DETROIT — In a Michigan Democratic primary, the path to a majority usually runs through the same rooms: Black churches, and the older voters who fill their pews and make up the party’s most reliable base. Which is why Rep. Haley Stevens has spent the past month working those rooms harder than any others.

Eight times this month, she has carried her Senate campaign into a predominantly Black church and made essentially the same case: her roots growing up in the Detroit suburbs, her endorsements from members of the Congressional Black Caucus and her ties to President Barack Obama, for whom she worked on the U.S. Auto Rescue Task Force in 2009. 

“President Obama, our 44th president of the United States, I worked on that campaign and I saw him get elected, and I put up my hand to serve in that administration,” Stevens told the congregation at New Hope Baptist Church in Ann Arbor during a recent stop. Her Obama ties have been a focus of campaign mailers and more than a million dollars in ad buys paid for on her behalf by outside political action committees.

That effort reflects a deliberate bet on the voters she needs most — the constituency that could decide her competitive primary against Dr. Abdul El-Sayed on Tuesday. It also underscores the danger she faces. El-Sayed, a public health expert and 2018 candidate for governor, has built his campaign around the roughly $60 million that PACs have spent to boost Stevens — above all, the more than $30 million spent on ads by a group aligned with AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying organization.

For now, those voters appear to be holding firm. Interviews with roughly a dozen Black voters, party leaders and elected officials across Michigan suggest the state’s most active Black voters — those older than 55 — are less troubled by that outside money, helping explain why Stevens has concentrated her closing weeks on turning them out.

“I don’t think it matters as much as really proving to me that she’s doing what she says she’s going to do to represent the people,” said Darius Randolph, 65, of Ypsilanti, after Stevens spoke at New Hope Baptist.

But beneath that stability runs a set of fault lines that could reshape the coalition for years — over generation, over Gaza, and over what the Democratic Party owes voters who have never stopped showing up for it. And for some Black Michiganders, tensions still linger from the state’s 2024 “Uncommitted” movement, which urged Democrats to vote “uncommitted” rather than for Joe Biden in that year’s primary to protest U.S. support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. That history — along with the false perception that El-Sayed was among the Uncommitted activists who opposed Kamala Harris in the general election — could also help Stevens, several Black Democrats acknowledged to MS NOW.

Black voters are not a monolith, and El-Sayed’s allies argue his progressive platform will play well with younger voters of every race. The divide runs through the institutions that have weighed in: The Congressional Black Caucus endorsed Stevens, but at least five of its younger, progressive members have broken to back El-Sayed. The Michigan Council of COGIC Bishops endorsed Stevens; El-Sayed’s website touts endorsements from two church leaders tied to the group.

El-Sayed’s path on Tuesday runs through those divisions — peeling off enough Black voters to deny Stevens a win, much as Sen. Bernie Sanders, an El-Sayed backer, did in Michigan’s 2016 presidential primary, when he carried the state while winning roughly 28% of the Black vote. For Stevens, victory means running up turnout among Democrats’ most reliable voters in places like Wayne County — where she has spent the bulk of her campaign’s final weeks— and Detroit, the largest Black-majority city in the country.

Either way, allies of both candidates said the race could turn on Black voters, a group that makes up roughly a quarter of the state’s Democratic electorate.

“If you’re gonna win, you better get the Black folks engaged,” said Keith Williams, chair of the Michigan Democratic Party Black Caucus.

The ghost of 2024

When Stevens opened a campaign event last weekend at a Teamsters hall in Detroit alongside Rep. Jim Clyburn, the surprise she had planned for her mostly older crowd was an endorsement from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — one of the few, Williams said, that carries weight with Black voters.

The surprise she hadn’t planned for was a now-viral clip of a supporter, Farmington school board member Angie Smith, making explicitly Islamophobic remarks as she explained her opposition to El-Sayed.

“We need some of us that can represent all of us and not just one race but all races,” Smith told reporter Sam Robinson of the Michigan Chronicle. “Don’t come out speaking only Arabic, don’t come out with your Arabic music on. Represent everyone.” (El-Sayed, who is Muslim and has Egyptian ancestry, campaigns in English and has not been known to play Arabic music at rallies.)

The comments drew wide condemnation, including from Stevens. But voters and party leaders said they reflected rising tensions between Black and Arab residents rooted in the Uncommitted movement, an effort that sought to deny Democrats votes due to the Biden administration’s funding support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

“My people died for the right to vote, and y’all just talk about being ‘uncommitted,’” Williams, who endorsed Stevens, told MS NOW. “Donald Trump won [Michigan in 2024] by 80,000 votes, and that’s where the tension lies.”

To El-Sayed’s backers, that resentment has curdled into something broader. “A lot of the African American community are trying to put a face on the Uncommitted movement,” said Tomena Rawls, a Michigan Democratic Party official backing El-Sayed. The dynamic, she said, is affecting not only El-Sayed, but also Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who is seeking re-election, and state Senate candidate Abbas Alawieh, who was a co-founder of the Uncommitted effort.

Rawls and other El-Sayed supporters argue the movement was not responsible for Harris’s defeat across all eight swing states in 2024. But memories of the movement — including event disruptions and online attacks that some in the movement aimed at Harris — won’t fade easily, especially as the United Democracy Project, an AIPAC-aligned group, pours millions into advertisements seeking to remind Michiganders of El-Sayed’s support of Uncommitted, though he later endorsed Harris.

“It’s just that when they voted for Jill Stein, and you had some content creators saying awful, awful things about Kamala Harris and how they, you know, they would vote for the devil instead of voting for her and everything. That turned off a lot of Black folks, especially the 92%,” Rawls, the El-Sayed backer, said, referencing the 92% of Black women that backed Harris in 2024.

Williams told MS NOW that he’d support El-Sayed in the general election should he defeat Stevens on Tuesday, and expects most Black voters would do the same. But in a primary defined by the candidates’ positions on U.S. military aid to Israel, Williams cautioned that the war in Gaza may not resonate as deeply with Black voters.