Democrats prevailed in many high-profile races Tuesday, but Abdul El-Sayed’s 7-point victory in the Michigan race for U.S. Senate over Republican Mike Rogers was the most significant one for the left. His unabashedly progressive platform called for, among other things, Medicare for All, cutting off aid to Israel, reining in corporations, taxing billionaires and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. His win over the competition backed by President Donald Trump demonstrated that the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party has viability in battleground states.
His victory also showed that a candidate of color could run as an adversarial populist and triumph over a right-wing candidate running on rank bigotry. El-Sayed will be the first Muslim in the U.S. Senate, and the GOP’s attacks against him were viciously Islamophobic. His win has major implications for the progressive left’s electoral horizons.
El-Sayed had never held elected office, and it was inherently risky for him to run on a platform closer to the ideological extreme of his party in a swing state that has voted for Trump twice. It’s one thing for Zohran Mamdani to sell social democratic programs in socialist-friendly New York City; it’s another thing to sell them in a deeply purple state with plenty of bright red rural counties. Yet he won decisively. (In fact, he fulfilled a remarkably cocky prediction about a 7-point win.)
El-Sayed was playing at about the highest level of difficulty possible in a competitive statewide race.
El-Sayed’s posture on Israel put him in the crosshairs of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which spent about $30 million against him in the Democratic primary, the most it ever spent on a single race. AIPAC laid out more than $9 million against him in the general election. And while El-Sayed was a formidable fundraiser, and handily outraised Rogers in the final stretch of the election, outside groups gave more than twice as much to Rogers than to El-Sayed.
Pro-Israel activism against El-Sayed eventually spurred one of the most shocking acts of intra-party treachery in recent memory, when Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens endorsed Rogers two days before Election Day.
On top of all that, El-Sayed faced unique obstacles as an Egyptian American and Muslim candidate. Nearly 40% of voters in Michigan have admitted that they’re less likely to support a Muslim candidate. Rogers, Trump and the GOP did everything to capitalize on the social reality of that prejudice and ran a heinously racist campaign against him, slandering him as a pawn of the Muslim Brotherhood and a “radical jihadist,” and generally rendering him as a non-American.
When you put it all together — his newcomer status, his progressive agenda, the money spent against him, his running as a Muslim in a state where many voters profess reservations about voting for a Muslim, and Stevens’ spectacular backstabbing — El-Sayed was playing at about the highest level of difficulty possible in a competitive statewide race. And he still won.
It would be a mistake to deduce that El-Sayed’s victory means progressives are a shoo-in in battleground states or stronger candidates than moderates. El-Sayed’s victory was impressive, but the more mainstream Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Michigan, Jocelyn Benson, won her race by more than 10 points. Moreover, Democrats did extraordinarily well across the country, even pulling out wins in Senate races in states that are more hostile to the left, including South Carolina and Texas. El-Sayed’s particular assets are more difficult to identify during a colossal wave election for Democrats. In a more competitive year, the outcome of his race might have looked different.
But we can say El-Sayed’s politics are far from a death knell for the Democratic Party in a region of paramount importance to national politics. He showed the limitations of bigotry as a weapon to try to delegitimize leftie political campaigns. And he deserves credit for carefully adapting the progressive playbook to the Midwest and working hard to figure out how to persuade voters to take interest in his ideas for major shifts in healthcare and foreign policy. Now his task is to convince Michiganders that they made the right choice.
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