Caro is a city of about 4,000 people in central Michigan and the seat of Tuscola County, which Donald Trump won by more than 40 percentage points in 2024. On a brisk Saturday afternoon, just more than two weeks before Election Day, I drove there in a rental car to see progressive firebrand Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate for U.S. Senate, hold a town hall. When I flipped on the radio en route to Caro, I immediately heard the hosts of a right-wing talk show lavishing praise on Elon Musk. After many miles of driving alongside corn fields and wind turbines, while listening queasily to admiration for the reactionary tech tycoon, I was surprised at what I saw upon my arrival: hundreds of people lined up outside a community center waiting to hear what a Bernie Sanders-backed Democrat had to say. El-Sayed, who has never held elected office, has a narrow lead in the polls against former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers for a seat left open by a retiring Democrat.

El-Sayed took to the stage in his signature tightly fitting black shirt and jeans. After joking that he had come to Caro because it was one letter off from Cairo — a nod to his Egyptian ancestry — he immediately worked the crowd up by listing things that “shouldn’t be this hard” in America: buying a tank of gas, buying a second bag of groceries, seeing a doctor. When he ended the list by declaring, “Shouldn’t be this hard to pay your taxes and know that that money’s going to be spent on you and your kids instead of dropping bombs on somebody else and their kids,” the crowd roared.

Then came a call-and-response from El-Sayed and the Caro crowd that hammered home his core campaign themes:

“Money out of?”

“Politics!” they shouted.

“Money in your?”

“Pockets!”

“Medicare for?”

“All!”

Many in the Caro crowd nodded as El-Sayed said, “Donald Trump is not himself the disease of our politics. He’s the worst symptom of the disease of our politics. The disease is the system that allows big corporations and billionaires and special interests to buy and sell politicians in ways that leave them rigging the system against us.” His language frequently draws attention to his training as a doctor. He never practiced medicine after finishing medical school at Columbia, but he earned a doctorate in public health from Oxford, and he has served as a health director for Wayne County, which is home to Detroit.

It was after El-Sayed said he’d answer questions that the mood darkened. In what may be the most viral moment of the 2026 midterm elections, a man in the audience who identified himself as Tommy stood up and asked El-Sayed if he would “disavow the Muslim Brotherhood,” an Islamist organization that Tommy called a “terrorist group.” El-Sayed said he’d have no problem disavowing the Muslim Brotherhood and did so. He then rejected the bigoted basis for Tommy’s question, and lectured him on the Constitution and freedom of religion.

There has been no indication that El-Sayed, or anyone else in the room, knew that Tommy was Thomas Teepell, a GOP operative who most notably worked as a former aide to Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. But watching their exchange from inside the room, I was struck by El-Sayed’s antagonistic, even scornful, tone with him. Most politicians find a way to brush off the substance of what their hecklers say, if they don’t have them escorted out altogether. As Teepell began to leave, a woman yelled, “Bye, Tommy!” All of a sudden, a whole chorus of “Bye, Tommy! Bye, Tommy!” rang out as he walked out the door. “Tommy” might have thought his Islamophobic attack would do well in Caro, but El-Sayed beat him back, and he walked out being jeered, with his tail between his legs.

The Caro town hall dramatized the exhilarating possibilities of El-Sayed’s campaign — and the dark reactionary forces arrayed against him.

El-Sayed is not a socialist, but he is backed by many of them, and his demands for government-backed health insurance, hostility toward corporate power, and willingness to call Israel’s war a “genocide” represents a break from standard American liberalism. His campaign embodies a belief — contra the Democratic establishment — that the political system must change and that the left can plausibly build a base for that effort in heartland America. In that Caro town hall, that change felt like a possibility.

But “Tommy” represents the right’s counter to this vision. Not with rebuttal, but by fostering bigotry and smearing progressive politics as an alien import. Michigan State University political scientist Matt Grossmann told me Muslims are “one of the few demographics that voters are willing to express that they dislike.” Nearly 40% of voters in Michigan have admitted they’re less likely to support a Muslim candidate, and the GOP’s attacks on El-Sayed have mostly focused on him being a Muslim born to Egyptian immigrants to imply he’s a “risky” extremist.

Some politicians might react to such a political environment by affecting an air of amicability, but El-Sayed doesn’t. For some Michiganders, that makes him all the more appealing. I spoke to dozens of voters that week as I followed El-Sayed criss-crossing the state. Nearly every town hall attendee I spoke to described El-Sayed’s fierce speaking style — which routinely includes cutting down his opponents with harsh language — as a reason they were drawn to him.

“I like how he’s almost abrasive, like how honest and how raw he is, and the things that he’s honest and raw about,” Trevana, a 36-year-old customer service professional who lives in Midland, told me.

Alexus-Jo, a university financial aid office staffer who lives in rural Bay County, said she has in the past voted Republican and third party, and wasn’t planning to vote at all this time — but then she was moved by his tough persona: “I feel like establishment Democrats underestimate how volatile the general political climate is, and I feel like he’s not being stepped all over,” she said.

