That Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan Democratic primary for Senate by (at this writing) less than a point, after the last five polls in the race all had him up by double digits, might be chalked up to the general difficulty of polling Michigan (especially in primaries, as I warned on Monday) or to poor-quality, agenda-driven primary pollsters. But it also might not be as random an error as it first appears. If you look at past Michigan poll failures, most notably the 2016 Democratic presidential primary (when Hillary Clinton led by 21 points in the final poll average, then lost to Bernie Sanders), you might think the pattern hard to spot: this time, it was the establishment figure who was underrated against the populist. But when you look at their actual coalitions, the picture seems more familiar:

Stevens bested El-Sayed in the state’s more rural, working-class counties, as well as among black voters in inner-city Detroit. In Michigan counties where fewer than 30 percent of voters are college-educated, Stevens earned almost 52 percent of the vote, Politico reported.........

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