QUID · MICHIGAN U.S. SENATE · OCT 3 - OCT 9, 2026
Seven days of conversation about Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers, split between posts that can be placed in Michigan and posts from the rest of the country. This is the largest corpus on the microsite at 1.4M posts, and the most hostile: both candidates run negative in both halves, and neither figure improves when the test is tightened.
Published polling, shown to set context. A poll asks a sample of voters which candidate they intend to support. Everything else on this page measures something different: the balance of positive and negative labeled posts about each candidate in the captured conversation. A candidate can lead the vote and still take the worse of the argument online, and where the two diverge this page explains the conversation, not the electorate.
El-Sayed leads the polling average by about 4 points while reading 20 points worse than Rogers inside Michigan and 29 points worse nationally. Unusually, tightening the test changes almost nothing here, which means the hostility is aimed at each candidate directly rather than borrowed from a contest between them.
Net sentiment runs on the left axis from −100 to +100. Gold bars carry total daily volume for both candidates combined; hover any bar for the narratives driving that day. Both lines fall through the week and neither recovers. The debate on Thursday night produces 506K posts on Friday, more than the first three days combined.
Michigan is harder on El-Sayed than on Rogers by twenty points, and the subject is almost entirely foreign policy rather than anything in the state.
Michigan
5,473 unique authors · 750 original posts
(5% of volume; the rest are reposts and replies).
Sentiment from 4,740 labeled posts, 31.0% of this slice;
stored sample behind the labels 474 documents.
The sharpest in-state damage to Rogers has nothing to do with the debate. Leaked audio of him discussing the cost of living circulated two days before it, and affordability is the one issue where Michigan judges him on his own terms.
Leaked audio of Michigan Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers mocking Americans struggling with skyrocketing prices.
@HQNewsNowOct 8Source
In-state reaction focused less on who won than on how it was conducted, and Rogers's in-state figure is the worse of his two readings as a result.
Rep. Mike Rogers spent the whole debate making unfounded and racist assertions about El-Sayed.
@DeciderDividerOct 9Source
For all of that, Rogers's -20.7 inside Michigan is the best of the four cells here. In a race where both candidates are under water everywhere, being twenty points less disliked at home is the clearest advantage either man holds.
Pretty clear as to why Mike Rogers was too scared to show up for that first debate.
@NoneOct 9Source
Michigan
8,515 unique authors · 820 original posts
(3% of volume; the rest are reposts and replies).
Sentiment from 4,420 labeled posts, 16.3% of this slice;
stored sample behind the labels 442 documents.
Michigan's own argument about El-Sayed runs through long, detailed Facebook comments about lobbying, a 2023 trip to Israel and who funded it. These are not slogans; they are the most substantive in-state posts in the race, and they are hostile.
AIPAC is the largest pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington. Its charitable arm paid for your trip to Israel in August 2023.
Oct 6Source
The strongest in-state material for El-Sayed is not advocacy but measurement. Detroit and Kalamazoo broadcast both carried polls showing him narrowly ahead, and those posts draw the highest engagement of anything inside Michigan this week.
Democrat Abdul El-Sayed appears to hold a narrow advantage over Republican Mike Rogers among likely voters in a hotly contested U.S. Senate race from Michigan.
CBS DetroitOct 5Source
A recurring in-state thread is Democratic voters pressing their own representatives over whether they have backed El-Sayed, with the primary result used as the lever. The split inside the party is a Michigan story that does not appear in the national cells at all.
Since you never did break down and support your fellow Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, you lost my vote.
Oct 6Source
The same week reads differently depending on where you stand. Net sentiment is plotted from Michigan on the left to the rest of the country on the right; the solid line counts every post naming a candidate, the dashed line counts only posts that name that candidate and not the other.
