{"id":866,"date":"2026-07-10T10:05:28","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T10:05:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=866"},"modified":"2026-07-10T10:05:28","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T10:05:28","slug":"michigan-is-the-next-big-test-for-the-democratic-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=866","title":{"rendered":"Michigan Is the Next Big Test for the Democratic Party"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Memorial Day parade in Eastpointe, a Detroit suburb, is a dependably wholesome, all-American affair, with Odd Fellows, Elks, library friends, and firefighters marching past flag-bedecked telephone poles and bunting-laden ranch houses. Eastpointe is in Macomb County, the birthplace of the fabled Reagan Democrat, and it\u2019s been a popular destination for politicians for more than four decades. This year, Haley Stevens, a four-term Michigan congresswoman who\u2019s running for U.S. Senate, paid a visit. But, unlike seemingly every other elected official in the city for Memorial Day\u2014the mayor, a county commissioner, city councillors, and school-board members\u2014she decided not to march in the parade. Eastpointe is situated in a congressional district that neighbors her own and, while Stevens told me that she\u2019d have no qualms about joining a Fourth of July or Labor Day parade in a city that she doesn\u2019t represent, she believed that marching in a Memorial Day parade outside of her district was \u201ca little taboo.\u201d \u201cThis isn\u2019t my community and the parade is for the fallen,\u201d she said. \u201cSo you go and support it, but you don\u2019t walk in it.\u201d Once she becomes a senator, she added hopefully, \u201cI can do this parade.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Practicing Shopping-Cart Meditation<\/a><\/p>\n

Last year, after the Michigan Democratic senator Gary Peters decided not to seek a third term, Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, tried to persuade Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to run for the seat, according to a person familiar with Schumer\u2019s thinking. After Whitmer declined, Schumer attempted to recruit Pete Buttigieg, the former Transportation Secretary, who\u2019d recently moved from South Bend, Indiana, to Traverse City, his husband\u2019s home town. Buttigieg said no, as well. Schumer then turned his attention to Kristen McDonald Rivet, a first-term congresswoman who represents Flint. It was only after McDonald Rivet decided not to run that Schumer anointed Stevens as his\u2014and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee\u2019s\u2014preferred candidate for U.S. Senate.<\/p>\n

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Even as a fourth choice, there was a lot for Schumer to like about Stevens. She is a strong fund-raiser and, unlike other Democrats, she has never called to defund the police or to abolish ICE<\/em>. It would be difficult for the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers, a former Michigan congressman who narrowly lost the 2024 Michigan Senate race to Elissa Slotkin, to portray her as soft on crime. Stevens also seemed to be an especially good character fit for Michigan, whose Democratic senators in the past four decades have tended to offer more substance than style. \u201cCarl Levin looked like a used-furniture salesman, Debbie Stabenow was everyone\u2019s hardworking aunt, and Gary Peters was as dry as an accountant,\u201d a prominent Michigan Democrat told me. \u201cMichigan elects workers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stevens, who is forty-three and speaks with the type of thick Michigan accent that some predicted would be extinct by now, another casualty of deindustrialization, considers her own lack of flash an asset. \u201cI call myself Michigan\u2019s workhorse,\u201d she told me. She grew up in Oakland County, outside Detroit, left for college at American University, in Washington, D.C., and broke into politics as a staffer for Hillary Clinton\u2019s 2008 Presidential campaign. During the Obama Administration, she was an aide to the car czar Steve Rattner as he orchestrated the rescue of the Big Three U.S. automakers. Officially, Stevens was Rattner\u2019s chief of staff; in practice, she was a factotum who was occasionally called upon to provide a Midwestern perspective to the distinguished economists\u2014the \u201cpropeller heads,\u201d Barack Obama dubbed them\u2014who were determining Detroit\u2019s future. Stevens told me that, during one session, when Rattner and the others were batting around the idea of liquidating Chrysler, she spoke up. \u201cNo one asked, but I\u2019m sitting in the room,\u201d she recalled. \u201cAnd I said, \u2018Hey, that won\u2019t be a rescue.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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After Donald Trump\u2019s first election, Stevens moved back to Michigan and ran for an open House seat, outhustling three higher-profile candidates in the 2018 Democratic primary, then riding that year\u2019s historic blue wave to victory in the general election. In Congress, she\u2019s established herself as a stolid centrist who\u2019s particularly focussed on manufacturing. Last year, the Center for Effective Lawmaking named her the most effective Michigan Democrat in the House. \u201cI identify problems,\u201d she told me. \u201cAnd I write bills to solve them.\u201d<\/p>\n

