| November 06, 2026Can you guess what’s pictured above? Click the image to find out! |
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| | In 1992, I was a sophomore at Northwestern when a student-powered movement shook the Illinois political landscape by propelling a little-known county official named Carol Moseley Braun to Congress as the country’s first Black, female senator. Pundits had given her little chance of defeating the white, male, two-term Democratic senator Alan J. Dixon in the primary, but they overlooked what was happening on college campuses and vastly underestimated the public’s fury at Dixon for voting to confirm alleged sexual harasser Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.
As a student journalist back then, I covered the euphoric party in downtown Chicago the night Moseley Braun won her primary. In interview after interview, students marveled to me at what they had done and contemplated with great gusto how they’d next use their newly discovered political power.
I flashed back to that moment this week on Election Day as I drove up State St. by the Michigan Union. A boisterous crowd of students were gathered because, I’d later learn, Abdul El-Sayed was popping by to pose for photos. When I spotted a couple of journalists out there interviewing these students, I imagined those conversations were similar to mine thirty-four years ago. It was, after all, college students across metro Detroit who first glommed on to El-Sayed’s campaign – and, at least at U-M, followed through this week by showing up to vote in record-breaking numbers.
For much of 2026, El-Sayed’s potential success sat beyond the imagination of pundits and the party establishment, just as Moseley Braun’s did in 1992. But these young adults – who have in their short lives endured the Great Recession, the endless wars, and Covid – lined up behind this charismatic new figure, himself once a politically active U-M undergrad.
At the time I drove by them, we were hours away from El-Sayed becoming the nation’s first Muslim senator-elect. Those students didn’t know that – and very few of us had any inkling that Americans from coast to coast were about to deliver such a gargantuan rebuke of the Trump era – but they nonetheless looked elated and optimistic.
So, regardless of where you stand politically, there ought to be something inspiring and movingly patriotic about bright young people realizing their power and using it to try to fix this messy world. There will be disappointments and disillusionments to come, but that’s all the more reason to let them enjoy this monumental achievement.
As El-Sayed noted in his sly dig at vice president and former Ohio senator JD Vance, Wolverines 1, Buckeyes 0. I’d buy that T-shirt.
Your news is here. Ann Arbor’s Eli Savit also won big; the anti-DTE measure Prop E lost narrowly; a majority of the AAPS board will be new; a charity is raffling off a parking lot; and EMU is a hotbed for, of all things, women’s flag football.
This is last week’s most-clicked link.
– Steve Friess, editor
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| | | A wildly gesticulating pumpkin unceremoniously shoved in the trash feels like a metaphor. Credit: Steve Friess |
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| | | | 5 Big Things: Election Edition |
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| | | Ann Arborites got the power: The statewide triumphs of senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed and attorney general-elect Eli Savit are only the most significant examples of Ann Arborites vaulting our town to new political heights. Ann Arbor’s influence in Lansing is only going to grow with the re-election of state representative and a Michigan Democratic Party vice chair Jason Morgan as well as the election of former state representative Yousef Rabhi as mayor and former U-M administrator and current lieutenant governor Garlin Gilchrist II as secretary of state. It’s been a long time since Ann Arbor has had this much juice – governor Rick Snyder hailed from these parts, but the Republican’s conservative priorities were never in sync with this progressive bastion the way El-Sayed, Savit, Morgan, Gilchrist, and Rabhi’s are. How that plays out in the coming years under governor-elect Jocelyn Benson will be a major story. |
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| | DTE still got the power: By just 2,003 votes out of 54,825 cast, Proposal E failed. That means the city will not be taking its first steps to take over the local electric grid. In a baffling voting pattern, absentee voters went 60–40 percent against Prop E, but those who voted in person either early or on Election Day voted yes by a 54–46 percent margin. The vote comes as a big disappointment to mayor-elect Rabhi, who campaigned on creating a municipal utility but is unlikely to have the support of council to make it happen legislatively. DTE funneled $1.8 million into an opposition campaign, and council controversially voted in October to oppose it, filing a preemptive lawsuit to block it if it passed. Other opponents to the proposal felt that such a coup would be exceedingly expensive. MLive offers an interactive map of the biggest pockets of support and opposition. One thing both sides seemed to agree on was that DTE and monopoly electric utilities, as well as companies with more than $250,000 in state government contracts, should not be able to directly or indirectly donate to candidates for office in Michigan. That measure, which the Mackinac Center for Public Policy is now suing to invalidate as a violation of free speech rights, passed in Washtenaw County 87–13 percent and statewide 81–19 percent. |
