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’s been a popular destination for politicians for more than four decades. This year, Haley Stevens, a four-term Michigan congresswoman who’s running for U.S. Senate, paid a visit. But, unlike seemingly every other elected official in the city for Memorial Day—the mayor, a county commissioner, city councillors, and school-board members—she 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’d have no qualms about joining a Fourth of July or Labor Day parade in a city that she doesn’t represent, she believed that marching in a Memorial Day parade outside of her district was “a little taboo.” “This isn’t my community and the parade is for the fallen,” she said. “So you go and support it, but you don’t walk in it.” Once she becomes a senator, she added hopefully, “I can do this parade.”

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’s thinking. After Whitmer declined, Schumer attempted to recruit Pete Buttigieg, the former Transportation Secretary, who’d recently moved from South Bend, Indiana, to Traverse City, his husband’s 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—and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s—preferred candidate for U.S. Senate.

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. 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. “Carl Levin looked like a used-furniture salesman, Debbie Stabenow was everyone’s hardworking aunt, and Gary Peters was as dry as an accountant,” a prominent Michigan Democrat told me. “Michigan elects workers.”

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. “I call myself Michigan’s workhorse,” 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’s 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’s chief of staff; in practice, she was a factotum who was occasionally called upon to provide a Midwestern perspective to the distinguished economists—the “propeller heads,” Barack Obama dubbed them—who were determining Detroit’s future. Stevens told me that, during one session, when Rattner and the others were batting around the idea of liquidating Chrysler, she spoke up. “No one asked, but I’m sitting in the room,” she recalled. “And I said, ‘Hey, that won’t be a rescue.’ ”

After Donald Trump’s 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’s historic blue wave to victory in the general election. In Congress, she’s established herself as a stolid centrist who’s particularly focussed on manufacturing. Last year, the Center for Effective Lawmaking named her the most effective Michigan Democrat in the House. “I identify problems,” she told me. “And I write bills to solve them.”

In past Michigan Senate races, the state’s 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, 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. “Haley’s supporters have Mallory as their second choice and Mallory’s supporters have Haley as their second choice,” 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—and setting up a direct clash between the Democratic establishment and the insurgent left.

The support Stevens has received from Schumer and the D.S.C.C.—not to mention endorsements from a host of prominent Michigan Democrats, including Stabenow and Peters’s wife—has become something of a millstone around her candidacy, fuelling both online vitriol and support for El-Sayed’s campaign. On Bluesky and X, Stevens has been derided as everything from “a walking meme” to “a Marge Simpson ass bitch.” Much of the animus stems from her support for Israel—and the support she has received from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. 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, the pro-Israel group spent more than four million dollars on Stevens’s behalf. Now, with less than a month to go before the August 4th primary, AIPAC 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, “Haley Stevens supports funneling billions of our tax dollars to Israel to fuel forever wars and genocide.”

Stevens and El-Sayed are both millennials who first ran for office during Trump’s first term—and they each offer a distinct vision of the Democratic Party’s future. Stevens is the stay-the-course candidate, hewing to the belief that, despite all the Democratic Party’s problems, certain political verities—manufacturing is Michigan’s lifeblood, Israel is a bipartisan issue in America—remain immutable. In Eastpointe, she strolled several hundred yards or so behind the parade, waving and shouting “Happy Memorial!” and “I love Eastpointe!” 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’t have been older than six. “You want to know something?” she asked. “You’re my boss! You get to tell me what to do, because everything I do affects you.” The girl looked both startled and confused. Her mother stepped in to reassure her: “Yeah, you haven’t learned about politics yet.”

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. “They were, like, ‘Well, we’d rather you not run,’ ” he recalled. “And I was, like, ‘Do you think I care what you’d rather I do?’ ”

El-Sayed has gone on to both confirm and defy the D.S.C.C.’s 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’t “have an issue” with Hezbollah and that “America deserved 9/11.” 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. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t like to impute people’s motives.”

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’s lacrosse team, and vice-president of the university’s 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 “the diversity of names, faces, stories, and experiences” of his fellow-graduates and their “audacity to believe that we can change this world.”

Bill Clinton, who was giving that day’s commencement address, praised El-Sayed in his own remarks. “I don’t want to embarrass your senior speaker,” Clinton told the audience, “but 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.” 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.

El-Sayed says that, at the time, he dismissed the advice—“I said, ‘Mr. President, you see my name. People like me don’t run for office’ ”—but 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’s health department. In 2017, when he and his wife were still living in his in-laws’ basement, he launched a campaign for governor. He was motivated, in part, by Trump’s election, but what really inspired him was Bernie Sanders’s 2016 Presidential campaign, which, notably, included a victory in Michigan’s 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’t duplicate Sanders’s 2016 result. He finished second in a three-way Democratic primary, losing to Whitmer by twenty-two points.

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

We were talking on the second floor of a public library in Gaylord, a county seat in the upper reaches of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. An hour or so earlier, a standing-room crowd of about a hundred and twenty-five people had packed into the library’s meeting room at noon on a Tuesday for one of El-Sayed’s 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, “Probably six foot.” El-Sayed, who readily cops to being five feet nine, in shoes, shot back, “You’re six foot like Donald Trump has big hands.”

