The Democratic Party is at war with itself, and nowhere is the battle more evident than in the Michigan Senate primary. On one side: Representative Haley Stevens, backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the establishment, who says the left is untested and too extreme to win a general election. On the other hand: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official who wants to explode the whole basis of the question.
More than 40 million dollars Outside money has already poured into the race — much of it from pro-Israel groups lining up against El-Sayed — because it’s less a Senate primary than a proxy battle for where the party is going. And in the middle of it sits the terrible word: ability to be selected.
The term has become a catchphrase used by Democrats to include whatever approach they think is most likely to win the general election.
This week America, ReallyI sat down with El-Sayed about what his The theory of selection makes sense.
Here are three takeaways from our conversation:
1. His electoral standard is the “America First” argument.
El-Sayed takes two things that his critics see as a liability – his opposition to US support for Israel and his popularity – and combines them into a single tableau debate: money going abroad is not money for you. Anti-war politics and affordability policy become one and the same.
“My priority is money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for all. That’s what I’m campaigning for,” he said. That reminded me of a similar argument I heard from Darializa Avila Chevalier, the socialist candidate who won the rebel congressional primary in New York City.
“Children need glasses, children need schools, children need infrastructure that works,” El-Sayed continued, explaining his case. “And I’m going to get the money that we’re sending to do nasty things to other people and keep it here.”
He says that elevation appeals to more voters than traditional leftists: Voters, he says, feel that the government is making them “not able to afford my groceries, not able to afford my house… and then (is) sending my money abroad telling me that somehow that’s for my benefit?”
2. He rejects the left-right dichotomy
El-Sayed also frequently rejected the left-right spectrum altogether. His reading in Michigan isn’t that voters continue to struggle between extremes — it’s that they’re looking for a new kind of politics, one that neither traditional party was offering. Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, Donald Trump in the general election of that cycle, Joe Biden in 2020, Trump again in 2024. Not whiplash, he says. It’s hunger. And that hunger rearranges the whole map.
“If the people of Michigan wanted moderates, why would they elect Donald Trump twice?” he asked.
“The best way to think about our politics is top-down: locked-out versus lock-out people. And if you’re on the lock-out side, you’re going to have a really hard time in our politics right now.”
With this system, El-Sayed thinks he can make a bigger difference to Republican nominee Mike Rogers than his Democratic counterpart.
“Both Mike Rogers, a Republican, and Haley Stevens, my opponent in this primary, have been on the side of the lockouts,” he said. “They take their money and do what they want.”
3. Administrators are hiding
The Stevens campaign declined multiple requests for comment — which is increasingly a trend on the Democratic establishment’s side of the party’s civil war. If you want to turn left, they will talk. But if you are interested in their vision, they are not ready to be open. In some cases, it seems like the moderate Democrats are afraid of their own shadow.
But that is also a political strategy. Stevens and his allies in groups like Third Way are making a bet: that if they can turn the race into a decision about El-Sayed himself — Hasan Piker’s streams, old campaign clips, a cannon caricature — voters will panic and return to safe options.
El-Sayed said the tactic is an insult to voters: “It’s fun to take political advice from a shop that exists specifically to deface old ideas and make them seem new again – and then, like, fail at that.”
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