‘It’s My Bleeding Heart’: Michiganders Agonize Over Stevens vs. El-Sayed
Tomorrow’s Michigan primary is the Democratic party’s identity crisis in microcosm.
HALEY STEVENS’S AND ABDUL EL-SAYED’S campaigns are wildly different in ways that are pitting Democratic voters’ heads against their hearts.
And with polls showing El-Sayed leading by double digits, I wonder if the heart is pulling away. Focus groups help shed light on the way voters reconcile their personal preferences with strategic calculations, in a way that polling can’t.
We conducted three focus groups—one each in April, June, and July—with Michiganders who had voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 and planned to vote in the Democratic primary for the Senate race. We wanted to get a deeper sense of how they were feeling about tomorrow’s election.1
One of our participants, Amanda, summed up a tension she’s feeling between idealism and pragmatism:
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