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At 3 p.m. on a recent Saturday afternoon, in a conference room inside Fellowship Chapel in Detroit, Abdul El-Sayed looked different from the Senate candidate I had been watching at rallies around Michigan. He dipped his head. His voice seemed softer. This was not a room he commanded.

Almost everyone in the room besides El-Sayed was Black. He quickly tried to make inroads. “Many folks in this room are people I worked with in the city of Detroit,” he said at one point. Then, turning toward one woman he knew from those years: “Ms. Pam, have I changed at all?” he asked her. “No.” “Still talking about the same things, right?” he asked, smiling. “Yes, sir,” she said.

The women around El-Sayed belonged to the Woman Difference Collaborative, an invitation-only network of Black women faith leaders founded by the Rev. Jessica Ingram. Its members included senior pastors, first ladies, evangelists, and other women with constituencies of their own that travel far in a state like Michigan. The group began as a support system for women navigating leadership in the Black church, but its reach extended into politics. When Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee in 2024, the collaborative organized a major gathering in support of her with only a few weeks’ notice.

Some in the room already liked El-Sayed. But most had voted for his Democratic primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens. Before El-Sayed spoke, the moderator, Monica G. Anthony, had already indicated part of the reason why: his support for the “uncommitted movement” in 2024, which many Black Democrats believed had weakened Harris on her way to losing Michigan. Some Black Democrats experienced that campaign, which demanded an end to U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, as an attack on a historic candidate they desperately wanted to elect. (Last month, in an apparent effort to help mend the wound, Harris traveled to Michigan to campaign for El-Sayed.)

Now questions still surround his campaign about whether he can win over the Black voters who largely rejected him in the primary. El-Sayed won the primary by a single percentage point. He lost in Detroit by 28 points; Stevens won the city handily.

In nearly every major national interview with El-Sayed, he’s asked about the concerns of Jewish voters in Michigan, who make up about 1.5 percent to 2 percent of voters there. He’s rarely asked about the concerns of Black voters, who make up roughly 11 percent to 12 percent. Democrats traditionally do not have a plausible path to statewide victory without a strong Black voter turnout. And if a recent Washington Post poll is any indication, El-Sayed still has a lot of ground to make up with those voters.........

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