She added, “Seeing my Republican family members or people that aren’t Democrats say, ‘I don’t love the idea, but he’s got some things where I’m like, “OK, I’m listening,”’ that has really made me energized to get more into politics.”

My goal in Michigan was to see how a candidate aligned with the Bernie Sanders left connects with and persuades voters far from the deep-blue cities and districts where the movement has thrived — and how that candidate withstands right-wing attacks. El-Sayed is connecting with voters in a thoroughly purple state, it seems, by disregarding colors and labels.

“There’s no such thing called ‘progressive’ versus ‘conservative’ ideas, we make that up,” El- Sayed told me after a packed 500-person town hall at a theater in Bay City, a small urban center in a Trump-friendly county which, to his point, voted twice for President Barack Obama. “Red and blue are not real, those are not real things. What’s real is people are locked out of their politics by a system that allows big corporations and special interests to buy their politicians.”

The far left has long believed that appealing to people’s shared class interests can cut across cultural differences and pre-existing ideological barriers. El-Sayed’s race against Rogers will be the most consequential test of that theory in recent memory.

***

El-Sayed’s potential strength with swing voters can be placed in three buckets: his specific mode of charisma as a fighter; his focus on — and slightly misleading framing of — Medicare for All; and his ability to frame issues including foreign aid and crime in ways that can appeal to voters on the right and left.

In our era, anger at the status quo is a way to reach across the aisle. El-Sayed’s persona as a scrapper, enhanced by his conspicuously muscular physique, allows him to radiate populist energy at a time of bipartisan demand for it. A new TV ad campaign of his emphasizes his credibility going up against the “corrupt swamp” and the “elites” in Washington to highlight where MAGA Republicans might find something in common with his worldview.

When El-Sayed fired back at “Tommy,” in Caro, I agreed with his argument, but I also winced — condescension toward a town hall participant is usually gaffe territory. But that’s an old-school rhetorical norm, and it is precisely because El-Sayed responded so forcefully that he was effective. He kicked off a news cycle about Islamophobia and his campaign, brought broadly positive attention to himself in the mainstream press and on social media, and used the moment of confrontation to raise money.

Still, there are obvious potential downsides to such pugilism. El-Sayed was repeatedly panned for being patronizing toward his opponents during a primary he won by a narrow margin, and he might miss out on voters who prefer conciliatory or unity-focused orators.

When I asked El-Sayed, while riding on his campaign bus between Flint and Detroit, if he ever second-guessed his abrasive style, he answered, “I just am who I am.” He continued, “I like to build stuff. I rebuilt a health department, led another one, built programs. But too often, when you look at why we are not building for working people in America, it’s because of the insane politics from folks like Donald Trump and Mike Rogers and JD Vance. So if you’re coming to break the things that we want to build, yeah, I’m going to stand up to you.”

Virtually every voter I interviewed cited El-Sayed’s support for Medicare for All as a key point of interest. KFF, a health research group, found in September that 66% of Americans, including nearly 40% of Republicans, support “a national health plan, sometimes called Medicare-for-all, in which all Americans would get their insurance from a single government plan” — the highest share since they started asking the question about a decade ago. A top pollster in Michigan found support for Medicare for All in Michigan is at 62%.

Mark Brewer, a 65-year-old independent voter and retired construction worker who lives near the village of Mayville, told me he thought El-Sayed’s support for Medicare for All was a good idea. He has voted for libertarian candidates in the past, and told me he’s “financially conservative,” but was frustrated that the vast amount of money he spent on health insurance never guaranteed him care.

“I worked construction for 40 years. I paid $375,000 into health insurance during that time. The day I retired, it stopped,” he said. He said he was unhappy he had to go three years without insurance until he qualified for Medicare.

Tad Sumner, a 61-year-old Midland resident who works in banking and IT, said in 2016, he was for Hillary Clinton, not Bernie Sanders, but he has slowly moved to the left and toward El-Sayed’s healthcare views because “health care has become more and more profitized.”

People skeptical about Medicare for All are often afraid of losing the insurance they do have, as flawed as it is. How does El-Sayed put them at ease? “People are frustrated by the current system,” he told me. “I’m not interested in taking anything away. I’m interested in offering you a guarantee for health insurance, cradle to grave, without worrying about a network, or out of network, without worrying about a premium, copay or deductible.”

Unlike some advocates for Medicare for All, El-Sayed says his plan would not entail prohibiting duplicative private insurance. But as People’s Policy Project founder Matt Bruenig has pointed out in Jacobin, that’s effectively a sleight of hand. After a public plan emerges and many employers drop coverage of health insurance, it’s unlikely that people will be able to, or inclined to, purchase expensive private policies that duplicate coverage they’re already guaranteed. Moreover, private insurance would likely look quite different, if it still existed, Bruenig notes. Whether El-Sayed’s plan would formally allow private insurance is not really the issue — but his position that he doesn’t want to take anything away must make the idea go down easier for the skeptics.

