Abdul El-Sayed Is In a Fight to Transform the Democratic Party
The Michigan Senate primary between El-Sayed and Haley Stevens is shaping up to be a proxy war in the struggle between the party’s progressive and centrist wings.
Danny Postel
Tuesday’s Democratic primary for the open U.S. Senate seat in Michigan is a national story, and not only because Michigan and Maine are likely to determine which party controls the upper chamber of Congress come January. The race between public health official Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and four-term U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens is also a microcosm of the struggle for the future of the Democratic Party — the war of position between progressives and centrists that is playing out all over the country.
Last week I went to Metro Detroit and spent a few days talking with a range of people about this pivotal race. I was especially curious to explore the political dynamics in Michigan’s Jewish and Black communities, two voting blocks that could prove crucial in this contest.
The outsize role of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in the race has been widely discussed: AIPAC and affiliated groups have spent nearly $30 million in support of Stevens — their biggest investment ever in a single race. And the overall spending picture is extremely lopsided, with the Stevens campaign spending 12 times more than El-Sayed’s.
AIPAC is, of course, hell-bent on defeating El-Sayed because of his critical stance on U.S. support for Israel. But the candidate doesn’t lead with Israel-Palestine or even bring it up much. His focus is decidedly domestic, as reflected in his campaign slogan: “Money Out of Politics. Money in Your Pocket. Medicare for All.” (Medicare for All has been a signature issue for El-Sayed going back several years. It was the centerpiece of his unsuccessful 2018 run for Michigan governor, and he co-authored a “citizen’s guide” on the subject, published in 2021.)
El-Sayed approaches Israel as a “kitchen table” issue. “Israel is an affordability issue,” he said in a recent interview with the journalist Anand Giridharadas. “Maybe we should keep our money here instead of sending it there to drop bombs on people’s schools or their hospitals. That’s our money. … And you want to send my money over there? That’s insane.”
When Giridharadas noted that some have described this outlook as “America first from the left,” El-Sayed responded enthusiastically. “I have no problem saying America first. Yes, America first,” he said. He doesn’t limit this to Israel. “I don’t think Egypt should get any foreign military aid either, or Jordan or Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates or Qatar,” he recently said in a podcast interview.
What has received far less attention than AIPAC’s crusade against the Egyptian American is the considerable Jewish support he enjoys in Michigan. Last week I met with several Jewish supporters of El-Sayed’s campaign in the Metro Detroit area. One of those supporters, Don Greenspon, is a 76-year-old attorney who resides in the heavily Jewish Detroit suburb of Huntington Woods. He is one of the co-founders of Jews for Abdul, a group that pushes back on the barrage of attacks against El-Sayed. Those attacks have traction in large swaths of the Jewish community, Greenspon said.
But, he noted, the attacks tend not to focus on Israel, because El-Sayed’s detractors know that his views on that subject are increasingly popular among Democrats, especially younger ones. Instead, they attack him for having the controversial leftist streamer Hasan Piker as a surrogate. (Though support for El-Sayed actually increased after attack ads focused on Piker.)
On Sunday, Jews for Abdul joined forces with Muslims for Abdul and Women for Abdul for a day of canvassing throughout neighborhoods in Detroit and Highland Park. They paired up into groups of two or three, with a Jew and a Muslim together in each group. “We canvassed together to show our solidarity with one another and to show that Abdul’s campaign represents people from all religions and walks of life,” Greenspon said.
Jess Newman is a 39-year-old El-Sayed supporter who lives in the Detroit suburb of Ferndale and serves on the town’s local school board. The issue of Israel “is holding this campaign hostage,” she told me at a coffee shop last week. Newman grew up in what she describes as a “very Zionist community” in West Bloomfield, a suburb of Detroit. She worked for AIPAC at one point and is now active with Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
The “propaganda” against El-Sayed in the Jewish community, Newman said, has been so intense that it has created something of an “alternative universe” in which many Jews believe, for example, that El-Sayed wants all Jews dead. Her view is the exact opposite: El-Sayed is the only person in the race “who wants to keep my people safe.”
It was a three-way race until one of the candidates, Mallory McMorrow, a member of the Michigan Senate, dropped out in early July. McMorrow had positioned herself somewhere between Stevens in the center and Abdul El-Sayed on the left, but found that her campaign wasn’t getting enough traction and withdrew. How McMorrow’s erstwhile supporters vote in Tuesday’s primary may determine the outcome.
One of those McMorrow supporters, 57-year-old Pamela Aronson, was undecided when I sat down with her to discuss the race a few days ago in the Detroit suburb of Huntington Woods, where she lives. Aronson teaches sociology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. She co-authored the 2023 book Gender Revolution: How Electoral Politics and #MeToo Are Reshaping Everyday Life and two recent research papers on the “gender self-presentations” of women candidates for office.
Aronson especially appreciated McMorrow’s strong advocacy of LGBTQ+ rights. The state senator’s withdrawal from the race left Aronson somewhat adrift and torn. She finds the deluge of attack ads from both Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed confounding. One such ad implied that El-Sayed was soft on antisemitism. Another accused El-Sayed of “a pattern of disrespecting women.” Aronson researched the claims and found that the quotes in question were taken “completely out of context” and “grasping at straws.” But most of the people such ads reach “aren’t going to go and look it up,” she said. (Rima Mohammad, a trustee on the Ann Arbor Public Schools Board of Education, has denounced the advertising campaign as racist and Islamophobic. “It is very anti-Muslim,” she recently said on a Michigan TV show.)
On the other hand, Aronson said there’s part of her that’s “ready to just vote for a candidate because they’re a woman.”
