National AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler stood inside a Detroit union hall Tuesday morning, flanked by state labor leaders, to make one final push for Democratic candidates as polls opened across Michigan. The gathering doubled as a canvass launch, sending volunteers back out into Detroit neighborhoods with Election Day closing in fast.
The rally took place at UNITE HERE Local 24’s Detroit office, according to Michigan Advance, where Shuler joined state labor leaders to rally for Democrats. UNITE HERE Local 24, a hospitality workers’ union affiliated with the AFL-CIO, had endorsed Haley Stevens in the primary before shifting its support to Abdul El-Sayed once he became the party’s Senate nominee. El-Sayed narrowly defeated Stevens in that August primary, according to The New York Times, which also reported the race now features El-Sayed against Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee for the open Senate seat.
That shift carried extra sting this week. Stevens endorsed Rogers in a video posted to social media Sunday afternoon, the Times reported, saying plainly, “I am endorsing Mike Rogers for the United States Senate today.” Antonio George, UNITE HERE Local 24’s Michigan political director, called the move a “real big hit in the gut, especially for working people, especially for this union specifically,” telling the outlet that union members and Detroit residents alike felt disregarded by Stevens’ turn toward the Republican side.
Volunteers Push Past 150,000 Doors
George said his union had already knocked 150,000 doors for El-Sayed in the general election and planned to keep canvassing right up until polls closed Tuesday. Union members, the report noted, were angry and surprised by Stevens’ endorsement, a reaction that appeared to sharpen the urgency behind Tuesday’s door-knocking push rather than dampen it.
El-Sayed capped his campaign with a Monday night rally at Detroit’s Majestic Theatre, where he was joined by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield and Eli Savit, according to WXYZ. The station reported El-Sayed’s closing message centered on expanding access to health care, lowering taxes for working-class families and reducing the influence of money in politics. A final New York Times/Siena University poll found him with a double-digit lead in the race, per the Times.
A Song From Selma, and a Closing Argument From Savit
Charles Mauldin, a student leader in the Selma, Alabama, civil rights protests of the 1960s, opened his remarks at the canvass launch by leading a rendition of “Woke Up This Morning With My Mind Stayed on Jesus.” Mauldin had spent the preceding 10 days traveling across Michigan to rally for Democrats, describing himself, per Michigan Advance’s report, as a foot soldier working without seeking credit.
Eli Savit, who launched his attorney general campaign in May 2025, told the crowd he wanted to close out his run surrounded by organized labor. “Labor and working people built the state, so there’s no better way to end our campaign to spend Election Day than with our friends in labor,” he said. Savit also said recent months had included an effort funded by Elon Musk and allies to divide communities by race, religion and background, and he described himself as optimistic and excited about Democrats’ chances on Election Day.
Labor’s Statewide Get-Out-the-Vote Machine
Shuler urged the crowd to back Jocelyn Benson for governor, El-Sayed for Senate and Savit for attorney general, according to People’s World. The outlet reported that El-Sayed had picked up endorsements from a wide swath of organized labor in Michigan, including the United Auto Workers, UNITE HERE, the United Food and Commercial Workers, National Nurses United and the American Federation of Teachers.
The scale of the statewide push was considerable: the Michigan AFL-CIO said it had set up 15 campaign sites, knocked on more than 250,000 doors, sent over a million mailers and made 132,000 calls to union households. The same People’s World report cited an AFL-CIO pre-election memo putting union-member enthusiasm about voting at 83 percent, 10 percentage points higher than the last off-year election in 2022, with 71 percent of members saying they trust their unions to deliver accurate information.
Michigan Advance noted that Black voters make up about 14 percent of the state’s population and that Democrats will likely need strong turnout among people of color to win — a dynamic playing out in a city like Detroit, which has a Black-majority population. The urgency was compounded by a political landscape the outlet described as inundated with campaign ads on Michigan airwaves heading into Election Day.
Michigan’s previous midterm, in 2022, set a state record for turnout, surpassing a mark set in 2018. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said at the time that more than 4.3 million Michiganders cast ballots in that election, including 1.8 million who voted absentee, according to MLive. El-Sayed and Rogers had already met once on a debate stage this cycle, in the first of two planned matchups, NBC News reported.
Shuler, who leads the nation’s largest federation of labor unions, argued that organized labor was uniquely positioned to break through the noise of a saturated airwave environment. She told the crowd the working class could unite around shared issues to defeat divisive political forces, and that labor could cut through the barrage of political ads to reach voters directly — the kind of door-to-door, person-to-person contact that defined Tuesday’s final canvass push in Detroit.
