With just a week to go until the Aug. 7 primary, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has announced plans to hold a pair of last-minute Michigan rallies for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
The rallies will be held Sunday, Aug. 5 in Detroit and Ypsilanti. Word of Sanders' visit comes a week after the progressive Democrat formally endorsed El-Sayed, and following a weekend in which El-Sayed crisscrossed the state for campaign stops with another progressive hero, Democratic congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Sanders won Michigan's 2016 Democratic presidential primary in a historic upset. Leading up to the election, polls had shown Sanders down by more than 20 points, but he wound up beating Hillary Clinton by two. Ocasio-Cortez pulled off an even more stunning victory last
El-Sayed is hoping he can replicate those come-from-behind victories by building momentum into Tuesday. He points to a poll by Change Research as evidence that his strategy is working.
The poll was conducted July 20 and July 21 — two days after a televised Detroit debate with former state Sen. Gretchen Whitmer and businessman Shri Thanedar — and shows El-Sayed eroding some of his rivals' support. The poll has El-Sayed at 27 percent, Whitmer at 33 percent, and Thanedar at 15 percent. Approximately 1,500 voters responded and the margin of error was 2.5 percent.
A separate, widely publicized poll conducted July 21 and July 22 shows Whitmer with a commanding lead in the race. The EPIC-MRA poll shows Whitmer at 49 percent, Thanedar at 22 percent, and El-Sayed at 19 percent. That poll gathered input from approximately 1,000 voters via landline phones and had a 3.1 percent margin of error.
El-Sayed's Detroit rally with Sanders will be held at the Grand Riverview Ballroom at Cobo Center. The time and location of the Ypsilanti event
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