{"id":1227,"date":"2026-08-05T14:36:07","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T14:36:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1227"},"modified":"2026-08-05T14:36:07","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T14:36:07","slug":"the-electability-of-abdul-el-sayed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1227","title":{"rendered":"The Electability of Abdul El-Sayed"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In late July, when Michigan\u2019s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, endorsed Haley Stevens in the state\u2019s Democratic Senate primary, it was unclear what the move meant. Was Whitmer\u2019s intervention an indication of the Democratic establishment\u2019s confidence that Stevens, a centrist congresswoman who\u2019d struggled to gain traction for much of the campaign, was now, just eleven days before the vote, on a path to victory, and just needed a final push to get over the finish line? Or was it a sign that the establishment was panicked that Stevens\u2019s opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, a liberal former public-health official, was in the lead\u2014and that the only way to prevent him from winning was a desperate, last-minute endorsement from the most popular Democrat in the state, who\u2019d previously pledged to remain neutral? After last night, it\u2019s clear that the latter was the case\u2014and that the Hail Mary failed.<\/p>\n

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El-Sayed\u2019s win over Stevens in Michigan, while not the blowout the final polls suggested it would be, is nonetheless the insurgent left\u2019s most important victory of 2026\u2014a year that has already featured many successful challenges to the Party\u2019s establishment. So it\u2019s fitting that El-Sayed is also the most politically talented of the group. He has the charisma of Graham Platner, the populist oysterman who won Maine\u2019s Democratic Senate primary before withdrawing from the race after being accused of sexual assault, which he denied, but none of Platner\u2019s skeletons: El-Sayed, a devout Muslim, does not drink, and he and his wife married when they were both in college. As a Rhodes Scholar with an M.D. and a Ph.D., El-Sayed is even more academically credentialled than Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Columbia grad and a doctoral student who unseated a five-term congressman in New York\u2014plus, unlike Avila Chevalier, he\u2019s a gifted orator who can think on his feet and doesn\u2019t wilt under tough questioning. And, though some of El-Sayed\u2019s detractors dismissed his campaign as an internet phenomenon\u2014\u201cI think there\u2019s an extent to which Abdul is certainly winning in the online contest, but Haley is strongly winning with actual voters,\u201d the Michigan congresswoman Hillary Scholten, who endorsed Stevens, said last week\u2014El-Sayed ran an impressive real-life grassroots operation, with nearly five hundred campaign events in more than a hundred different towns and cities, that helped him overcome Stevens\u2019s nine-to-one TV-spending advantage.<\/p>\n

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As much as El-Sayed\u2019s win is a testament to his talents, it\u2019s also an indictment of the Democratic establishment. Stevens was elected to Congress in 2018, but her Senate campaign was centered on the work she did in 2009, as a twenty-five-year-old factotum on the Obama Administration team that orchestrated the rescue of the U.S. auto industry. Television ads backing Stevens featured Obama almost as much as they did the candidate herself, even though Obama did not endorse Stevens\u2019s bid. When Stevens visited the Greater Emmanuel Institutional Church of God in Christ, a Black Pentecostal church on Detroit\u2019s west side, on a Sunday in May, the church\u2019s pastor introduced her as \u201cthe former chief of staff, I think, for President Barack Obama.\u201d Stevens did not correct him. \u201cI will be honored to continue to do the work that I did alongside the great President Barack Obama,\u201d she told the congregation.<\/p>\n

Stevens, who benefitted from about sixty million dollars in spending from outside groups, more than half of which reportedly came from the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC<\/em>, had much less to say, at the church and in her campaign, about her four terms in Congress. Although she, like pretty much every Democrat these days, described herself as a \u201cfighter\u201d against President Donald Trump, it remained unclear to Michigan Democrats what, exactly, her fighting had got them. El-Sayed, by contrast, spoke openly about his fight against the Democratic establishment and about how he hoped his victory in the state he called \u201cthe carotid artery of American politics\u201d would propel a progressive candidate to capture the Party\u2019s Presidential nomination in 2028.<\/p>\n