All posts naming the candidate Posts naming that candidate only
Rogers reads -20.7 in Michigan and -23.5 nationally, the closest agreement between halves in this race. Removing posts that name El-Sayed barely helps him, which means the criticism is of him rather than borrowed from a hostile contest. His damage is domestic: leaked audio about prices, and the conduct of the debate.
El-Sayed is twelve points worse nationally than at home, -52.9 against -40.7, and the single-subject test does not rescue either figure. The subject in both halves is foreign policy. Michigan adds an argument the country does not have: a split inside the state's own Democratic party over whether to back him.
Geography, not party. Both columns cover the same week and the same two candidates; what separates them is which arguments actually travel.
Michigan argues in detail and at length. Leaked audio about the cost of living, a documented dispute over lobbying and a 2023 trip, and Democratic voters pressing their own officials over the primary result. The in-state comments are the most substantive on the microsite.
Nationally the race is a proxy argument about foreign policy. El-Sayed's debate answers on Iran and Israel, Rogers's closing line about ideology, and competing instant verdicts on who won. Only 3 percent of it is original writing.
The national halves are four times larger and move the same way. El-Sayed's national cell alone holds 810K posts, more than any other single cell measured here.
Rest of United States
152,172 unique authors · 9,272 original posts
(3% of volume; the rest are reposts and replies).
Sentiment from 141,906 labeled posts, 42.3% of this slice;
stored sample behind the labels 16,451 documents.
Rogers's debate close is the most repeated piece of his own material in the week, carried by clip accounts within minutes and reposted thousands of times.
We cannot afford Abdul, and we cannot risk his ideology.
@EricLDaughOct 9Source
The counter-reading, carried mainly on Bluesky, is that Rogers attacked El-Sayed's family and religion rather than his positions. It is the largest single driver of Rogers's negative national figure.
Rogers drags El-Sayed family into heated Michigan Senate debate. Republican Mike Rogers repeatedly attacked Abdul El-Sayed's family during the first Michigan debate.
QNC NewsOct 9Source
A substantial share of the material scored positive toward Rogers nationally frames the race in religious terms. It is quoted here as evidence of what circulated, not as a characterization of the campaign's own position.
Mike Rogers just went nuclear on national TV. Democrats are fully embracing Abdul El-Sayed.
@ConstitustionXOct 9Source
Rest of United States
322,014 unique authors · 20,486 original posts
(3% of volume; the rest are reposts and replies).
Sentiment from 155,362 labeled posts, 19.2% of this slice;
stored sample behind the labels 18,998 documents.
El-Sayed's national cell is the largest measured anywhere on this microsite and the most negative in Michigan. Almost none of it is about Michigan. The subject is Israel, Iran and his answers about both, pressed hardest in the hours after the debate.
Abdul El-Sayed is facing criticism after reportedly refusing to say that Iran poses a greater threat than Israel during last night's debate.
viroxtrionairesOct 9Source
Against that, Democratic accounts circulated instant verdicts giving El-Sayed the night by a wide margin, tied to Medicare for All and taxation rather than to foreign policy.
76 percent of people believe Abdul El-Sayed won last night's U.S. Senate debate. He is running on Medicare for All and taxing the rich.
@DemzDeliverOct 9Source
A former senior Biden official backing Rogers was one of the most circulated national items in El-Sayed's cells. The classifier scores it positive toward him because he is the subject, which is the two-name problem appearing even at this scale.
Ex-Biden official backs Republican Mike Rogers over socialist Abdul El-Sayed in critical Senate race.
@Juliett59778255Oct 9Source
This page is the product of two different kinds of work. One half is data that no public API makes available; the other half is judgment about what the data does and does not support.
None of the following could be assembled from public endpoints inside a week.
The data does not interpret itself, and it arrives with traps in it.
Neither half can establish cause. This page measures what was said, how much of it there was, and who said it. It is not a poll, it does not model turnout, and it does not predict the November result.
primary: sentiment targeting, so the sentiment is scored
toward that named figure rather than toward the post as a whole.