaign.

Divides across religion, race and education

There were no exit polls conducted during the primary, but analyses of aggregate vote returns suggest important differences in patterns of voting behavior.

El-Sayed won more than 70% of the vote in the main Arab-American areas of southeastern Michigan: Dearborn, Dearborn Heights and Hamtramck. At the same time, Stevens carried Black voters in Detroit and other parts of Wayne County – although her 58% of the vote was not as much as Biden’s 78% of the vote in the 2024 presidential primary.

El-Sayed did better among young voters, as he won every one of the college towns in the state, including Ann Arbor and East Lansing.

And there seemed to be distinct differences in their supporters’ methods of voting. El-Sayed performed better among voters who cast their ballot on Election Day, which is typically favored by young adults. Early voting, whether in person or by mail, were methods typically favored by older Michigan voters who chose Stevens.

Looking to November

El-Sayed now has to turn to the general election campaign, where early post-primary polls suggest the race is a dead heat.

Michigan was considered a toss-up race before the primary, and it remains that way with El-Sayed’s victory.
His first task is to unite the Democratic Party behind him. Prominent Michigan Democrats pledged their support during a rally held in Detroit on Aug. 7. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a possible 2028 presidential candidate, expressed support for El-Sayed at the rally, as did Whitmer, who had endorsed Stevens before the primary.

One notable absence, however, was Dana Nessel, the state’s attorney general. She associates El-Sayed’s concern about arming Israel as an expression of antisemitism and claims that she won’t feel safe at the state’s nominating convention because she is Jewish.

The Democratic candidate understands the affordability issue and is comfortable campaigning on it.

Since June, Trump has been calling Democratic candidates “Communists” – even those, like El-Sayed, who do not label themselves as “democratic socialists.”

El-Sayed will also likely face Islamophobic attacks. After the primary, the Republican candidate Rogers said El-Sayed is someone who “believes America deserved 9/11” and “pledged his support to the Muslim Brotherhood.” In recent Senate testimony, Sen. Ted Cruz focused on El-Sayed’s alleged family connections to organizations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. These claims are not true but may still influence voters who are just beginning to pay attention to the campaign.

Rogers is a skillful campaigner who might continue to capitalize on this strategy. It is too early to tell whether El-Sayed can inoculate himself against this characterization.

For his part, El-Sayed will likely try to link Rogers as closely to Trump as possible because of the president’s low approval ratings. Rogers will have to weigh carefully whether to invite Trump to Michigan to campaign with him.

One thing is certain. Michigan voters can expect a long, negative campaign between now and November.

Read more of our stories about Michigan and Detroit.

Michael Traugott receives funding from the National Science Foundation.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Political action committees are responsible for nearly two-thirds of all federal election funding, with about US$6.3 billion raised and $4.8 billion spent since January 2025. But their outsized political influence does not just come from their wallets. It’s also generated from their names.

Political strategists are adopting PAC names that signal the opposite political goals from what those organizations truly intend. They hope to taint voter perception of the candidates or ballot initiatives to which they donate.

And, as our research shows, the strategy is working.

The history of deceptive PAC naming

Typically, PAC names borrow expressions from the party they wish to help, like ActBlue or WinRed, which raised the most money in the 2024 federal election cycle.

Many of those names have been ridiculed for their overreliance on throwaway clichés. In 2012, comedian Stephen Colbert created the PAC Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow to prove the point.

But a more sinister custom has emerged. Our research has shown that for the past decade or so, PACs have engaged in what we call “tactical naming,” the practice of giving laws and PACs names designed to manipulate voter perception.

One tactic is to choose a name derived from slogans of the opposing party, falsely signaling ideological kinship to gain the trust of voters from the other side. In 2014, for example, the PAC Americans for Progressive Action provided no support for Democratic candidates. Instead, it gave over $1.3 million to Republican Gabriel Gomez’s 2014 campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts.

Examples can be found on both sides of the aisle. The PAC Patriot Majority USA, which sports a gun-toting minuteman logo and foregrounds the word “patriot,” a term that recent research indicates is a strong marker of conservative political identity, ran ads in support of Democratic candidates. It also opposed Republican candidates in multiple states for years.

The PAC Protect Women Ohio Action, Inc. contributed to conservative ads opposing a ballot initiative that limited Ohio’s authority to restrict abortion.

Deceptive PAC naming today

Tactical naming continues in current primaries.

