ElSayeds

Detroit, Michigan – The sighs in the audience were audible as United States Congresswoman Haley Stevens closed in on Abdul El-Sayed’s lead in the Michigan Democratic primary for the US Senate.

El-Sayed, a public health advocate, took the stage after midnight as uncertainty had dampened the once-celebratory mood among supporters in Detroit early on Wednesday.

“I wish I could tell you that I was declaring victory right about now. It turns out it takes a long time to count some votes in Michigan. It’s a big state,” he joked.

The progressive candidate went on to remind the crowd of what his campaign was up against: tens of millions of dollars in campaign spending by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other special-interest groups.

“I want you to remind them that if we come through this, when we come through this, inshallah [God willing]”, he said, “that we’ll have taken $70m on the chin and kept fighting back.”

Stevens, a four-term congresswoman, continued to shrink El-Sayed’s lead as the votes came in, bringing the margin between them down to less than 1 percent.

The final results arrived later on Wednesday morning, long after the sun had risen on a new day. El-Sayed had won by a razor-thin margin.

He had fended off not just Stevens but also the pro-Israel groups and Democratic power brokers in Michigan, including top officials from the party, like Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who had endorsed his opponent.

The result appeared to stun the US political system, dealing yet another setback to the pro-Israel Democrats and sparking a response from President Donald Trump, who was quick to label El-Sayed as a “Communist loser who hates Jews and Israel”.

But the message from the vote results was clear: Campaign spending and big-name endorsements may no longer be enough to secure victory within the Democratic Party.

‘It’s not just the status quo anymore’

El-Sayed’s supporters say the delayed celebrations and the smaller-than-expected margin of victory should not diminish the significance of the elections.

Democratic state legislator Alabas Farhat said El-Sayed’s victory sends a message that, if candidates run on an anti-war platform and are willing to take on special interest groups like AIPAC, people will vote for them.

“It’s not just the status quo anymore and these establishment politicians who are used to coasting through these elections,” Farhat told Al Jazeera.

“It’s now folks who want to come in and disrupt and deliver big, bold agendas and relief for the working families of Michigan and anywhere else.”

Stevens had overwhelming support from the Democratic Party establishment. She was backed by Whitmer, former Senator Debbie Stabenow, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and retiring Senator Gary Peters, whose seat she was running for.

Defeating Stevens allows El-Sayed to compete in November’s general elections against former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, who is backed by Trump and will likely receive support from pro-Israel groups.

AIPAC has already indicated it will continue its spending in Michigan to beat El-Sayed in the general election. “Our members remain determined to ensure that voters reject Dr El-Sayed and his radical anti-Israel agenda in November,” the group said in a statement on Wednesday.

The pro-Israel lobby group also downplayed El-Sayed’s victory, highlighting wins by other pro-Israel candidates, including in Missouri, where Congressman Wesley Bell comfortably won against his progressive challenger, former Congresswoman Cori Bush.

“While disappointed that some of our AIPAC-backed candidates did not prevail, our community is proud to support pro-Israel Democrats and Republicans who stand for our values, and we are encouraged that voters in races across this primary season continue to broadly choose leaders who support a strong US-Israel partnership,” AIPAC said.

Even with polls showing that the general election is up for grabs, analysts are emphasising the historic nature of El-Sayed’s primary victory.

Progressive Senator Bernie Sanders called El-Sayed’s win the “most extraordinary victory” in modern US politics.

“Have you ever heard of a candidate in a major race getting outspent nine to one, taking on the entire establishment and winning?” Sanders said on the Pod Save America podcast.

“I cannot recall somebody having done that.”

Left-wing victories

El-Sayed was not alone in security victories in the state’s primary races. The overall result in Michigan is seen as another major achievement for the progressive left in this election cycle.

In Tuesday’s election, progressive state legislator Donavan McKinney defeated pro-Israel incumbent Shri Thanedar in a US House Democratic primary. In a district north of Detroit, left-wing climate organiser William Lawrence also won a Democratic primary for Congress by 15 points.

Across the US, from California to Colorado to Pennsylvania to New Jersey to New York, progressives have won similar races, ousting several incumbents and claiming open seats in safe Democratic districts.

What makes El-Sayed’s win significant is not only the spending and endorsements he faced, but also that he won a state-wide race in a swing state that voted for Trump less than two years ago. Michigan is home to more than 10 million people.

Progressive Pennsylvania State Representative Chris Rabb, who is on his way to Congress after winning a competitive primary for a heavily Democratic seat in May, said left-wing candidates are prevailing because they are able to engage voters with a compassionate and substantive approach.

He said El-Sayed’s victory sends a message to the Democratic establishment: “They’ve got to take a look at the electoral calculus going forward.”

“The things that used to work are old and are arcane and do not reach the types of people that will come out who won’t vote for normal traditional Democrats,” Rabb said. “But he’s bringing out folks who haven’t come out in a long time or ever.”

He added that El-Sayed’s ability to broaden the Democratic base will help him defeat Rogers in November.

El-Sayed’s campaign slogan is, “Money out of politics. Money in your pockets. Medicare for all.”

His platform is focused on affordability and expanding access to healthcare. But AIPAC’s involvement in the race and the polarisation over Israel made the conflict in the Middle East a key issue in the election.

Russell Ellis, the social media commentator known as Jolly Good Ginger, said voters across the US are showing that they are “fed up” with Israel and AIPAC.

“The amount of voters that are drawing a red line at sending bombs to continue a genocide is much larger than people are accepting that it is. It’s massive,” he told Al Jazeera.

“I think most Americans can agree that we can’t support genocide, and that using American taxpayer dollars and American bombs to commit genocide in Gaza, in Sudan, in Congo, anywhere is unacceptable.”

