In Macomb county, Michigan – a blue-collar Detroit suburb that twice voted for Barack Obama before backing each of Donald Trump’s three runs for the US presidency – residents are exhausted.

Time and again, township trustee Shannon King, a Democrat still making up his mind, hears similar complaints. “You’re going backwards in your paycheck. You’re going backwards in your healthcare,” he said. “You go to work every day. You might have a side hustle. Your significant other has a side hustle, too. And you’re still struggling to do childcare.”

These are the realities faced by Michiganders as the Democratic party chooses its candidate for the US Senate contest in the state, one of the most closely followed races in November’s midterm elections.

Ask around some of the key battlegrounds – like Lansing, Macomb county, Dearborn and Grand Rapids – and it’s clear residents aren’t following the daily beats of the primary. They don’t much want to. What they want to talk about is healthcare, rent, their parents’ social security checks, the devastation in Gaza and their cousins in Beirut, and whether anyone in office is going to do something about all this before it’s too late.

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In Washington, though, this same election is being discussed as something else entirely: a proxy war over what the Democratic party is supposed to be after its devastating defeat in 2024. Cable panels and social media personalities have debated whether Abdul El-Sayed’s rise is a Mamdani-style insurgency while establishment energy has curdled against him, or whether Haley Stevens is the safe and “electable” pick.

Three candidates had been vying for the Democratic nomination ahead of August’s primary in Michigan, until this weekend. Mallory McMorrow, who had tried to chart a course between her leftwing and moderate rivals, dropped out on Sunday.

Spending has flooded the airwaves: at least five groups have poured more than $34m into boosting Stevens, led by Aipac’s United Democracy Project Super Pac, which alone has spent roughly $20m.

Stevens’s ads have focused on her record working with Barack Obama’s bid to rescue the automotive industry, while El-Sayed launched his own TV ads in mid-June, leaning on his Michigan upbringing and his relationship with the influential progressive senator Bernie Sanders.

And now that McMorrow dropped out of the race, El-Sayed’s apparent lead in the polls is being put to the test as both contenders are vying for her supporters to move toward their campaigns.

Few of the beltway-centric conversations dominating the internet over the last few months, about a fight between the wings of the Democratic party, seem to have legs in Michigan.

“I think inaction on behalf of the Democrats is costing them votes,” said Toni Gordon, 33, a PhD student at Michigan State and an East Lansing election chairperson. “The performative, old-school way of doing things, in the attempt to be diplomatic, or judicial … it’s costing them voter support.”

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Gordon, who hails from Muskagon, calls herself left-leaning, with “some conservative values”, left over from three years as an army reservist deployed to the Middle East and her religious upbringing. She is backing El-Sayed, but predicted Stevens would win the primary, carried by name recognition and support by the party machine.

Separately, Detroit anchors one of the largest Black populations of any American city, and turnout there could decide how the whole state looks after this election.

“Michigan is only a swing state if Black people choose not to vote,” she said. “A large number of them will not vote this election.”

On turnout, another demographic will be watched closely. Polling has shown El-Sayed pulling support from four out of five voters under 44, but the primary falls on 4 August – deep in summer academic recess – when many college students especially will be scattered away from their Michigan addresses, rather than dorms down the street from a polling station.

Michigan, which Trump won in 2024, is a diverse political patchwork. Macomb, whichbacked Obama before flipping to Trump in 2016, has grown redder in recent years, awarding Trump 53% of the vote in 2020 and nearly 56% in 2024. Wayne county, home to Detroit and Dearborn, still went for Kamala Harris in 2024, but also swung more than nine points toward Trump compared to 2020. Within it, Dearborn itself flipped: Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to win a plurality there since 2000, in a city with one of the largest Arab American populations in the country.

But Kent county, anchored by Grand Rapids, moved in the opposite direction, voting for Harris by five points. Trump was the first Republican to win the White House without the county’s support since 1916.

Ali Fawaz, 34, alifelong Dearborn resident who identifies as independent, said the city’s Trump vote was never really about Trump. He pointed to Ali Abbas, the restaurant owner who hosted Trump on the trail and later sold his business after receiving threats, as a measure of how “extremely polarizing” that moment was locally.