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| | Debbie Dingell at the heart of it all: Ann Arbor’s congresswoman played a central role in the weekend drama surrounding lifelong Democrat Haley Stevens’s stunning endorsement of El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, Mike Rogers. On Sunday, CNN’s Anderson Cooper pressed Stevens, who narrowly lost to El-Sayed in the Democratic primary and immediately endorsed him in August, on why she told Dingell the night before her defection that she wouldn’t do it. Stevens didn’t give an answer, but Dingell was waiting in the wings to go on-air immediately after Cooper’s epic interview. She looked and sounded shellshocked, telling Cooper his conversation with Stevens was “one of the most painful interviews I have ever watched.” Unlike Stevens, Dingell remains firmly in the good graces of Democratic voters; despite having no serious opponent, she drew the second-most votes of anyone in Washtenaw County – fifty-one fewer than governor-elect Benson – en route to winning her seventh term. Oh, and her doctor scolded the seventy-two-year-old about her Diet Coke consumption, so on Wednesday she switched to orange juice. |
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| | Teachers unions FTW: All five candidates endorsed by the Ann Arbor Education Association for Ann Arbor School Board won their seats, bringing four new trustees to the seven-person board in Aaron J. Puno, Becca Hogan, John Benson, and Brandon Smith. Rima Mohammad was re-elected as well and will be the only trustee serving their second term. The comeback bid of former board member Don Wilkerson fizzled; he came in a distant third in the race to finish the term he quit May 4 as he faced a domestic violence charge. Weeks later, after the charge was dismissed, he filed to run to return to the seat. |
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| | Other bits and bobs: Washtenaw County prosecutor Eli Savit defeated Doug Lloyd by 902 votes in Eaton County, where Lloyd has been the county prosecutor since 2013, according to state totals.
Saline’s longtime mayor lost.
Ypsi voters rejected a proposal to switch future city elections to nonpartisan.
Some twenty-five U-M law students worked as temporary clerks registering voters, staffed polls and election receiving boards, and served as election monitors and challengers in Ann Arbor on Tuesday.
Every millage in the county was approved except one – for fire services in Augusta Twp. It also failed when it was on the ballot in August.
Congrats to Ypsilanti Community Schools trustee-elect Jason Sprague, who works as a paraprofessional assigned to a student in my daughter’s class at Mitchell Elementary.
El-Sayed also dropped by EMU just before the election.
Turnout in Washtenaw County exceeded 71 percent, a record for a midterm.
At the county’s early voting sites, children were given ballots to pick their favorite candy and put it in a “ballot box.” The results are in.
Who wants to be a county commissioner? Rabhi’s seat is about to be vacant, so get your resumes ready for a December 1–8 application period.
See all the county results for yourself here.
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| | | Educator by day, performer by night: Sandor Slomovits profiles WISD early childhood education supervisor and Huron High alum Chris Joseph, who sings with Accidentally Hip and performs in shows at several local and regional theaters. He cultivates a creative spirit with the students he teaches with “a lot of fingerplays, songs, and stories with the children, and trainings and workshops for teachers on how to infuse music into the classroom. That’s how I can fuse my two worlds together.”
Businesses lament the loss of Kline’s lot: The city is selling the site between Main and Ashley to a developer planning to build a high-rise, so customers of places like London Beauty & Spa will have to figure out where else to park, Micheline Maynard reports. “It’s going to be a reckoning,” the shop’s landlord, Ed Shaffran, says. “We haven’t had a public parking lot close. If you take away that many spaces, where are people going to go?”
Poet Tree Town: In “For the Huron,” Ypsi-based author AJ Standish offers an anti-data center treatise cloaked in a love letter to the river running through our region, “one of the only things that does not ask anything from me.” Among the more vivid lines: “Imagine telling the fish / I need to see what a computer / thinks I would have looked like / in the third grade / so you must die.” |
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| | | The attorney general’s office has ruled no charges will be filed in the January death of John Jenuwine, who was shot at thirty-four times by Washtenaw County Sheriff’s deputies at the culmination of a lengthy and dangerous police chase. You can read the detailed explanation of what happened or watch fifteen minutes of police dashcam footage posted to YouTube. Viewer discretion is advised.
Going to tailgate at the U-M—MSU rivalry game tomorrow? Don’t forget to donate your urine. I’m not taking the piss outta ya, but they are.
An Ypsi man is suing the county after being shot in the back with a stun gun while, he says, he was already under police control at a traffic stop in July.
You wonder how U-M students could fail to realize calling something Halloween-related a “Hallowcaust” is offensive, but then Martha Stewart did this and you realize common sense knows no age.
