The Electability of Abdul El-Sayed
In late July, when Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, endorsed Haley Stevens in the state’s Democratic Senate primary, it was unclear what the move meant. Was Whitmer’s intervention an indication of the Democratic establishment’s confidence that Stevens, a centrist congresswoman who’d 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’s opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, a liberal former public-health official, was in the lead—and that the only way to prevent him from winning was a desperate, last-minute endorsement from the most popular Democrat in the state, who’d previously pledged to remain neutral? After last night, it’s clear that the latter was the case—and that the Hail Mary failed.
El-Sayed’s win over Stevens in Michigan, while not the blowout the final polls suggested it would be, is nonetheless the insurgent left’s most important victory of 2026—a year that has already featured many successful challenges to the Party’s establishment. So it’s 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’s Democratic Senate primary before withdrawing from the race after being accused of sexual assault, which he denied, but none of Platner’s 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—plus, unlike Avila Chevalier, he’s a gifted orator who can think on his feet and doesn’t wilt under tough questioning. And, though some of El-Sayed’s detractors dismissed his campaign as an internet phenomenon—“I think there’s an extent to which Abdul is certainly winning in the online contest, but Haley is strongly winning with actual voters,” the Michigan congresswoman Hillary Scholten, who endorsed Stevens, said last week—El-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’s nine-to-one TV-spending advantage.
As much as El-Sayed’s win is a testament to his talents, it’s 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’s bid. When Stevens visited the Greater Emmanuel Institutional Church of God in Christ, a Black Pentecostal church on Detroit’s west side, on a Sunday in May, the church’s pastor introduced her as “the former chief of staff, I think, for President Barack Obama.” Stevens did not correct him. “I will be honored to continue to do the work that I did alongside the great President Barack Obama,” she told the congregation.
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, 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 “fighter” 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 “the carotid artery of American politics” would propel a progressive candidate to capture the Party’s Presidential nomination in 2028.
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—Trump won there in 2016 and 2024—and 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—who supports Medicare for All and the abolition of ICE, and who calls Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide—cannot win a general election. The bitter nature of the primary contest in its final weeks—with El-Sayed attacking Stevens as “a suit with a large AIPAC bank account” who’s unable “to string together two coherent sentences,” and Stevens accusing El-Sayed of wanting to “blame all of your problems on Jewish Americans”—has only intensified that concern. AIPAC will likely spend heavily on Rogers’s behalf, perhaps even more than it spent on Stevens’s. In the Democratic primary, AIPAC’s support for Stevens turned out to be a boon for El-Sayed—such is the lobbying group’s toxicity among Democratic voters these days—but he’s unlikely to enjoy a similar dynamic in the general election this November.
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’t “have an issue” with Hezbollah and that “America deserved 9/11,” he’ll gain more support from younger Michiganders who didn’t previously vote but turned out because they heard about El-Sayed on Piker’s 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 “beta character.” “You know what I’m gonna do to that man?” he boasted to Semafor’s David Weigel last month. “By the time I’m done, his best friends are gonna look at him and think what I think, say what I say. I’m gonna define him into eternity.”
Most of all, El-Sayed believes that, in 2026, it’s 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. “When Trump won the first time, it felt like the record had skipped, and this time around everyone understands that it’s baked into the infrastructure of American politics,” he said. “I think we’re 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—both of them.” On Tuesday night, Michigan’s Democrats backed El-Sayed in his gamble that an aggressive, combative, and at times divisive approach to politics will work in a swing state. “If perfectly inoffensive was what wins Michigan,” El-Sayed told me, “Donald Trump would never have won Michigan.” ♦