In past Michigan Senate races, the state\u2019s Democratic establishment has typically cleared the field for its chosen candidate: Stabenow, Peters, and Slotkin were all essentially unopposed in their Senate primaries. But, for the first time since 1994, Michigan Democrats have a truly competitive Senate primary, and Stevens spent the first fifteen months of her campaign contending with two opponents, Abdul El-Sayed, a former public-health official, and State Senator Mallory McMorrow. At the outset of the race, the conventional wisdom among Michigan Democrats was that Stevens was the clear favorite, and that El-Sayed and McMorrow would compete with each other to emerge as her challenger. Instead, El-Sayed, who supports Medicare for All and the abolition of ICE<\/em>, has established himself as both the most progressive candidate in the primary and the front-runner in the polls. Stevens, meanwhile, found herself fighting with McMorrow over the same voters. \u201cHaley\u2019s supporters have Mallory as their second choice and Mallory\u2019s supporters have Haley as their second choice,\u201d a Democratic pollster, who is not affiliated with any of the Senate campaigns, told me in May. Six weeks later, on July 5th, McMorrow announced that she was suspending her campaign, allowing Stevens to go head to head against El-Sayed\u2014and setting up a direct clash between the Democratic establishment and the insurgent left.<\/p>\n

The support Stevens has received from Schumer and the D.S.C.C.\u2014not to mention endorsements from a host of prominent Michigan Democrats, including Stabenow and Peters\u2019s wife\u2014has become something of a millstone around her candidacy, fuelling both online vitriol and support for El-Sayed\u2019s campaign. On Bluesky and X, Stevens has been derided as everything from \u201ca walking meme\u201d to \u201ca Marge Simpson ass bitch.\u201d Much of the animus stems from her support for Israel\u2014and the support she has received from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC<\/em>. In 2022, when redistricting forced Stevens to run in a congressional primary against another Democratic incumbent, Andy Levin, who, despite being a former synagogue president, was deemed too critical of Israel by AIPAC<\/em>, the pro-Israel group spent more than four million dollars on Stevens\u2019s behalf. Now, with less than a month to go before the August 4th primary, AIPAC<\/em> has already shelled out nearly five times that amount in pro-Stevens and anti-El-Sayed ads. @TrackAIPAC, an X account with four hundred and seventy thousand followers, recently wrote, \u201cHaley Stevens supports funneling billions of our tax dollars to Israel to fuel forever wars and genocide.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stevens and El-Sayed are both millennials who first ran for office during Trump\u2019s first term\u2014and they each offer a distinct vision of the Democratic Party\u2019s future. Stevens is the stay-the-course candidate, hewing to the belief that, despite all the Democratic Party\u2019s problems, certain political verities\u2014manufacturing is Michigan\u2019s lifeblood, Israel is a bipartisan issue in America<\/em>\u2014remain immutable. In Eastpointe, she strolled several hundred yards or so behind the parade, waving and shouting \u201cHappy Memorial!\u201d and \u201cI love Eastpointe!\u201d to the stragglers packing up their coolers and camp chairs. She buttonholed a young family and, bending down, introduced herself to a little girl who couldn\u2019t have been older than six. \u201cYou want to know something?\u201d she asked. \u201cYou\u2019re my boss! You get to tell me what to do, because everything I do affects you.\u201d The girl looked both startled and confused. Her mother stepped in to reassure her: \u201cYeah, you haven\u2019t learned about politics yet.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Early last year, El-Sayed travelled to Washington for introductory meetings with various pillars of the Democratic establishment. Officials at the D.S.C.C., he says, were not especially encouraging about his plans to run for Senate. Other party figures, meanwhile, explicitly tried to persuade him not to enter the race. \u201cThey were, like, \u2018Well, we\u2019d rather you not run,\u2019\u00a0\u201d he recalled. \u201cAnd I was, like, \u2018Do you think I care what you\u2019d rather I do?\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

El-Sayed has gone on to both confirm and defy the D.S.C.C.\u2019s worst fears. He has weathered controversies stemming from his past calls to defund the police and his decision to campaign with Hasan Piker, the leftist political streamer and strident critic of Israel who once said that he didn\u2019t \u201chave an issue\u201d with Hezbollah and that \u201cAmerica deserved 9\/11.\u201d Party leaders fret that, if El-Sayed wins the primary, he will lose to Rogers in November and potentially cost Democrats the Senate. I asked El-Sayed, who is Muslim, if he thought these electability concerns stemmed from his faith or from his politics. \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t like to impute people\u2019s motives.\u201d<\/p>\n