In Gaylord, El-Sayed unwound a tight, twenty-minute stump speech that assailed plutocrats (“If you tax a billionaire eight per cent of their wealth, do you know what they still are? A billionaire!”); corporations (“You shouldn’t be able to buy politicians to do your bidding, so you can make money off of government policy”); and American foreign policy toward Israel (“We 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”). His biggest complaint, though, was with the Democratic Party, which he accused of a failure of both nerve and imagination. “I’m not going to come here and tell you what you cannot have and should not have,” he told the crowd, “because, election after election after election, we are told these seats are too important, that we’ve 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.”

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 opposed his candidacy, one of two things would happen: If he lost the primary, “you’ll get a Haley Stevens, and don’t be surprised if you get a repeat of 2024,” when Arab American voters in Michigan, angry at Kamala Harris’s refusal to reconsider the Biden Administration’s support for Israel, helped deliver the state to Trump. And, if he won the primary, “you’ll have three months to rehab me after AIPAC has done thirty million dollars of negative-ad spending against me.” The D.S.C.C. has clearly not heeded El-Sayed’s warning. When I asked him why Schumer seemed so afraid of his candidacy, El-Sayed paused for several seconds. “I think he’s afraid that Michigan’s going to elect somebody he can’t control,” he finally said. “I think he’s afraid that our race is a harbinger of the Democratic Party that people really, really want, and I think he’s going to do absolutely everything to make sure that we don’t get that party, and I’m going to do absolutely everything I can to make sure that we do.”

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 “Shame.” Her treatment was so rough that El-Sayed—whose supporters made up the majority of the convention’s delegates and whose own speech was greeted with rapturous cheers—felt compelled to text Stevens an apology and later released a video calling her treatment “unkind and unnecessary.”

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. “It’s embarrassing for a sitting congresswoman to be booed off the stage at the Democratic convention,” a prominent progressive operative told me. “I was not happy with that. It was extremely rude. But it was also a moment.” 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’s. But, according to multiple people familiar with the effort, Stabenow and other Stevens allies quickly put the kibosh on any attempt to remove Stevens. “Big Debbie was on the warpath,” a Democratic operative told me. (Stabenow denies this. “I was not involved in any discussions on that,” she said.) Three months later, when McMorrow dropped out, she did so of her own accord. “No one ever called her telling her to get out,” a McMorrow adviser told me. “Mallory saw the writing on the wall and just made the decision that there was no path.”

McMorrow’s exit has allowed Stevens to make a full-throated, uncomplicated case for what she considers her candidacy’s greatest strength: that she is more electable than El-Sayed. “Michigan is a purple state, and Abdul’s 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,” a Stevens adviser said. “We believe, and the data shows, that Haley’s the strongest candidate to run against Mike Rogers.” Stevens’s campaign points to a recent series of digital ads from the National Republican Senatorial Committee seemingly boosting El-Sayed’s candidacy with Democratic primary voters as validation for this claim.

El-Sayed’s backers argue that, in 2026, being an establishment figure identified with Washington brings its own electability challenges. What’s 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. “Maybe Abdul doesn’t get quite as many swing voters, to the extent that’s still a thing,” the Democratic pollster said. “But he could expand the electorate.” The pollster could imagine a scenario in which El-Sayed lost “fifty thousand votes” that Stevens would have received from “Republicans who don’t like Trump but who decide that Abdul is just too much.” But, the pollster went on, “he might also turn out one hundred thousand voters under forty-five who otherwise wouldn’t vote in the midterm.”

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. In June, the group’s main super PAC, 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 for supporting her congressional campaign, if she was comfortable with the perception that she’s “the AIPAC candidate” in the Senate race, she responded with a question of her own: “Well, what is that perception, do you think?”

El-Sayed’s 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. “I am the greatest threat to AIPAC politics that has ever existed,” he boasted to me. “They literally called me the most dangerous candidate for the U.S.-Israel relationship. I was, like, ‘I welcome your scorn.’ ” 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. “The angle of attack to portray me as this dangerous radical was over Israel,” Piker told me. “It actually raised the salience of Abdul’s position on the issue.” Among Democratic voters, especially young ones, Gaza has taken on an unusual significance. “It’s become a credibility question,” Tommy Vietor, the “Pod Save America” co-host and El-Sayed’s old podcast boss, said. “Does this politician see what I see with my own two eyes and call it out? That’s what Abdul’s captured.”

Stevens, for her part, describes her campaign as “a love letter” to Michigan, betting that, in a time of increasingly nationalized politics, Tip O’Neill’s old adage, “all politics is local,” is still operative. “I think we’re 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’re heard, and we’re getting our fair share,” she told me. “I’m not trying to be famous or have a podcast or write a best-selling book. I’m looking at this squarely through the lens of what does my state need and how can I best help.”

El-Sayed likes to say “Go Blue” in his stump speech before hastily adding, “We can also ‘Go Green,’ just as long as we don’t ‘Go Red.’ ” But he tends to have a much less parochial view of what the Senate race is about—and what it can do. If Stevens wants to return Michigan Democrats to their roots, El-Sayed is intent on taking his party—in Michigan and beyond—in 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 “a pretty outsized voice” in the 2028 Presidential election. Later, I asked him to elaborate on the role he hoped to play in the nominating process. “It’s easy to marginalize an elected official who’s a mayor of New York,” he said. “It’s easy to marginalize an elected official from California. You know who it’s not easy to marginalize? A senator from Michigan, because you’ve got to win Michigan both to win the primary and to win the general. So, if I can prove it’s doable, then we’ve just created a pathway in the carotid artery of American politics that every politician who’s thinking about being President would do well to heed.” ♦