Michigan primary day heats up as turnout remains steady across races

Michigan's Aug. 4, 2026 primary drew steady turnout with more than 1.3 million voters casting ballots early and 139,609 at early voting sites; a late-afternoon technical outage briefly slowed absentee processing but did not affect in-person voting and was resolved within about an hour. Voters in Detroit, Ann Arbor and the suburbs weighed issues from affordability and immigration to the open U.S. Senate race between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens, and the GOP governor contest featuring John James and Perry Johnson, all under the watch of DOJ monitors and election groups as live updates continued.