Two Polls. Two Realities. One Future Michigan Senate Race.

Two Polls. Two Realities. One Future Michigan Senate Race.
LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) -- If you're looking for clarity in Michigan's November U.S. Senate race, the latest polling might leave you wondering if the pollsters are even measuring the same election.
Just days after a Glengariff Group poll showed Republican Mike Rogers cruising to a roughly 10-point lead over Democrat Abdul El-Sayed if the progressive Muslim candidate wins Tuesday's primary, a new Mitchell Research survey paints a dramatically different picture, showing the race tied at 45%-45%.
Even so, Mitchell's own numbers show El-Sayed has lost ground since June. The candidate who led Rogers 47%-42% in the firm's June 11-13 poll has now fallen into a dead heat.
The bigger surprise, however, is how dramatically Mitchell's findings differ from Glengariff's. That's not a statistical quirk. It's a gap of more than 10 percentage points between two respected Michigan polling firms surveying voters at nearly the same time.
A tale of two polling organizations.
The Glengariff Group surveyed likely Michigan general election voters from July 22-24. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. About 85% of those surveyed were reached by cellphone and 15% by landline.
The Mitchell poll was conducted July 28-29, 2026, by sending text messages to a random sample of registered voters and directing them to complete an online SurveyMonkey questionnaire. It surveyed 672 likely voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.77%.
Interestingly, the two polling firms are much closer when it comes to a potential Mike Rogers-Haley Stevens general election matchup. Glengariff found Stevens with a razor-thin 45.5%-44.7% lead, while Mitchell gave Rogers a 46%-43% advantage. Both surveys point to a highly competitive race.
While the two firms largely agree that a Rogers-Stevens race would be a toss-up, they paint dramatically different pictures if Democrat Abdul El-Sayed is the nominee and the contrast between the two polls is hard to ignore.