A server is suing Anna’s House, alleging wage and overtime improprieties as part of a federal class-action lawsuit.
A U-M prof claims she’s the victim of retaliation for writing a policy brief opposing the 110-megawatt computing center the university plans to build with Los Alamos National Laboratory in Ypsilanti Twp.
Two recent Greenhills alums are the only Michiganders among 161 people named U.S. Presidential Scholars.
Ypsi City Council is preparing for the winter with a $100,000 allocation for shelter services.
A U-M student was arrested amid an altercation in which, according to cell phone video, she shoved a conservative influencer visiting the campus with whom she was having a heated debate.
EMU is evidently the place for the next Olympic craze, women’s flag football.
Neighbors in Ypsilanti Twp. are trying to excise racist restrictive covenants from their property deeds.
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| | | Sunset for Afternoon Delight: With attempts to find another owner for the venerable brunch spot failing, Joanne Williams shut the doors for good on October 31, Shelley Daily reports in this month’s Observer. Williams, who started at the restaurant as a waitress when she was a teenager, took over for Tom Hackett, who opened the restaurant in 1978 and retired in 2020. Diagnosed with a degenerative eye disease, she is eager to spend more time with her young grandson and to travel. She’s working on a café cookbook, but hasn’t yet decided if she’ll divulge the recipe for the bestselling bran muffins.
Phone accessory shop opens at Briarwood Mall: Zagg is a long, narrow, brightly lit storefront with sleek white fixtures lined with phone cases, screen protectors, keyboards, and power banks, Alex Kourvo writes in this month’s Observer. It’s part of a Utah-based company with more than 100 locations nationwide. The store is on the perimeter of the central lounge area of the mall.
Ray’s Red Hots, rental house for sale for $2M: The unusual listing at Collier’s International features the restaurant as well as a neighboring five-unit home on the same lot at 627 East University. The restaurant has been closed since September 2022. |
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| | | Raffle of parking lot to support car-seat cause: Care Seats of Michigan, a nonprofit that promotes vehicle safety for families transporting babies and children, is selling a 30-by-10-foot lot at Emerick and Davis streets in Ypsi to pay for the charity’s activities. Founder Jenna Dawson, who obtained a charitable raffle license for this fundraiser, says the organization serves about 150 families by providing free car seats and through monthly pull-over prevention clinics like this one set for November 14. The property’s value is estimated by Care Seats at $32,000; tickets cost $10 for a drawing to take place on December 21. Buyers can reserve their tickets online but, per state law, all purchases must be completed in person either on Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Little Break Cowork in Ann Arbor, on the day of the raffle, or via other arrangements to meet up with Dawson. She can be reached at [email protected]. (Disclosure: Dawson is a close personal friend.)
Sports clinics raise money for adaptive summer camp: KidSport, a program that mingles typical and neurodivergent kids and is operated out of U-M’s School of Kinesiology, is holding one-off events in coming weeks focused on track-and-field, lacrosse, wrestling, and tennis. Admission for each is $40 per child, with proceeds going to scholarships for the summer program. For a schedule of events and to register, click here. The events take place at the U-M facilities dedicated to each sport.
FedUp Ministries to expand to permanent Ypsi facility: The nonprofit, launched as a food truck that delivers healthy meals in low-income areas, has bought a parcel on Ecorse in Ypsi to build a 7,000-square-foot building for a kitchen, food storage, and other services. The organization, founded in 2021, served 22,000 meals in 2025. |
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| | | By Jennifer Taylor
Friday: Peer at the night sky through the U-M Detroit Observatory’s 1857 Fitz telescope as well as modern instruments.
Saturday: Turn everyday household recyclables into a gravity-defying, high-speed mini roller coaster to carry a marble down a track at Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum’s “Makerspace: Mini Roller Coasters.”
Sunday: Run a chip-timed 5K, 10K race, an Iron Turkey race or a family-friendly one-mile fun run and other races for kids 12 and under — all in Hudson Mills Metropark.
Monday: Hear writer Jacob Weisberg discuss his new book, Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era at AADL Downtown.
Tuesday: Hear a talk by MIT philosophy professor Kieran Setiya, “Laughter in the Dark: The Consolation of Comedy,” about how we use humor to confront adversity.
Wednesday: See the U-M Volleyball team take on Ohio State, 7 p.m. at the Crisler Center.
Thursday: See Voices of Dissent, a stage performance inspired by Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, that combines dramatic readings with live musical performances.
See the Observer’s online calendar for many more local events. |
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