El-Sayed has garnered a lot of attention for confidently characterizing Israel’s treatment of Gazans as a “genocide” and opposing unconditional aid to Israel. But the bulk of his foreign policy messaging during town halls and press interviews hasn’t focused on Israel. In those contexts, he has more generally called out militarism and argued that the U.S. should focus on spending at home.

The remark he made in Caro — “Shouldn’t be this hard to pay your taxes and know that that money’s going to be spent on you and your kids instead of dropping bombs on somebody else and their kids” — has cross-partisan appeal. With it, El-Sayed simultaneously connected foreign policy adventurism to depleted social services at home; issued a moral judgment by directing attention to the killing of innocents; and, because he didn’t name any countries, he condemned the U.S. backing Israel and the U.S. war with Iran simultaneously. There was something there for war-averse people across the political spectrum. That framing seemed to resonate with many voters I spoke to, some of whom approved of his position on Iran or Gaza, while many others said they approved of how El-Sayed’s foreign policy “put Michigan first.”

El-Sayed is running TV ads featuring a quote from the Detroit Free Press noting that he “Views foreign policy through an America First lens.” And he has found an unlikely supporter in right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson, who has described his outlook on foreign policy as “Trumpian.”

I asked El-Sayed if he wanted to be associated with an America First position, or if he would say other values inform his foreign policy worldview. “I definitely am America first,” El-Sayed said. “But my real value is I believe in international law, and I believe we need to be the first among equals to enforce international law.”

That poses some vexing questions and contradictions. Enforcing international law would seem to cut against the idea of focusing exclusively on American affairs. And he insisted on a “responsibility to support Ukraine.” That’s not what MAGA America First advocates want. But this part of El-Sayed’s worldview doesn’t feature in his messaging and doesn’t seem to be trickling through as much to voters, based on my conversations.

When crime came up at the town halls, El-Sayed positioned himself as an advocate for both the status quo and reform. Like socialist New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, El-Sayed has flipped on his previous support of “defund the police.” At Bay City, a voter asked about criminal justice reform in light of an unsolved murder of her peers. El-sayed emphasized “everybody should get to come home safely” — community members and police — and he spoke about funding the police in order to protect “recruitment, retention, and retirement.” He added that there should also be investment in community violence intervention and mental health response services. In other words: Fund the police and alternatives to policing.

When I asked if he took issue with “defund the police” as rhetoric or policy, he said, “It was a dumb idea and dumb rhetoric.”

While some proponents of criminal justice reform on the progressive left will take issue with El-Sayed’s turn to full-throated support for policing, his additive approach to reform has the potential to appeal to progressives and nonprogressives alike.

***

Will all of this come together for a winning ticket? El-Sayed’s calibration of progressive politics to the Rust Belt seem to be resonating enough with voters that he’s been able to maintain a lead, but his lead is narrower than the Democratic gubernatorial candidate’s lead over her Republican opponent in this state. He is massively outraising his opponent, but Rogers is a former seven-term U.S. representative with Trump’s backing and significant name recognition. El-Sayed has labored to make his campaign appealing to people across the political spectrum, but that doesn’t mean that they will overlook his party affiliation or discard racial prejudice. He could easily lose.

The Democratic base is not entirely a lock for him. El-Sayed was weak with Black voters in the primary, and whether they will turn out in large numbers for him is an open question that could decide the race. Tensions between the Arab and Black community in Michigan have been cited by strategists and reporters as an issue for El-Sayed. But the main issue may have less to do with race than with ideology. “A lot of his issues with Black voters are not necessarily specific to Black voters,” Grossmann, the Michigan State political scientist, told me. “Within the Democratic Party, Black voters are actually more likely to identify as moderate or conservative, and more likely to be skeptical of the Bernie wing of the party.”

The stakes of this race are exceptionally high. The outcome will not only be crucial in determining who controls the Senate, but will also shape conversations about 2028. According to a recording obtained by The New York Times, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-N.Y., who is considering a presidential run, said at a New York fundraiser in October that El-Sayed is part of a “generational project” for the progressive movement that could help “break the map.” She added, “If Abdul can win in Michigan, anybody can win anywhere.”

Undoubtedly, the outcome of El-Sayed’s race will be used to make the case that a democratic socialist like Ocasio-Cortez has a real chance at winning the White House — or shatter the argument. But a major confounding variable in this contest is that El-Sayed faces unique obstacles due to his identity.

Given that polls in Michigan detect real bias against Muslims and that Trump has won the state twice, I asked El-Sayed whether running as a progressive Muslim in an environment of rampant Islamophobia was asking too much. Had he been tempted to move toward the center?

“I don’t lie to people,” he said. “I tell them what I believe. I’m not willing to check my ideals at the door because of my identity. That’s what people hate about politics. I am who I am. I’ll tell you what I believe. If you agree with me, vote for me.”

He added, “Even if they might never want to vote for me because of my name, maybe by the end of my public service, they’ll think a little bit differently about what America is. Because America’s always been a place where people come together despite our differences to build together what we can’t alone. I believe in that.”

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