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The challenge now for El-Sayed is how to take that fight to the Republicans. Until last night, all of the progressive victories this year came in deep-blue congressional districts or cities, where the Democratic primary is the whole ballgame. But Michigan is a purple state\u2014Trump won there in 2016 and 2024\u2014and El-Sayed will have more than token Republican opposition in the general election in November. Mike Rogers, the G.O.P. nominee, is a former seven-term congressman who, two years ago, came within twenty thousand votes of winning the U.S. Senate race in Michigan. Indeed, the biggest reason that so many establishment Democrats, in both Michigan and Washington, have been so worried about El-Sayed winning the primary is that they believe a candidate as liberal as El-Sayed\u2014who supports Medicare for All and the abolition of ICE<\/em>, and who calls Israel\u2019s war in Gaza a genocide\u2014cannot win a general election. The bitter nature of the primary contest in its final weeks\u2014with El-Sayed attacking Stevens as \u201ca suit with a large AIPAC<\/em> bank account\u201d who\u2019s unable \u201cto string together two coherent sentences,\u201d and Stevens accusing El-Sayed of wanting to \u201cblame all of your problems on Jewish Americans\u201d\u2014has only intensified that concern. AIPAC<\/em> will likely spend heavily on Rogers\u2019s behalf, perhaps even more than it spent on Stevens\u2019s. In the Democratic primary, AIPAC<\/em>\u2019s support for Stevens turned out to be a boon for El-Sayed\u2014such is the lobbying group\u2019s toxicity among Democratic voters these days\u2014but he\u2019s unlikely to enjoy a similar dynamic in the general election this November.<\/p>\n

But El-Sayed is operating with a different theory of electability. He believes that, for every older Michigander whose vote he loses because of his decision to campaign with the leftist streamer Hasan Piker, who has said he didn\u2019t \u201chave an issue\u201d with Hezbollah and that \u201cAmerica deserved 9\/11,\u201d he\u2019ll gain more support from younger Michiganders who didn\u2019t previously vote but turned out because they heard about El-Sayed on Piker\u2019s live stream. He believes that his bro-y campaign style, which struck some voters as sexist when employed against Stevens, will hold greater appeal when he turns it against Rogers, whom he recently dubbed a \u201cbeta character.\u201d \u201cYou know what I\u2019m gonna do to that man?\u201d he boasted to Semafor\u2019s<\/em> David Weigel last month. \u201cBy the time I\u2019m done, his best friends are gonna look at him and think what I think, say what I say. I\u2019m gonna define him into eternity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of all, El-Sayed believes that, in 2026, it\u2019s no longer good politics to be identified with Washington or to play it safe. When I spoke with him in Michigan in late May, he reflected on how the political climate has changed since his first campaign, in 2018, when he unsuccessfully ran for governor. \u201cWhen Trump won the first time, it felt like the record had skipped, and this time around everyone understands that it\u2019s baked into the infrastructure of American politics,\u201d he said. \u201cI think we\u2019re learning that the Michigan electorate is actually sick and tired of having two options that look virtually the same. I think they want an option that is going to take on the inherited wisdom of the establishments\u2014both of them.\u201d On Tuesday night, Michigan\u2019s Democrats backed El-Sayed in his gamble that an aggressive, combative, and at times divisive approach to politics will work in a swing state. \u201cIf perfectly inoffensive was what wins Michigan,\u201d El-Sayed told me, \u201cDonald Trump would never have won Michigan.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

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Jason Zengerle writes about Abdul El-Sayed\u2019s victory over Haley Stevens in the Democratic Senate primary race in Michigan, and whether his progressive platform can succeed in the general election.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1226,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-election-2026"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Electability of Abdul El-Sayed - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1227\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Electability of Abdul El-Sayed - 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