Three weeks before Michigan Democrats pick their nominee in the Michigan Senate race, a race for a must-win U.S. Senate seat, the state’s airwaves are drowning in outside money.
More than $41 million in outside spending has poured into the race, and more than half of it has one purpose: boosting Rep. Haley Stevens and tearing down her progressive opponent, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, ahead of the August 4 primary.
Here’s what the ads won’t tell you: who’s paying for them.
Follow the money
The single biggest spender in the race is United Democracy Project, the super PAC of the pro-Israel lobbying giant AIPAC, which has dropped nearly $15 million supporting Stevens and opposing El-Sayed.
AIPAC has also funneled several million more directly to Stevens by steering its donors through online portals — money that never shows up under AIPAC’s name in public data.
And that’s just the spending with a return address.
A group calling itself the Center for Democratic Priorities dumped more than $5.3 million into pro-Stevens ads in May without registering as a political committee or disclosing a single donor.
The Detroit News found the group shares a media-buying vendor with AIPAC-affiliated PACs, and that an officer on its paperwork was tied to a 2024 Michigan group funded by AIPAC-linked committees.
AIPAC denies a connection — but the money remains anonymous.
Another super PAC, A Stronger Michigan, has spent over $12 million more backing Stevens.
Add it up: the ad-tracking firm AdImpact counts $46.1 million in Democratic primary ad spending, and 74% of it supports Stevens.
That’s roughly $34 million — nearly fourteen times the $2.5 million El-Sayed’s entire campaign had in the bank at the last reporting deadline.
El-Sayed, who refuses corporate PAC money, has drawn a comparatively tiny $2.3 million in outside support, mostly from nurses’ and veterans’ groups and a progressive PAC.
Notice what none of these ads say on screen: AIPAC.
That’s not an accident.
As The Nation observed, the group’s attack ads carefully avoid mentioning Israel at all — because Democratic voters have soured on both. So the money arrives wearing friendlier names.
The “disrespecting women” ad falls apart under scrutiny
United Democracy Project’s first attack ad, backed by a $2 million buy, accuses El-Sayed of a long history of disrespecting women.
The Detroit Free Press — which has not endorsed El-Sayed — fact-checked the ad and found it “stretches its facts,” calling at least three of its four examples unconvincing.
The ad’s lead example? A 2010 op-ed on childhood obesity in which El-Sayed, a public health doctor, called Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign commendable but ineffective at reducing obesity — while praising her for tackling the issue. The ad clipped that into an attack on women.
Another example: El-Sayed criticizing Gretchen Whitmer in 2018 over corporate donations — a standard campaign-finance attack the Free Press found had nothing to do with gender. The ad also cites a discrimination lawsuit in which El-Sayed wasn’t even a defendant.
Stevens, for her part, stood by the ad’s message, calling this kind of attack fair game.
The Obama Illusion
Then there are the ads blanketing Detroit that make it look like Barack Obama has endorsed Stevens.
He hasn’t.
The PAC-funded spots feature a clip of Obama praising Stevens as a critical part of his auto rescue team. As Bridge Michigan’s fact-check confirmed, that clip is from 2018 — when Obama endorsed her House run — and he has made no endorsement in this Senate primary.
Even Obama’s own former chief strategist, David Axelrod, said of the ad: “if you live there and saw the ad … you’d THINK he had!”
Below: A campaign ad that aired during the Michigan Senate race. It features former President Obama praising Stevens in 2018. Black voters in Michigan cite this as one of the reasons they will vote for Haley Stevens.
The illusion is working. The Michigan Chronicle reports that Black voters in Detroit cite the Obama ads as a reason they’re backing Stevens.
Detroit City Council member Denzel McCampbell called the spots “deceptive campaign tactics” that treat Black voters as pawns.
Stevens’ campaign — which by law cannot coordinate with the super PACs running the ads — told Bridge the clips accurately reflect how Obama viewed her work, and Stevens herself has never claimed his endorsement. But the PACs bankrolling her know exactly what impression a 2018 Obama clip leaves in 2026.
It doesn’t stop there. On Monday, the United Auto Workers — which endorsed El-Sayed — sent A Stronger Michigan a cease-and-desist letter for slipping the union’s logo into pro-Stevens ads, calling them “a deliberate attempt at misleading voters.”
What Michigan voters deserve to know
The fact-checks exist. The Free Press, PolitiFact, and Bridge Michigan have all done the work.
But a fact-check published once cannot compete with a falsehood aired ten thousand times.
That’s the whole strategy: saturation. When one side of a primary is backed by $34 million in ads and the other has a fraction of that, the truth isn’t losing the argument — it’s being outspent.
So here’s the truth: The ad calling Abdul El-Sayed sexist stretches the facts, per Michigan’s largest newspaper.
The ads implying Obama endorsed Haley Stevens are built on a clip from a different race eight years ago.
The “grassroots-sounding” groups paying for all of it trace back to AIPAC’s super PAC, an anonymous pop-up nonprofit, and corporate dark money.
Michiganders will decide this race — not the PACs. But voters deserve to walk into the voting booth knowing who was whispering in their ear, and that much of what they heard wasn’t true.
The Michigan Democratic primary is August 4. Absentee ballots are already going out — check into who paid for the ad before you believe it.