El-Sayed, the child of Egyptian immigrants, grew up in Bloomfield Hills, an affluent suburb of Detroit. His first serious brush with politics came in 2007, when he was the student speaker at his University of Michigan commencement ceremony. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a starting defenseman on the men\u2019s lacrosse team, and vice-president of the university\u2019s Muslim Students Association. He was also a husband, having married at the end of his junior year. In his speech, which came four years into the Iraq War, he hailed \u201cthe diversity of names, faces, stories, and experiences\u201d of his fellow-graduates and their \u201caudacity to believe that we can change this world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bill Clinton, who was giving that day\u2019s commencement address, praised El-Sayed in his own remarks. \u201cI don\u2019t want to embarrass your senior speaker,\u201d Clinton told the audience, \u201cbut I wish every person in the world who believes we are fated to have a clash of civilizations and cannot reach across the religious divides could have heard you speak today.\u201d El-Sayed was headed to medical school that fall, where he planned to pursue both an M.D. and a Ph.D. in epidemiology. Privately, Clinton told him that medicine would be a waste of his oratorical talents and that he should consider running for office instead.<\/p>\n

El-Sayed says that, at the time, he dismissed the advice\u2014\u201cI said, \u2018Mr. President, you see my name. People like me don\u2019t run for office\u2019\u00a0\u201d\u2014but the encounter seemed to have planted a seed. Eight years later, after completing a D.Phil. in public health as a Rhodes Scholar, at Oxford, and earning an M.D. from Columbia, El-Sayed forwent a medical residency and instead returned to Michigan to become the director of Detroit\u2019s health department. In 2017, when he and his wife were still living in his in-laws\u2019 basement, he launched a campaign for governor. He was motivated, in part, by Trump\u2019s election, but what really inspired him was Bernie Sanders\u2019s 2016 Presidential campaign, which, notably, included a victory in Michigan\u2019s Democratic primary. El-Sayed ran on a Sanders-esque populist platform, including a call for single-payer health care and to raise the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour. Sanders travelled to the state to campaign with him. But El-Sayed couldn\u2019t duplicate Sanders\u2019s 2016 result. He finished second in a three-way Democratic primary, losing to Whitmer by twenty-two points.<\/p>\n

Read more \u201cBirthright\u201d and \u201cGiant\u201d Tackle Jewish Identity<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Since then, El-Sayed has co-written a book, \u201cMedicare for All: A Citizen\u2019s Guide,\u201d and hosted a public-health-focussed podcast, \u201cAmerica Dissected,\u201d for Crooked Media; he also spent a couple of years as Wayne County\u2019s health director. When I recently asked him why he thought his second campaign was going so much better than his first\u2014a poll had come out just that day showing him in first place, with an eighteen-point lead over Stevens\u2014he pointed to the political climate. \u201cI\u2019ve been saying the same thing for eight years,\u201d he said. \u201cI think the public has experienced the last eight years and, unfortunately, the last eight years have been validating my message.\u201d<\/p>\n

We were talking on the second floor of a public library in Gaylord, a county seat in the upper reaches of Michigan\u2019s Lower Peninsula. An hour or so earlier, a standing-room crowd of about a hundred and twenty-five people had packed into the library\u2019s meeting room at noon on a Tuesday for one of El-Sayed\u2019s town halls. El-Sayed, who is forty-one, wore jeans and a tight, black V-neck T-shirt that advertised his familiarity with the bench press; at times, his campaign style is less Bernie and more bro. The next day, at the Mackinac political conference, El-Sayed pointedly asked the Republican Michigan state House speaker, Matt Hall, how tall he was. Hall, a fervent Trump supporter, responded, \u201cProbably six foot.\u201d El-Sayed, who readily cops to being five feet nine, in shoes, shot back, \u201cYou\u2019re six foot like Donald Trump has big hands.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Gaylord, El-Sayed unwound a tight, twenty-minute stump speech that assailed plutocrats (\u201cIf you tax a billionaire eight per cent of their wealth, do you know what they still are? A billionaire!\u201d); corporations (\u201cYou shouldn\u2019t be able to buy politicians to do your bidding, so you can make money off of government policy\u201d); and American foreign policy toward Israel (\u201cWe watch our tax dollars get misappropriated and buy tanks for foreign militaries and to drop bombs on other people and their kids instead of investing in us and our kids here at home\u201d). His biggest complaint, though, was with the Democratic Party, which he accused of a failure of both nerve and imagination. \u201cI\u2019m not going to come here and tell you what you cannot have and should not have,\u201d he told the crowd, \u201cbecause, election after election after election, we are told these seats are too important, that we\u2019ve got to play not to lose, only to get representatives who functionally do the same thing that the other side would do with those same exact seats.\u201d<\/p>\n