‘We want to fund healthcare, not warfare’

Despite his criticism of Israel, El-Sayed always brought the political conversation back to Michigan.

The US has spent billions of dollars on military support for Israel, its Middle East ally, and even more on the war with Iran – a conflict that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been seeking for decades.

El-Sayed has argued that the money spent on war should go to help communities across the US and Michigan.

His supporters say the progressive wins in Michigan show that this approach is resonating with voters.

“Today’s historic victories in Michigan prove that Palestine will win at the polls again and again,” Iman Abid, the political director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights Action, said in a statement.

“AIPAC can try dumping millions of dollars into propaganda, but at the end of the day, American voters don’t want our tax dollars to go toward bombing families abroad. We want to fund healthcare, not warfare.”

Sally Howell, a history professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn who pioneered academic research about the Arab community, said El-Sayed’s win represents “genuine change” for Michigan.

“It tells us that voters are very frustrated with the establishment – the establishment in Washington and the establishment in the Democratic Party,” Howell told Al Jazeera.

“They want leaders who are going to bring change, not more of the same.”

The day after the state’s Senate primary, I was at a gym in Michigan when I overheard a brief exchange about the results of the close race.

The small group of voters were all elderly and white. Most of them expressed disappointment that Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens lost. Most of them questioned victor Abdul El-Sayed’s ability to win in November against a Republican. One of them called El-Sayed — a born and raised Michigander who attended the University of Michigan and ran the Department of Health, Human and Veteran Services for the largest county in the state — “a radical.”

For a few seconds, the group went quiet.

The only sound heard was the echo from the dog whistle that was just blown.

The prejudicial rot at the heart of that comment is just one of the challenges facing El-Sayed in November, however it is the most significant.

MAGA Republicans may complain about identity politics, but they aren’t afraid to use them. During the primary campaign, both Republican gubernatorial candidates in the state continuously ran ads characterizing immigrants as violent criminals. That will likely continue. El-Sayed’s opponent, Mike Rogers, is endorsed by President Trump, who has been making racially offensive statements for more than half a century.

That’s documented as far back as the 1973 lawsuit the Nixon administration filed against him and his family for racial discrimination, and it’s documented as recently as the octogenarian’s latest social posts about people from Somalia and Haiti. Not to be outdone by his boss, Vice President JD Vance started his fearmongering during a supposed anti-fraud event this week. The 2028 presidential hopeful quipped “God forbid, you’re going to have President El-Sayed in three years” — a thought I had not considered until he said it.

Many of us hadn’t given El-Sayed much consideration at all until recent months. When Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) announced he was not seeking reelection in January 2025, El-Sayed was not considered a strong contender to replace him. Many establishment Democrats believed former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who quietly moved to Michigan after running for the White House in 2020, or Stevens, were the party’s best shot of holding on to the seat and helping Michigan do its part to flip the Senate.

They discounted El-Sayed’s chances in large part because they misread the moment we are in. The days of performative campaign endorsements, huge war chests and strongly worded posts started fading noticeably in 2016 — after Jeb Bush dropped out of the race early despite having north of $100 million at his disposal. Yet over the last decade, establishment Democrats have continued to replay the same playbook with mixed results. And in totality, Tuesday’s primaries in Michigan, Kansas, Missouri, Virginia and Washington are a mixed bag with no clear message beyond whatever you read into these facts: El-Sayed is a Muslim who has criticized the government of Israel, and yet he won a Democratic primary. Even so, the chatter before and after the vote is more revealing than the primary outcome. (On Tuesday, roughly 2 out of 10 eligible voters in the state cast a ballot in Michigan. Sweeping interpretations of El-Sayed’s narrow victory are rather bold when 80% of voters didn’t participate.)

Questions about his electability have little to do with his résumé — the Rhodes scholar led Columbia University’s research on global population health — and more to do with him being the son of Egyptian immigrants who prays five times a day. The president takes photos holding an upside-down Bible and has a 22-foot gold statue of himself, but it is El-Sayed’s faith that should worry good Christian folks?

Over the weeks leading to Tuesday, we saw entire interviews with El-Sayed — an epidemiologist — that dwelled solely on his thoughts about Israel, while voters in his state were dealing with a cyclosporiasis outbreak. He has plenty to say on other topics. Getting “money out of politics” is not only central to his campaign messaging, but also is an actual grassroots ballot initiative in Michigan. Yet the talk about El-Sayed mostly orbits around one foreign policy topic.

To be clear: The issue for establishment Democrats isn’t that something like “Medicare for all” is too radical of an idea to champion. Both President Obama and President Clinton campaigned heavily on healthcare, and history views them both as centrist. No, the concern is how easy it is for Trump, Rogers and other Republicans to “other” El-Sayed, so when he does question our spending priorities it can be painted as un-American or antisemitic. As a result, election analysis is indirectly being dictated by his identity, all but ignoring he’s one of the top healthcare experts in a state still reeling from a foodborne illness.

What El-Sayed and his supporters are questioning isn’t Israel’s right to exist. They’re wondering why the United States, the richest of all the developed democracies, is still the only one that does not guarantee healthcare to its citizens? The list of nations that do guarantee access includes Israel, which receives billions in U.S. aid. For a doctor who has written a book on healthcare access and co-authored about 100 scholarly articles on health, that line of questioning doesn’t seem radical at all.

It is who is doing the asking that unnerves some.

YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow

New York City’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani congratulated Abdul El-Sayed on winning Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, praising his focus on healthcare and cost of living. He dismissed Republican claims branding El-Sayed a ‘mini Mamdani’, joking, ‘he can lift a lot more than I can’.