In Fawaz’s estimation, his neighbors who voted for Trump weren’t ever doing it out of love. “They watched the genocide in Gaza, and they saw Biden do absolutely nothing,” he said. “Out of desperation, they looked for other options.”

Fawaz believes that in Dearborn, the community is disproportionately attuned to geopolitics, even as it pays comparatively little attention to Congress’s domestic business.

It’s the kind of place, he said, where a single senator’s vote on Middle East policy would register directly with the city. “Every single person has family in Lebanon, or Palestinians here who have family back there, wondering on the daily what’s going to happen to them.”

El-Sayed has tried to engage this community in Dearborn. In June, he delivered the keynote at the inauguration of a $16m mosque and Islamic complex in Dearborn Heights.

El-Sayed has “changed his tone” since running unsuccessfully for governor in 2018, according to Fawaz. “His talking points to the Arabs was a lot different than what it was a few years ago.”

El-Sayed, an epidemiologist, has not taken corporate money from political action committees, and hasbeen campaigning for universal healthcare, calling for an end to military aid for Israel over the devastation of Gaza and now south Lebanon, the abolition of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and an aggressive new AI regulation plan.

He describes himself as a capitalist in an oligarchic society, and he’s picked up endorsements from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and Jewish Voice for Peace Action, in the group’s very first endorsement for a US Senate candidate.

Stevens, who flipped a Republican seat in the US House of Representatives, has been the choice of much of the party’s Washington wing, including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, as well as Detroit News. She wants to expand Obamacare, and has authored a bill to investigate ICE misconduct, though she’s faced criticism over a vote seen as friendly to the agency and over her support for Israel, including a speech where she said she sees Israel in her dreams.

Stevens, unlike her rivals, has held few public town halls this cycle – a pattern Republican critics have seized on, contrasting it with El-Sayed and McMorrow’s months-long swing through Michigan cities. Dana Nessel, the state attorney general who was heavily involved in prosecuting pro-Palestinian student activists, endorsed her the day after McMorrow dropped out. She called Stevens “wicked smart” and someone “who connects with people on a level so sincere and genuine that everyone who meets her feels truly seen and heard”.

Misty Ramsey, a supporter of El-Sayed, used to landscape yards in her native Macomb, and now does deliveries to make ends meet. But it’s not the economy that gets her animated.

Somewhere between those jobs, Ramsey heard a Macklemore song about Hind Rajab, a five-year-old girl killed in Gaza after being trapped for hours in a car with her dead relatives, pleading with emergency dispatchers to send help that never came in time. The song sent Ramsey down a rabbithole, and reshaped her views on everything from Joe Biden’s policy on Israel to the money still flowing from Aipac into political campaigns nationally.

“When I realized the scope of the lies, not only is that devastating for the people of Gaza, it’s terrifying for us that we’ve been conditioned to not care,” she said. “That dichotomy – between elected officials and the reality – is very unsettling to me. And it’s very hard for me to even get up now and just try to go to my job and make money.”

El-Sayed is trying to ride this anti-establishment wave. At a recent western Michigan rally for El-Sayed, Ms Dushane, a Grand Rapids voter who was once registered as a Republican, said she was backing him explicitly because of his vocal opposition to Aipac funding and support for Medicare for All, but also because he seems like a candidate you could put your trust in.

“He seems to be the only one who is truly for the people, and working hard for everyone in the campaign, and committed to doing so when he gets elected,” she said.

With about a month to go, the primary itself remains unsettled. The top three candidates have fallen to two. Before McMorrow dropped out, recent polling showed El-Sayed pulling ahead with a single-digit lead over Stevens, with McMorrow at a distant third. Voting is already under way, as ballots were sent out in the mail during the last week of June.

“I don’t know how much it matters,” Gordon, the Michigan State student, said, “but in previous years, there were conversations about young people being disengaged from politics. I noticed that those are the individuals who seem to be the most motivated to participate now. People are fed up with both parties.”