When El-Sayed met with D.S.C.C. officials last year, he said he warned them that, if Schumer and outside groups like AIPAC<\/em> opposed his candidacy, one of two things would happen: If he lost the primary, \u201cyou\u2019ll get a Haley Stevens, and don\u2019t be surprised if you get a repeat of 2024,\u201d when Arab American voters in Michigan, angry at Kamala Harris\u2019s refusal to reconsider the Biden Administration\u2019s support for Israel, helped deliver the state to Trump. And, if he won the primary, \u201cyou\u2019ll have three months to rehab me after AIPAC<\/em> has done thirty million dollars of negative-ad spending against me.\u201d The D.S.C.C. has clearly not heeded El-Sayed\u2019s warning. When I asked him why Schumer seemed so afraid of his candidacy, El-Sayed paused for several seconds. \u201cI think he\u2019s afraid that Michigan\u2019s going to elect somebody he can\u2019t control,\u201d he finally said. \u201cI think he\u2019s afraid that our race is a harbinger of the Democratic Party that people really, really want, and I think he\u2019s going to do absolutely everything to make sure that we don\u2019t get that party, and I\u2019m going to do absolutely everything I can to make sure that we do.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In April, the Michigan Democratic Party held its spring nominating convention in Detroit. For Stevens, it was suddenly as if the online world had become real. As she addressed the full convention, she was relentlessly heckled and booed, with many in the crowd chanting \u201cShame.\u201d Her treatment was so rough that El-Sayed\u2014whose supporters made up the majority of the convention\u2019s delegates and whose own speech was greeted with rapturous cheers\u2014felt compelled to text Stevens an apology and later released a video calling her treatment \u201cunkind and unnecessary.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among Michigan Democrats who do not want El-Sayed to be the nominee, the response to Stevens at the convention triggered a sort of panic. \u201cIt\u2019s embarrassing for a sitting congresswoman to be booed off the stage at the Democratic convention,\u201d a prominent progressive operative told me. \u201cI was not happy with that. It was extremely rude. But it was also a moment.\u201d Several Michigan Democrats and labor leaders began working behind the scenes to see if they could persuade Stevens to drop out of the race, in hopes of consolidating her support with McMorrow\u2019s. But, according to multiple people familiar with the effort, Stabenow and other Stevens allies quickly put the kibosh on any attempt to remove Stevens. \u201cBig Debbie was on the warpath,\u201d a Democratic operative told me. (Stabenow denies this. \u201cI was not involved in any discussions on that,\u201d she said.) Three months later, when McMorrow dropped out, she did so of her own accord. \u201cNo one ever called her telling her to get out,\u201d a McMorrow adviser told me. \u201cMallory saw the writing on the wall and just made the decision that there was no path.\u201d<\/p>\n

McMorrow\u2019s exit has allowed Stevens to make a full-throated, uncomplicated case for what she considers her candidacy\u2019s greatest strength: that she is more electable than El-Sayed. \u201cMichigan is a purple state, and Abdul\u2019s taken a number of positions that are out of line with the kind of persuadable voters we need to win over in the general election,\u201d a Stevens adviser said. \u201cWe believe, and the data shows, that Haley\u2019s the strongest candidate to run against Mike Rogers.\u201d Stevens\u2019s campaign points to a recent series of digital ads from the National Republican Senatorial Committee seemingly boosting El-Sayed\u2019s candidacy with Democratic primary voters as validation for this claim.<\/p>\n

