Former President Barack Obama is heading back to Michigan and Ohio this weekend to prop up two Democratic Senate hopefuls in races that could decide chamber control, a late pitch in states that flipped hard toward Republicans.
Obama is scheduled to campaign Saturday in Detroit for Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, then move on to Cleveland to stand with former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown. The stops come just 10 days before the midterm elections, with Democrats needing gains to claw back the Senate.
Newsweek reported the Detroit rally is set for 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., though the exact venue had not been announced as of Friday afternoon. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic nominee for governor, is expected to join him on stage. In Cleveland, Ohio’s Democratic gubernatorial nominee Amy Acton is set to appear alongside Obama and Brown. That venue also remained unreleased Friday.
Republicans hold the Senate 53-47. Democrats would need to pick up four seats for a majority, with Vice President JD Vance holding the tiebreaker. Michigan and Ohio sit at the center of that math.
Michigan’s contest is for the open seat left by retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters. Democrats have held it since 1979. Republican nominee Mike Rogers, a former congressman, nearly flipped the state’s other Senate seat in 2024, falling fewer than 20,000 votes short against Elissa Slotkin.
Trump carried Michigan by about 1.4 points in 2024 after the state backed him in 2016, shifted to Biden in 2020, then returned. Early voting is already open across the state, and the Michigan Democratic Party is pitching the Detroit event as a push to bank those ballots.
Recent surveys show a knife-edge race. A Marist poll of likely voters conducted Oct. 15, 18 had El-Sayed at 50 percent and Rogers at 48 percent. An InsiderAdvantage survey Oct. 21, 22 put El-Sayed at 47 percent and Rogers at 46 percent. El-Sayed entered the candidates’ final debate on Oct. 21 up roughly 2.6 points in the RealClearPolitics average. A late-September Fox News poll had him at 50, 49. A Rogers-affiliated Tyson Group poll in early October found Rogers ahead 46, 44.
Obama last campaigned in Detroit in October 2024 for Kamala Harris. This weekend’s visit also follows an August conversation between Obama and El-Sayed that was described as an effort to pull Michigan Democrats together after a bruising primary.
El-Sayed did not always sound like an Obama ally. Days after the 2012 election, he wrote a Huffington Post column dismissing the result as no victory for progressives and criticizing the Obama record on war, civil liberties, and deportations. He called the Affordable Care Act an “incremental” policy and wrote of the choice facing voters:
"It was the rock we chose over the hard place."
On NBC’s Meet the Press on Oct. 11, host Kristen Welker pressed him on those older remarks. El-Sayed answered:
"I was younger, right, and I was angry about circumstances."
He added:
"President Obama was handed a really difficult set of circumstances, and he did his best."
Breitbart noted El-Sayed later framed the relationship in warmer terms after the post-primary call, saying it is normal “to love somebody, to really appreciate all that they've done, and to say, 'Hey, here are some things I would have done differently,' but they still did some important things to create opportunity for you.” Obama also has a Georgia appearance planned with Sen. Jon Ossoff as part of the same midterm push.
The primary exposed another soft spot. In Wayne County, Rep. Haley Stevens took about 51 percent of the Democratic vote to El-Sayed’s 45 percent. Among Black voters in Detroit, a city where more than three-quarters of residents are Black, El-Sayed won only 31 percent against Stevens, per Bridge Michigan. After the primary he leaned on prominent Black Democrats, and several Congressional Black Caucus members plus Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock are scheduled to campaign with him.
Ohio has become far tougher terrain for Democrats. Obama’s Saturday stop will be his first visit to the state since 2018. The race is a special election for the seat JD Vance left to become vice president. Gov. Mike DeWine appointed then-Lt. Gov. Jon Husted to fill it; Husted is the Republican nominee against Brown.
Brown held the seat for three terms before losing to Bernie Moreno in 2024 by a little more than 3.5 points. Cleveland and Cuyahoga County remain Democratic territory, but neighboring Lake Erie areas that once backed Obama shifted toward Trump. Trump campaigned for Husted in Ohio earlier this month. An Ohio Capital Journal analysis put expected campaign spending around the race near $750 million.
Polls there are also tight. A Fox News survey of likely voters Oct. 15, 19, released Wednesday, had Brown at 52 percent and Husted at 47 percent. Marist, polling Oct. 15, 18, showed Brown 48 percent, Husted 44 percent, with 4 percent undecided. An ActiVote survey of likely midterm voters had Husted at 50.2 percent and Brown at 49.8 percent.
Obama recorded an endorsement video for Brown earlier this month and said:
"This race is going to be close. It could determine which party controls the Senate, and whether Ohioans can count on the people in Washington to be fighting for you."
A Bowling Green State University October poll of 1,000 likely Ohio voters found Trump at minus 15, Vance at minus 7, and Moreno at minus 17. Obama stood at plus 7, the only public official in positive territory in that survey. A CNN June survey put Obama’s favorability at 57 percent, against 34 percent for Trump and 30 percent for Biden. Democrats gave Obama 96 percent favorable marks; nearly one in five Republicans still viewed him favorably. YouGov’s summer rankings placed him first among political figures.
That residual goodwill is exactly what Democrats are trying to cash in the final stretch. Both races remain within the margin of polling error. Rogers has already proven he can run statewide in Michigan. Husted holds the advantage of incumbency by appointment in a state that has trended sharply Republican. El-Sayed still carries the baggage of his earlier progressive attacks on the very president now headlining his rally, and Brown is trying to reverse a loss he suffered only two years ago.
When a party has to fly in a former president to paper over old critiques and thin margins in states it once dominated, voters can see the real scoreboard for themselves.
