El-Sayed wins Michigan Democratic Senate primary in blow to AIPAC
Abdul El-Sayed has won the Democratic nomination for the Senate in Michigan, narrowly defeating Representative Haley Stevens in a close contest.
Decision Desk called the race for El-Sayed Tuesday morning, projecting him as the winner with 48.52 percent of the vote to Stevens’s 47.47 percent.
El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and the former Wayne County health director, edged out Stevens despite her receiving heavy financial backing from groups aligned with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. El-Sayed now moves on to the general election, where he’ll face Republican Representative Mike Rogers in November and have a shot at becoming the first Muslim U.S. senator.
Stevens received $62 million in advertising from outside groups, with $31.9 million of that coming from the United Democracy Project, AIPAC’s super PAC. It wasn’t enough to help her in the end, and El-Sayed called out the massive spending in their final debate last week, pointing out that Stevens had just voted for a pro-Israel resolution.
“That is the pro quo that comes with the quid,” El-Sayed said in the beginning of the debate. “It really comes down to how you are funded.” [Continue reading…]
Every now and then, a Senate race sets the direction for an entire party. In 1991, a state official named Harris Wofford – advised by a foul-mouthed Cajun named James Carville – upset his far better-known Republican opponent to win a special election in Pennsylvania. He did it by promising to expand access to healthcare – and thus created a template for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign the following year.
If Abdul El-Sayed can follow up his victory in last night’s Democratic Senate primary by winning the general election in Michigan this fall, he will have created a template of his own. Despite his closer-than-expected margin of victory, his campaign offers a model for how Democrats across the country can answer the political challenge posed by Donald Trump.
By casting the Michigan Senate primary as yet another battle between progressive insurgents and establishment centrists, media coverage of El-Sayed’s campaign has tended to overlook what is innovative about it. Like Zohran Mamdani and the democratic socialists who have won House races in New York, Pennsylvania and Colorado, El-Sayed wants to end unconditional US military support for Israel. But while Mamdani sometimes discusses Israel purely through the language of human rights and international law – as he did in his recent video arguing that Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested as a war criminal – El-Sayed’s message is more nationalistic. He rarely discusses the Jewish state without linking it to Washington’s failure to address problems at home. [Continue reading…]