In one of the most-watched primary contests of this election cycle, former public health official Dr. Abdul El-Sayed defeated Rep. Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary to replace retiring Michigan Sen. Gary Peters. Stevens had the endorsement of Peters, not to mention popular Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the rest of the Democratic establishment.
Polling in the state had shown El-Sayed well ahead, by enough that many expected a blowout. The contest ended up quite close, but El-Sayed’s victory was another feather in the cap of a progressive political movement that has managed to knock off incumbents and machine-picked candidates across the country, including in the near-clean sweep of candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani here in New York. Still, El-Sayed faces a tough road ahead in a state that’s one of the Democrats’ must-wins in the party’s quest to take control of the Senate in the November midterms.
Republicans haven’t held a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan since a one-term senator left office in 2001, but it remains a very purple state. President Donald Trump has won it twice, in 2016 and 2024, if by a small (2024) and ridiculously small (2016) margin. El-Sayed will face off against longtime FBI agent and former Rep. Mike Rogers, who in 2024 lost to the current senator, Elissa Slotkin, by just 0.3% (and, in keeping with contemporary GOP dogma, immediately suggested without evidence that the election may have been stolen).
While El-Sayed was endorsed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders and other luminaries of the domestic democratic socialist movement, he is not himself a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). He’s been careful to temper his language around the economic worldview that this political movement represents, bristling whenever he is referred to as a socialist, though he does share the view that the government should use its regulatory powers aggressively for the public good and should ensure a basic standard of living.
If you were even dimly aware of this primary race, you were probably aware that it revolved perhaps more than any other race in the country around the issue of Israel. Of the more than $60 million of outside spending that went to support Stevens, over half came from a super PAC affiliated with AIPAC, the most significant pro-Israel political lobbying group in the U.S. All told, outside money gave her camp about a 9-to-1 advantage in spending over El-Sayed’s campaign.
There are both moral and practical dimensions to the domestic political conversation around Israel. In moral terms, progressive Democrats have long considered Israel’s actions in Gaza and Lebanon in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks to be unjustifiable, whether or not they fit more contentious and technical definitions of war crimes or genocide. It’s a position that mainstream Democrats have increasingly joined. In practical terms, El-Sayed and other progressives have worked to connect the issue of Israel to the Democrats’ broader affordability agenda. Their message is that the billions of dollars the U.S. sends in military and other aid to Israel could be put to better use at home.
I think it’s important to note that while this debate is being bitterly fought out among Democratic elected officials and party leaders, it looks like an increasingly settled issue among the party’s actual voter base: Once-strong support for Israel has curdled into widespread dissatisfaction. In recent polling, a full 84% of Democrats aged 18 to 49 hold unfavorable views on Israel, a catastrophic 30-point nosedive over the past four years that seems to only be accelerating. Among all adults, the number of Americans with unfavorable views of Israel has climbed from 42% to 60%.
Does this mean that every Democratic district in the country has uniformly Israel-skeptical views? Certainly not, and some anti-Israel primary challenges failed; in Washington state, moderate, pro-Israel Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez made it through that state’s chaotic all-party primary system, beating out leftist opponents. It does, however, mean that opposition to the current Israeli government or at the very least to U.S. support of it has become the clear median position of the national Democratic voter, leaving the institutional party somewhat at loggerheads with its own base.
That’s not to say that this was the only animating principle of the El-Sayed campaign – as intense of an issue as Israel has become, I don’t think a campaign can win on that alone. The highly credentialed onetime director of the Detroit Health Department raked the broader Democratic establishment over the coals for a failure to deal with the totality of the Trump moment, and pressed a number of progressive policies, including support for Medicare for All and opposition to ICE, corporate consolidation and the increased role of money in politics.
His win also seems like another example of the theory that Democrats should concentrate on activating younger, more progressive voters who haven’t seen a good reason to participate until now, rather than continue to focus on hanging onto older Democrats and wooing moderate independents and former Republicans.
We’ll have to wait to see fuller breakdowns of the Michigan results, but at least part of El-Sayed’s win seems to have come from his bet that his brash campaign style, progressive positions, active online presence and outsider identity would attract more new voters than they would drive away. And part of his success could be tied to the nebulous concept of “fight” – the idea that voters are desperate for someone who can and will fight tooth and nail against encroaching authoritarianism, unlike the establishment Dems they see as wavering and equivocating. (I think it helps that El-Sayed is a former college lacrosse captain with a sort of swaggering rhetorical style, which some Democrats found off-putting, but which helped solidify his image as someone who would throw down against MAGA).
In any case, as with any election, it is unwise to extrapolate too wildly. Each election is a product of its own time and place, and I don’t think El-Sayed’s victory gives us a crystal ball into what’ll happen next (even in November in his own race). But it’s part of a pattern that seems less and less like a deviation from the Democratic norm and more like its new normal.
