By Jim Ellis — Thursday, October 29, 2026
Arguably, the Michigan Senate race could determine which party will control the Senate in the next Congress. With Democrats having a chance to obtain the majority by scoring a presumed flip in North Carolina and currently running close or ahead but not secure in Alaska, Maine, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas, a GOP win in Michigan could save the party’s majority.
With that background in mind, let us examine recent polling data and compare it with the 2024 Senate race, in which Republican nominee Mike Rogers, again the party’s nominee in 2026, fell just 19,006 votes short out of more than 5.57 million ballots cast. Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s (D) victory margin was a mere three-tenths of one percentage point.
The polling in 2024, however, painted a slightly different picture, and many of the same firms are now surveying the 2026 contest. Below is a comparison of the final pre-election ballot tests and the actual election results. We then examine data from some of those same pollsters in the current race between Rogers and former Wayne County Health Director Abdul El-Sayed.
Click on chart above to see full-size.
In the closing days of the 2024 campaign, six polls from five polling organizations were conducted between Nov. 1 and Election Day, which was on Nov. 5. Their final ballot test results are presented below and, collectively, came quite close to the eventual outcome.
As you can see from the chart below, the actual 2024 numbers show the result of Slotkin (D) edging Rogers (R) 48.6-48.3 percent.
All polls between Nov. 1-4 projected Slotkin to be ahead or tied.
While the polls from a week before the election, commensurate with now in 2026, largely showed a different trend: All of these polls found Slotkin leading. There were two in the Oct. 26-30 time period, from Mitchell Research and the Tarrance Group, that found Rogers holding a two-point edge, but at the time those were regarded as outlier results.
Juxtapose that in the chart above with current polling for the 2026 Rogers/Ed-Sayed contest, all of which find El-Sayed leading.
As you can see, the polling trajectory one week before the 2024 election closely resembles what we are seeing today. In that race, the late movement broke in Rogers’ favor, though not by enough for him to secure victory. Whether a similar pattern emerges in 2026 remains to be seen.
Another important point of comparison is El-Sayed’s performance in the Democratic primary. Recall that he defeated Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Birmingham) by just nine-tenths of a percentage point in the Aug. 4 Democratic primary.
Across six individual polls conducted slightly more than a week before the election, with early voting already underway, El-Sayed held an average lead of 15 percentage points.
Obviously, these numbers represent a major polling miss in an election that tested Abdul El-Sayed’s strength with the electorate. Whether pollsters have corrected the errors evident in the Aug. 4 primary for the general election remains undetermined.
The one constant, however, is that the Michigan Senate race remains one of the most consequential contests in the country and will almost assuredly play a decisive role in determining the next Senate majority.