I Went to Watch the Most Important Senate Primary of 2026 Unfold in Its Final Days. It Sure Reminded Me of Something Else.

On a hot and smoky mid-July Saturday night at the Detroit Opera House, the front-running campaign in Michigan’s Senate Democratic primary had little to say about the Republican Party. But it offered no mercy for the Democratic establishment. Over the course of the night, speaker after speaker would excoriate the Democratic establishment as beholden to corporate dollars, cynical, and out of gas. Well-funded super PACs—with AIPAC’s chief among them—have been doing Stevens’ dirty work of trying to take down El-Sayed, while the El-Sayed campaign is portraying the Stevens camp as corrupted by powerful interests. The Stevens campaign, though, is banking heavily on turning out Black voters, among whom she enjoys a significant advantage, in metro Detroit.