Earlier in this primary cycle, the PACs Real Change and Lead Left ran television ads and mailers in competitive congressional districts attacking Democratic candidates, ostensibly from the left. The ads accused candidates of standing with President Donald Trump, opposing Medicare for all and “cashing in on Trump’s terror.”

To any casual observer, Real Change and Lead Left look like progressive groups holding Democrats accountable. But closer scrutiny reveals something else.

When people subscribed to Real Change’s email list, they received emails confirming their subscriptions that routed through cavalryllc.com. That’s the domain of Cavalry LLC, one of Washington’s premier Republican communications firms, founded by Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell’s former chief of staff.

Cavalry has received more than $10 million from the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with House Republican leadership. And investigative reports revealed that Caleb Crosby, the treasurer of the Congressional Leadership Fund, founded a political compliance firm that supported personnel at two conservative PACs that used the same unusual address as Lead Left: a Staples store in Tallahassee, Florida.

The science behind the names

It’s tempting to think that this tactic won’t work on the politically savvy people who pay attention to PAC names. But our research shows otherwise.

To test the effects of deceptive PAC names, we conducted a controlled online experiment involving more than 650 participants recruited through Prolific, an online academic research studies platform. The sample was balanced by gender and diverse in age, though participants were somewhat more educated than the general U.S. population.

Participants evaluated four proposed laws before and after learning that each law was sponsored by a PAC. The PAC’s name was manipulated to be either congruent with the law’s ideological direction, incongruent with it or politically neutral. For example, a left-leaning environmental proposal might be sponsored by a PAC called Save the Earth, Americans for Oil or Smith. By comparing participants’ ratings before and after exposure to those names, we measured the extent to which naming alone could alter attitudes toward otherwise identical proposals.

We found that misleading PAC names significantly shifted voter opinion. We also found that PAC names were most effective when they were deceptive. When participants who supported a particular law were told that an incongruently named PAC was sponsoring it, their support for that law dropped sharply, even when the law’s text sat right in front of them.

For example, when people who identified as left-leaning already favored a law that expedited refugee worker rights, their favorability ratings dropped sharply when they learned that the sponsoring PAC had a right-signaling name, Building the Wall. By contrast, learning that an aptly named PAC, Humane Treatment of Migrants, had sponsored the same law did not significantly affect the ratings of left-leaning people and barely affected the ratings of right-leaning people.

Our research also found that stronger partisans are more susceptible to this tactic. The more firmly someone identified with a political party, the greater the swing in their opinion when an inapt PAC name was introduced.

Sophisticated voters are not automatically inoculated – if anything, their stronger priors make them more vulnerable to cues that appear to confirm or threaten their political identity.

What makes this especially troubling is where tactical names appear. Federal regulations require that PACs disclose their names “in a clear and conspicuous manner” in their political advertisements.

One might wonder whether tactical naming is just everyday politics. But weaponizing names introduces a hazard that goes far beyond ordinary negative campaigning.

A Republican group running ads against Democrats is unremarkable. A Republican group pretending to be a Democratic group to run those same ads is something different: It is a deliberate attempt to corrupt the informational environment in which voters decide whom to support.

Can anything be done?

Our research addressed this question, and our conclusions are sobering.

An outright ban on deceptive PAC names would face serious First Amendment obstacles. Naming a PAC is a form of expression that receives constitutional protection.

Courts have been reluctant to allow the government to dictate how political organizations present themselves. In Doctors for a Healthy Montana v. Fox in 2020, a federal district court struck down a Montana law requiring PACs to name themselves in a way that clearly identified the economic or special interest of a majority of their contributors. The court found that the statute did more than require disclosure of factual information; it unconstitutionally dictated “how that information must be packaged to the public.”

Required disclaimers, such as warnings to voters not to treat a PAC’s name as reliable evidence of its political identity, would probably be the most legally viable intervention. Even their constitutionality is uncertain, however.

That leaves two other remedies: transparency journalism and voter skepticism.

The reporting on Real Change PAC, which followed money through shell companies, traced email domains and mapped connections to the Congressional Leadership Fund, is the kind of investigative work that gives voters a fighting chance.

Voters can also follow a simple rule of thumb: When you see a PAC name, don’t treat it as gospel. Ask who is paying for it and who benefits.

Be mindful when the PAC is critical of a person or position that is supported by the very party that the PAC appears to serve. And remember that the most dangerous political actors don’t always attack your political allies.

Sometimes, they just steal their names.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation