Michigan Democrats pick a Senate nominee Tuesday. The closing arguments both candidates made over the weekend are on the record in their own words, which is the most useful thing anyone can hand a voter the day before a primary [1].

Abdul El-Sayed's version: "We set out to build a movement to get money out of politics, put money in pockets and pass Medicare for all. The movement is what we've built and we're looking to take that on" [1].

Haley Stevens's version: "They want to see abuses of power being stood up to. I'm being very present, as I have been this entire campaign, and it's really an exciting moment. Every vote counts" [1].

Those are two different theories of what a primary is for. El-Sayed's names three commitments, money out of politics, money in pockets, Medicare for all, and describes the campaign as a movement that outlasts the ballot. Stevens's names no policy at all. It names a posture, opposition to abuses of power, and then talks about presence and turnout. Neither is a slip of the tongue at the end of a long weekend. Each is the argument its candidate wants in a voter's head at the moment the ballot is marked.

The surrogates split along the same line. Sen. Bernie Sanders, campaigning for El-Sayed, made it an argument about who the party belongs to: "We need fundamental changes in the Democratic Party. We need to be a party that opens its doors to young people, people of color, to working class people" [1]. He also called for "a radical transformation of that party to stand up for ordinary Americans" [1]. Rep. Jim Clyburn, campaigning for Stevens, made it an argument about who can produce votes: "I know what it takes to energize Democratic voters. I know she has what it takes to energize Democratic voters" [1]. One endorsement is about direction. The other is about competence at the mechanical work of winning.

Behind both is the money. ClickOnDetroit reports, citing AdImpact, a firm that tracks political advertising, that more than $80 million had been spent on advertising in this Democratic race by the end of July [1]. That is the figure as the outlet published it; we have not checked it against AdImpact's own tracking, and we are attributing rather than adopting it.

What is not in this piece. No poll numbers appear above, and none are coming. The survey results circulating in this race did not reach us with a sample size or a margin of error attached, and a number missing those two things cannot be checked by a reader or by us. There is no way to know how many people were asked, how the sample was built, or how much of a reported gap sits inside the noise. On the eve of a primary the horse-race number is the most repeated and the least auditable thing on the page. Printing one we cannot show the work for would put a figure in a reader's head that we could not defend Wednesday morning, and a wrong expectation is harder to correct than a wrong fact, because nobody files a complaint about it.

Two notes on the edges of this record. The candidate and surrogate quotations above come from coverage published Sunday night at 10:26 p.m. Eastern and updated at 11:51 p.m. [1]. They are the closing weekend's words, not Monday's; our sweep surfaced no distinct Monday statement from either campaign. The ad-spending total is measured through the end of July, so it does not include whatever the final weekend cost.

What Tuesday settles is which of these two arguments the Michigan Democratic Party carries into the fall: the one that names Medicare for all and money out of politics, or the one that names abuses of power and asks people to show up. Both campaigns spent the weekend in metro Detroit making that case in person [1]. The counting starts when the polls close, and it will answer the question that $80 million of advertising has been asking.