Although only 14% of Michiganders are African-American, the community comprises close to a fifth of the state’s Democratic primary voters, and polls show Haley Stevens with a dramatic lead over Abdul El-Sayed among Black voters in Michigan. One recent poll shows 67% of Black Democrats supporting Stevens and only 21% supporting El-Sayed.
This discrepancy is typically attributed to Stevens’ association with the Obama administration, in which she served as chief of staff for the U.S. Auto Rescue Task Force — a particularly salient role in Michigan, where the auto industry has long loomed large. Stevens worked under “car czar” Steven Rattner, who oversaw the Obama administration’s bailout of the Big Three U.S. automakers amid the 2008-2009 financial meltdown. (El-Sayed has the endorsement of the United Auto Workers, the largest labor union in Michigan.)
The Stevens campaign has leaned into this Obama connection heavily, especially with Black voters. The airwaves have been awash with pro-Stevens ads featuring Barack and Michelle Obama. Critics say those ads are dishonest, as the former president has not endorsed Stevens in the primary.
Vincent Hutchings, a professor of political science and Afroamerican Studies at the University of Michigan and author of Public Opinion and Democratic Accountability: How Citizens Learn About Politics, sees this “clever but somewhat misleading” identification with Obama as a key factor driving her support with Black voters — along with her name recognition and her assertion that El-Sayed didn’t support Kamala Harris in 2024. In an ad, Stevens has accused El-Sayed of referring to the Harris campaign as “nauseating.”
These claims require some unpacking. El-Sayed was a supporter of the “uncommitted” movement, which advocated withholding support for then-President Joe Biden in the 2024 Democratic primaries over his administration’s handling of the Gaza War. It wasn’t an outright refusal to vote for Biden in the general election, but an attempt to pressure him to change course on the war. As my colleague Samer Badawi reported at the time, Michigan was the nerve center of the “uncommitted” movement.
But El-Sayed did endorse Harris for president when she became the nominee after Biden withdrew from the race. “Considering the dangers of the Republican nominee, & potential of her leadership, it’s time for all of us to unite behind @KamalaHarris to defeat Trump,” he wrote on social media. El-Sayed didn’t call Harris herself “nauseating”; he was commenting on the juxtaposition of the Harris-Walz campaign’s “joyful warriors” branding and the colossal destruction in Gaza.
“Watching elders who look like your parents, children who look like your kids, be pulled in parts out of rubble for a year, and then watching the split screen of this manufactured campaign of joy on behalf of Democrats was nauseating,” El-Sayed said in a November 2024 conference.
But such nuances are hard to convey amid the war of narratives and the rough-and-tumble of a political campaign. The mere insinuation that El-Sayed failed to support Harris or spoke disparagingly about her could be enough to hurt him among Black Democrats. “The fact that he feels the need to defend himself on that position is an indication that he or his handlers thinks that he’s weak on it,” Hutchings said.
Hutchings cautions against the temptation to see a “deeper ideological message” at work, as many commentators do when they posit a supposedly broad preference among Black voters for centrist over progressive candidates — citing, for example, Biden outperforming Bernie Sanders with African-American voters in the 2020 Democratic primary. “That shouldn’t be interpreted as ‘they’re embracing conservatism’ or ‘they’re rejecting progressivism.’ I think that would be a mistake,” he said.
“Most voters are not combing the websites of the candidates to figure out where they stand on the issues,” Hutchings said. “Voters are wildly inconsistent. The notion that they have some coherent ideological framework to their preferences is a mythology” — one that is by no means peculiar to African Americans, he adds.
The race has taken on an increasingly bitter tone in the final stretch. Several Michiganders I spoke with expressed deep dismay about this. One question that looms over the primary is what supporters of the respective candidates will do in the general election in November. Will Stevens supporters vote for El-Sayed against the Republican nominee, Mike Rogers (who lost to Democrat Elissa Slotkin in 2024 by fewer than 20,000 votes)? By the same token, will El-Sayed voters vote for Stevens in November? How many will sit the election out?
Newman will vote for Stevens if El-Sayed loses Tuesday. “I’m a tactical voter,” she said. Greenspon, in contrast, was torn.
He says he has “voted for the lesser evil” in the past — Hillary Clinton in 2016, Biden in 2020, Harris in 2024 — but is not sure if he can do it anymore. Many El-Sayed supporters, himself included, “will be devastated” if their candidate loses the primary, especially after the intensity and ugliness of the attacks on him from the Stevens campaign and the Democratic Party establishment.
This dilemma and ambivalence reflect the crossroads at which Democrats find themselves nationally. The recent victories of DSA-aligned candidates in New York, Pennsylvania and Colorado have sent the Democratic National Committee and centrists in the party into panic mode, desperate to keep this socialist wave at bay. Yet if this rising progressive tide is thwarted in Michigan, it could hurt the party’s prospects in November.
El-Sayed has spoken to this. If a business-as-usual Democrat like Stevens wins the primary, he warned officials with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee last year, “don’t be surprised if you get a repeat of 2024” — when a critical mass of Arab and Muslim voters and young progressives, indignant over Harris’ equivocations on the Gaza War, sat out the election. That may have cost Harris the crucial state of Michigan.
The margins are razor thin and the stakes are very high.
This story was first published at New Lines Magazine.
Danny Postel is Politics Editor at New Lines Magazine. Previously he was Assistant Director of the Center for International and Area Studies at Northwestern University, Senior Editor of openDemocracy, and a staff writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education. He is the author of Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran and co-editor of three books, including Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East.
