ABDUL EL-SAYED WINS SENATE RACE — HIS FIRST MOVE INFURIATES AMERICANS
El-Sayed Won Michigan by Less Than a Point. Now Mike Rogers Is Going After the Democrats Who Didn’t Vote for Him.
Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Michigan by less than a percentage point.
Now comes the harder part.
He has to convince a state Donald Trump carried in 2024 that the progressive message that energized Democratic primary voters can survive a general election.
Republican Mike Rogers has already decided where he thinks El-Sayed is vulnerable: the Democrats who voted for Haley Stevens.
Within days of the primary, Rogers released a video telling disaffected Democratic voters they had “a home” in his campaign. The appeal was aimed at moderates, working families and suburban voters who may have backed Stevens but are uncomfortable with El-Sayed’s politics.
Democrats understood the danger immediately.
Stevens, who lost by just under one point, quickly endorsed El-Sayed and told CBS News she was willing to campaign with him.
“Whatever he wants me to do,” she said.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who had supported Stevens, also moved to close ranks. Michigan Democrats scheduled a unity event. El-Sayed shifted almost overnight from attacking the party establishment to arguing that the divisions inside the Democratic coalition were smaller than the stakes in November.
“The things that unite us are so much bigger than the things that divide us,” he said.
That may be the most important sentence of his campaign now.
The Democratic primary was a bruising fight over Israel, money, ideology and what kind of candidate can still win statewide.
Stevens represented the safer bet for much of the Democratic establishment.
She is a sitting member of Congress from suburban Detroit, had the backing of major party figures and benefited from an extraordinary wave of outside spending.
AIPAC and affiliated pro-Israel groups spent close to $30 million backing her, according to the Associated Press, the largest investment the organization had ever made in a single race.
El-Sayed turned that spending into the central symbol of his campaign.
He argued that Stevens was being propped up by wealthy interests and that Democratic voters were tired of seeing outside money shape their nominees.
His campaign leaned on volunteers, small-dollar enthusiasm and a message that mixed economic populism with opposition to unconditional U.S. military support for Israel.
It worked.
Barely.
El-Sayed won without reaching 50 percent of the vote.
That makes the result both a breakthrough for the Democratic left and a warning about its limits.
He showed that a progressive candidate can defeat the party establishment in a major battleground state.
He did not show that the broader Democratic coalition is fully comfortable with him.
Stevens remained strong with working-class and Black voters, while El-Sayed performed better among younger and college-educated voters. That split matters because Michigan Democrats have typically won statewide by building broad coalitions rather than relying on one part of the party.
The general election will require an even broader one.
Michigan is not a safely Democratic state.
Trump won it in 2016, Joe Biden carried it in 2020, and Trump won it again in 2024.
Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin defeated Rogers in 2024 by fewer than 20,000 votes.
Now Rogers is back, running for the open seat of retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters.
For Democrats, losing Michigan would make an already difficult path to Senate control much harder. The party must defend battleground seats while finding several Republican seats to flip elsewhere.
That national math explains why the primary drew so much attention.
It was not simply a referendum on El-Sayed or Stevens.
It was a test of how much risk Democrats are willing to take in a state they cannot afford to lose.
Republicans have wasted no time trying to define the answer.
Trump celebrated El-Sayed’s victory as good news for the GOP. Republican campaign groups began portraying him as one of the most ideologically extreme Senate nominees in the country.
Rogers has taken a more targeted approach.
Rather than speaking only to Republicans, he is trying to create permission for Democrats to cross over.
His message is essentially this: you do not have to become a Republican to decide El-Sayed is too far left.
That may be smart politics after such a narrow primary.
But Rogers is also stretching the argument when he speaks as if Michigan Democrats broadly rejected El-Sayed.
El-Sayed won the nomination.
The more relevant question is how many Stevens voters remain uncomfortable enough with him to consider a Republican in November.
Israel will be one of the main pressure points.
El-Sayed has called Israel’s military campaign in Gaza a genocide, sharply criticized the Israeli government and called for ending unconditional U.S. military aid.
He has also made opposition to AIPAC central to his political identity.
Those positions place him well to the left of Stevens and many national Democrats.
They do not, by themselves, establish that he is anti-Semitic.
El-Sayed has publicly condemned antisemitism and, after winning the primary, reached out directly to Jewish voters, calling them his “sisters and brothers” and pledging to protect their safety.
That distinction will matter in a general election likely to feature some of the most aggressive rhetoric of the cycle.
Republicans will try to make his views on Israel part of a broader argument that he is too ideological for Michigan.
El-Sayed will try to separate criticism of the Israeli government from hostility toward Jewish voters.
But the race may not ultimately turn on Israel.
El-Sayed’s campaign also focused heavily on Medicare for All, housing costs, corporate power and the economy. His supporters argue that the anti-establishment message—not foreign policy alone—was what allowed him to overcome Stevens’ financial advantage.
That is plausible.
AIPAC may have spent tens of millions of dollars, but outside money cannot guarantee a victory.
If anything, the spending gave El-Sayed a useful enemy.
He could tell voters the race was the many against the money.
The danger is that what works in a Democratic primary does not always translate cleanly to November.
Rogers will argue that El-Sayed is too ideological for a closely divided state.
He will talk about taxes, socialism, public safety and Israel.
He will use El-Sayed’s own words from the primary against him.
And he will keep speaking directly to Stevens voters.
That makes Stevens’ decision to campaign for El-Sayed more important than the usual post-primary endorsement.
If she appears with him, reassures suburban Democrats and tells her supporters that the November choice is clear, she can help close the opening Rogers is trying to create.
El-Sayed also has an opportunity Republicans should not dismiss.
The primary drew exceptionally high Democratic turnout, according to state party officials. His campaign energized younger voters and activists who often complain that conventional Democratic candidates give them little reason to participate.
He also won despite being dramatically outspent.
That is not the profile of a candidate who can simply be written off as unelectable.
The Michigan race may become a test between two competing theories of politics.
Rogers believes the center is still decisive.
El-Sayed believes voters are hungry for something less cautious and more confrontational.
Neither theory has been proved yet.
The primary only decided which one Democrats are willing to test.
El-Sayed survived tens of millions of dollars in outside spending and defeated the candidate preferred by much of the party establishment.
But winning by less than a point left him with an immediate problem.
Almost half of the Democratic primary electorate chose someone else.
Mike Rogers noticed.
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So did Haley Stevens.
The next three months will show which campaign is better at convincing those voters that the primary is over—and that they still have a political home in November.
