So....at around 2 AM they FINALLY called the race for Abdul El Sayed. What was supposed to be a roughly 10 point margin of victory was turned into a 2 point one, with lots of people saying polls were wrong. Well...yes and no.
Again, polls have ERROR. In my own forecaosts, I assume a 4 point margin of error. Given that this applies to BOTH candidate, this gives a massive 8 point range the polls can be off in either direction. So we can expect the margin of victory for El Sayed to be between 2 and 18 with a 95% degree of confidence. When I said that I gave him around a 99% shot at winning, that's because the probability of the polls being off by 10 is about 1%. And as it turned out...that didn't happen. We just ended up at the extreme end of the 95% range roughly speaking. This was like a 2nd-3rd percentile margin of victory for Abdul El Sayed, a small margin of victory, but a victory nevertheless.
Now, my big concern is where this leaves us with the general. As things stand, Haley Stevens was leading Mike Rogers by around 1.7%, giving her around a 66-67% chance of victory. El Sayed trails Rogers by 0.3%, this gives him a 47% chance of victory. This is not fatal to El Sayed in and of itself. Stevens is not super strong here, but El Sayed is not super weak either. Still, Stevens WAS the better candidate for the general, despite my own preference for El Sayed, and if El Sayed is gonna underperform by 8 in the primary, does that mean he stands a chance in the general? Hard to say. Quite frankly, the general looks very competitive, and once again, error will determine who wins in all likelihood. If democrats overperform, El Sayed wins. If they underperform, Rogers wins. It's that simple. But El Sayed's underperformance was significant here. We had a very comfortable margin and El Sayed only won BECAUSE he had that much of a buffer. If it were within the margin of error, El Sayed would have lost here. Because again, we got just about the worst possible outcome in that 2-18 point possibility range. We ended up only winning by 2.
Now, to be fair, polling was funky here. After McMorrow dropped out, polling was all over the place, but then consensus polling in the weekend leading up to the election seemed to coalesce around El Sayed in a way that gave him a double digit lead. It was sudden. But with multiple polls showing similar outcomes, plausible. Well....again, while he won...it was close. It is possible that the error happened because lots of people had to make up their mind last minute and they went in favor of stevens. Maybe the sampling was off. Who knows. But yeah. Again, this just shows how funky polling can be and how imprecise these forecasts really are. Still, the model TECHNICALLY held up. El Sayed won, so...yeah.
Anyway, I just hope this doesnt mean anything for the general. Michigan is strangely in play for how blue of a year 2026 is shaping up to be, and El Sayed is admittedly the weaker general election candidate. If we get a similar underperformance in the general, we're screwed. of course, given Haley stevens was only 2 points better here, she'd be screwed too. D+1.7 actually means R+6.3 to D+9.7. R+0.3 means D+7.7 to R+8.3. Ya know? Again, this is why i didnt sweat El Sayed's electability in the primary, but if he underperforms like this, I got a bad feeling about the general. I guess we'll have to see though. El Sayed was my favored candidate so I'm glad he won, but yeah. This was nerve wracking and the general is too. Not only could this race decide the control of the senate, but also is a test balloon for the viability of progressive left candidates in a swing state. if El Sayed screws this up, centrists will just hold this over us to push electability arguments and we might end up with more moderate candidates in the future. So yeah, let's see where this goes. Challenge 1 over, but challenge 2 is about to begin.
Still, I feel better about El Sayed than I do Hong in Wisconsin. If you notice I didn't endorse her. Yeah, it's her electability or lack thereof. Nothing against her, but uh...YIKES, her numbers are bad. Even I dont wanna touch THAT. El Sayed though? As you can tell, it will only matter if the race is super close. If El Sayed loses by less than 2 points in November, Stevens probably would've won. otherwise it wouldnt have mattered.
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