Michigan U.S. Senate primary tightens as McMorrow, El-Sayed outpace Stevens in Q1 fundraising
Ben Solis
Michigan Advance
April 28, 2026
Newly released campaign finance reports show growing enthusiasm around Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate primary candidates Mallory McMorrow and Abdul El-Sayed, as both did demonstrably better in the first quarter of 2026 than sitting U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens.
Stevens, who is likely recovering from a rough showing at the April 19 Michigan Democratic Party spring endorsement convention, is still in a strong position money-wise and has the most cash on hand of the three candidates.
But the tide could be turning on Stevens’ candidacy as McMorrow, a state senator from Royal Oak, and El-Sayed, a former health official from Ann Arbor, continue to draw in more small-dollar donations and potentially out raise her as the race barrels quickly toward August.
…
Setting small-dollar donations aside, FEC reports show that political action committees still helped fund each campaign.
Stevens received $154,000 from PACs in the first quarter of the year, while McMorrow had $24,569 in support from PACs. El-Sayed raked in just $7,000 from PAC contributions.
At least $28,000 of Stevens’ PAC funding haul came from corporate committees, including from Bank of America and BlackRock.
Both El-Sayed and McMorrow have eschewed corporate PAC money in their respective U.S. Senate campaigns, but El-Sayed has been particularly critical of Stevens for taking money from DTE Energy. He has also more recently wrapped McMorrow into that line of attack.
In March, El-Sayed told a crowd at an Indivisible District 7 meeting that the company was “supporting the candidates I am running against in this election.” That was the first time that El-Sayed publicly attacked both McMorrow and Stevens on corporate PAC money.
The seeds of that attack, however, were planted in February when, on an organizing call, El-Sayed accused McMorrow and Stevens of voting to give data centers tax breaks in 2024. He then went on to accuse McMorrow of flip-flopping on her support for data centers, even as she aims to take a pragmatic approach to data centers that also criticizes them when planned at scale.
McMorrow and Stevens, meanwhile, have both criticized DTE for raising rates on their customers, despite their previous campaigns being funded in part by the company’s PAC money.
In her 2022 state Senate reelection campaign, DTE was McMorrow’s top donor, donating close to $10,000. Republican operatives… have placed emphasis on her votes to give data centers tax breaks in Michigan.
At the same time, McMorrow’s state Senate leadership PAC, A More Perfect Michigan, received $1,500 from DTE in 2024. A year later, she would announce her U.S. Senate campaign and shortly thereafter disavowed taking corporate PAC money.
El-Sayed’s camp has called that a sign of hypocrisy, and so have the Republicans…
In that vein, Stevens has also received a steady flow of cash from DTE starting in her first U.S. House reelection campaign in 2020, a total of $45,000 across multiple committees. DTE continued to funnel donations to her U.S. House leadership PAC and her congressional campaign as recently as last year, the last donation coming to her HMS SCRAP PAC in September 2025. Her Senate campaign received a direct donation in March 2025, a contribution of $2,500.
Stevens, like El-Sayed and McMorrow, has also been critical of DTE’s rate hikes, calling them out of control and outrageous.
As the attacks fly across the bow regarding campaign cash and where it came from, El-Sayed has followed the Bernie Sanders mantra of attacking corporate wealth and has garnered just as many supporters as he has enemies in the corporate wealth world in the process.
While both El-Sayed and McMorrow position themselves as champions of the middle class and affordability for average Michiganders, they might potentially be millionaires.
Financial disclosures filed in 2025 with the U.S. Senate showed that McMorrow estimated her net worth between $588,041 and $1.87 million, much of that money coming from diversified investment accounts, many of which are associated with her husband, Ray Wert.
The same disclosures filed by El-Sayed show that he estimated his net worth between $586,022 and $1.66 million, which includes two rental properties valued, respectively, up to an estimated $250,000 and $500,000, each.
Despite the flak Stevens has received for her corporate donations, personal finance disclosures show her net worth actually shrank during her time in Congress. In 2024, Stevens’ personal net worth was estimated as being nearly $380,000 in debt or up to $176,998 in assets. Her debt appears to come from a mortgage on a home purchased in 2021 with a value estimated up to $500,000. When she entered Congress in 2018, her net worth was estimated between $44,018 and $312,000.
###