MORNING GLORY: The polls got Michigan badly wrong. Now Democrats may face a bigger reckoning
The nationwide duel for the Senate is going on in the dark because polling this year has produced a series of spectacular busts, especially in Michigan, where polls on the primary battle between Democrats Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens posted double-digit lead after double-digit lead for El-Sayed. In fact, El-Sayed won by 1% — not the 10-18% that had been predicted. It turns out those polls may have suppressed voter turnout and encouraged some Stevens voters to stay home.
It is doubtful anyone following the news will stay home in Michigan in the general election. El-Sayed is — at best! — an Islamist apologist. He cannot own his past statements or campaign rhetoric.
He refuses to discuss his most prominent supporter in the primary: far-left streamer and YouTube personality Hasan Piker, who is part crazy and part extremist. Piker carried El-Sayed over the finish line in the primary, but now voters are supposed to accept El-Sayed’s deflections when questioned about him.
HISTORIC NEWSPAPER GIVES EL-SAYED A SAVAGE REBUKE FOR HIDING HIS PAST WHILE ENDORSING HIS OPPONENT
El-Sayed is a radical. He’s done very little to hide his antipathy toward America’s ally Israel, going so far as to equate Israel with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran has, of course, been at war with the United States since its revolution in 1979. That regime is responsible for the deaths of more than a thousand Americans, whether blown up at the U.S. Embassy or the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut in 1983 by Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, or this past weekend, when another American was killed by another Iranian proxy, the Houthis, via a Houthi missile attack on the international airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Still, El-Sayed cannot simply declare that Israel is our ally and Iran is our enemy. That should tell everyone all they need to know about El-Sayed and cost him on November 3.
EL-SAYED TRIES TO MAKE PEACE WITH JEWISH DEMOCRATS BUT DRAWS LINE AT DUMPING HASAN PIKER
All across the country, Democrats have nominated candidates from the fringe, from El-Sayed in Michigan to James Talarico in Texas, Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota and Troy Jackson in Maine. It’s as though the Democratic National Committee put zero effort into candidate recruitment, or maybe they just threw darts at a board marked with "Guaranteed to Lose" at the top.
But El-Sayed is the worst of the lot … by a lot. And the stories keep coming as opposition research reveals facts about El-Sayed’s past that he has tried to hide, including his claim of dual citizenship, which he has subsequently repudiated. With nearly three weeks left before polls close, it’s fair to expect that more such old tape and tweets will surface.
El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, is, by contrast, a mainstream and moderate Michigander, a former FBI agent and lieutenant in the Army before he went on to serve in the Michigan legislature and then for more than a decade in the House of Representatives, finishing there as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. (That’s significant, by the way, as the Intelligence Committee is a select committee, with members selected by the speaker and the House minority leader, traditionally because of their national security chops.)
Rogers v. El-Sayed ought not to be close. And chances are it won’t be because of El-Sayed’s reported difficulty connecting with Detroit’s Black community, on which Democrats traditionally rely to win in the Wolverine State.
ROGERS OPENS DOOR TO DEMOCRATIC VOTERS AFTER EL-SAYED’S PRIMARY VICTORY: ‘THERE IS STILL HOPE’
Report after report hints at the long-standing estrangement between the Black and Arab American communities in and around Detroit, but hardly any pollster knows how to account for the antipathy felt toward El-Sayed by Black voters.
Campaign drop-bys by former Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Barack Obama are as close to "break glass, pull alarm" emergency signals as you can get, but they are not doing the trick.
BLACK VOTERS, JEWISH DEMOCRATS IN MICHIGAN WARY OF VOTING FOR EL-SAYED, SAY 'HE'S TAKING ADVANTAGE'
The trouble? Traditional Democrats know El-Sayed. He’s run for political office before. And lost before. "Winsome and gracious" is not on his resume. If anything, he’s the angriest major-party candidate we’ve seen in decades. His refusal to answer basic questions about Piker, about his family’s alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and about the impact of "Medicare for All" on union-negotiated health care plans (the former would destroy the latter) marks El-Sayed as untrustworthy.
An early call for Rogers on election night will secure the Senate majority for Republicans. (That result might have already been accomplished by victories for Sens. Susan Collins in Maine and John Sununu in New Hampshire, but Rogers getting the call early on November 3 would be a great relief.)
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Beyond simply having the far better man win an election, though, the victory of Rogers over El-Sayed will be a win for moderation and maturity and a rejection of the sort of extremism that Democrats have not flirted with outside of the deep-blue urban districts that sent AOC, Ilhan Omar and the rest of "The Squad" to D.C.
The United States needs two mainstream parties committed to playing between the 40-yard lines of American politics. Losing the Democrats to the control of extremists like El-Sayed would be terrible for everyone, including, and most especially, the Democratic Party.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show" heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.