“I think that’s part of the problem we’ve had is that people haven’t been paying attention to Michigan,” said El-Sayed. Now “they come here to pay attention to what's going on in our state, because we might actually get some leadership someday? I think that's a pretty good thing.”

However, many traditional Democrats in the state haven’t warmed to El-Sayed, who was raised in metro Detroit and graduated from the University of Michigan before becoming a Rhodes Scholar and earning an Ivy League medical degree.

That’s partly because he’s running against the establishment, but also because his personality grates on some. Party loyalists have complained that El-Sayed is patronizing in private, especially for someone so new to politics.

“He’s come out of nowhere, just moved back to Michigan, had a job for 18 months in a small (city) department and now he’s running for governor?” said Al Williams, a Detroit political operative who is former membership director of the Michigan Democratic Party.

“He acts like people are automatically supposed to support him. It supersedes arrogance to the point of being conceited.”

Race to the finish

The cheering masses Saturday stood in contrast to the latest polls — a point El-Sayed didn’t hesitate to point out several times.

“A bunch of people who still answer landlines in the middle of the day think we’re not going to win,” he told the audience in Detroit, referring to a recent poll commissioned by the Free Press that placed El-Sayed in third behind businessman Shri Thanedar and predicted Whitmer winning the Democratic primary by a wide margin.

The poll didn’t reach out to voters with cell phones. (According to Pew Research, landline-only polls under-represent young people, lower-income people, Hispanic people, less educated people and people living in urban areas.) On Thursday, El-Sayed’s campaign touted another poll showing him gaining on Whitmer.

Matt Grossmann, Director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University, said his team conducted a survey indicating that “state politicos” overwhelmingly believe Whitmer will take home the crown.

“Most people believed that Whitmer was the likely victor. In public polling she’s actually been doing better over time, and Abdul has not broken out,” Grossmann said. “But if I were his campaign I’d be advising him to say the same thing; obviously the polls were off for both the primary and general election in Michigan” in 2016.

Indeed, being behind in the polls — and the possibility of a dramatic upset — is oftentimes worn as a badge of honor in the progressive camp.

When she was first talking with El-Sayed, “folks would say, ‘You know he’s a bit behind in the polls, right?’” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters Saturday. “I said ‘Well, that’s fabulous, because I was down 35 points two weeks before the election.’”

And experts say there’s merit in that: Predicting election results has become far less certain after President Donald Trump’s poll-defying victory in 2016.

“We can’t trust our guts in politics anymore because it’s being so radically disrupted in front of our eyes. We can’t trust the polls because polling has been so radically disrupted and become so unreliable,” said Fournier. “If I’m any of the candidates, I’m not thinking of myself as a frontrunner, I’m running scared.”

While most insiders continue to believe Whitmer will likely win, they also say it feasibly could be anybody’s game.

Thanedar can also be considered a contender: He has spent millions of dollars of his own money infusing the heavily Democratic Detroit media market with advertisements and has a campaign staffed with African-American grassroots activists like the Revs. Horace Sheffield III and David Bullock in the city. Despite being plagued by multiple scandals during the campaign, Thanedar has consistently remained second place in the polls.

He has also espoused many of the same leftist platforms El-Sayed has, much to the chagrin of the Party’s left wing which booed him out of their caucus meeting in April and even released their definition of the “progressive” moniker in part to push back on Thanedar.

Most political observers came back to the same point: Could 33-year-old El-Sayed win in a general election this fall if up against a conservative politician with decades of experience like Republican gubernatorial candidates Lt. Gov. Brian Calley or Attorney General Bill Schuette?

“Abdul El-Sayed winning a primary in my opinion almost hands the general election to the Republicans,” Bucholz said.

Others, like Detroit-area organizer Snyder, call that viewpoint “cynical.”

“We’re just excited to have someone who can talk about (progressive issues) in the mainstream,” Snyder said. “For far too long our state’s mainstream Democrats really focused on a policy platform of incrementalism. And what we’re looking for is someone who can really take us to the future.”

Bridge Magazine Managing Editor Joel Kurth contributed to this story.