El-Sayed\u2019s backers argue that, in 2026, being an establishment figure identified with Washington brings its own electability challenges. What\u2019s more, they maintain that El-Sayed is capable of assembling a different kind of coalition and that, especially in a Democratic wave year, he will beat Rogers, who, they note, lost two years ago in a much friendlier political environment for Republicans and with Trump on the ballot. \u201cMaybe Abdul doesn\u2019t get quite as many swing voters, to the extent that\u2019s still a thing,\u201d the Democratic pollster said. \u201cBut he could expand the electorate.\u201d The pollster could imagine a scenario in which El-Sayed lost \u201cfifty thousand votes\u201d that Stevens would have received from \u201cRepublicans who don\u2019t like Trump but who decide that Abdul is just too much.\u201d But, the pollster went on, \u201che might also turn out one hundred thousand voters under forty-five who otherwise wouldn\u2019t vote in the midterm.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The biggest reason that Stevens, who has largely eschewed large campaign rallies and town halls, was able to weather the storm after the convention was AIPAC<\/em>. In June, the group\u2019s main super PAC<\/em>, the United Democracy Project, spent nineteen million dollars airing ads backing Stevens and attacking El-Sayed. When I asked Stevens, who, in 2022, had publicly thanked AIPAC<\/em> for supporting her congressional campaign, if she was comfortable with the perception that she\u2019s \u201cthe AIPAC<\/em> candidate\u201d in the Senate race, she responded with a question of her own: \u201cWell, what is that perception, do you think?\u201d<\/p>\n

El-Sayed\u2019s support for the Palestinian cause is long-standing and stems, at least in part, from his own Muslim identity. But, in the current Democratic Party, it is also smart politics. \u201cI am the greatest threat to AIPAC<\/em> politics that has ever existed,\u201d he boasted to me. \u201cThey literally called me the most dangerous candidate for the U.S.-Israel relationship. I was, like, \u2018I welcome your scorn.\u2019\u00a0\u201d His rise in the polls this spring coincided with the controversy surrounding his campaign appearances with Piker, whom McMorrow had likened to the white-supremacist streamer Nick Fuentes. \u201cThe angle of attack to portray me as this dangerous radical was over Israel,\u201d Piker told me. \u201cIt actually raised the salience of Abdul\u2019s position on the issue.\u201d Among Democratic voters, especially young ones, Gaza has taken on an unusual significance. \u201cIt\u2019s become a credibility question,\u201d Tommy Vietor, the \u201cPod Save America\u201d co-host and El-Sayed\u2019s old podcast boss, said. \u201cDoes this politician see what I see with my own two eyes and call it out? That\u2019s what Abdul\u2019s captured.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stevens, for her part, describes her campaign as \u201ca love letter\u201d to Michigan, betting that, in a time of increasingly nationalized politics, Tip O\u2019Neill\u2019s old adage, \u201call politics is local,\u201d is still operative. \u201cI think we\u2019re being screwed over, and I think we need our strongest voice at the table to stand up for us, and to make sure that we\u2019re heard, and we\u2019re getting our fair share,\u201d she told me. \u201cI\u2019m not trying to be famous or have a podcast or write a best-selling book. I\u2019m looking at this squarely through the lens of what does my state need and how can I best help.\u201d<\/p>\n

El-Sayed likes to say \u201cGo Blue\u201d in his stump speech before hastily adding, \u201cWe can also \u2018Go Green,\u2019 just as long as we don\u2019t \u2018Go Red.\u2019\u00a0\u201d But he tends to have a much less parochial view of what the Senate race is about\u2014and what it can do. If Stevens wants to return Michigan Democrats to their roots, El-Sayed is intent on taking his party\u2014in Michigan and beyond\u2014in a new and radically different direction. During his town hall in Gaylord, El-Sayed predicted that, if he goes to the Senate, he will have \u201ca pretty outsized voice\u201d in the 2028 Presidential election. Later, I asked him to elaborate on the role he hoped to play in the nominating process. \u201cIt\u2019s easy to marginalize an elected official who\u2019s a mayor of New York,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s easy to marginalize an elected official from California. You know who it\u2019s not easy to marginalize? A senator from Michigan, because you\u2019ve got to win Michigan both to win the primary and to win the general. So, if I can prove it\u2019s doable, then we\u2019ve just created a pathway in the carotid artery of American politics that every politician who\u2019s thinking about being President would do well to heed.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more \u00c9ric Rohmer\u2019s Novel \u201c\u00c9lisabeth\u201d Is a Precocious Literary Triumph<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Senate primary race between Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed reflects the Party\u2019s growing ideological schism, but it\u2019s also a contest of competing campaign styles. Jason Zengerle reports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":865,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-election-2026"],"yoast_head":"\nMichigan Is the Next Big Test for the Democratic Party - 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=866\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Michigan Is the Next Big Test for the Democratic Party - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Senate primary race between Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed reflects the Party\u2019s growing ideological schism, but it\u2019s also a contest of competing campaign styles. 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