Abdul El-Sayed wins Michigan Democratic Senate primary
Abdul El-Sayed defeats Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary.
The divide between Michigan Democrats was so tight that it took another dawn to declare the winner.
The morning after the Aug. 4 primary, leftist insurgent Abdul El-Sayed finally claimed the Democratic nomination in the state’s crucial Senate race, riding a tide of younger and disenchanted voters to defeat establishment choice Haley Stevens.
But the closeness of the contest against the centrist congresswoman, more competitive than statewide polls had predicted, did more to underscore than to settle the fierce debate about the direction of the party − and its prospects in November.
As votes were being counted, El-Sayed urged his supporters to “begin to mend fences” in an effort to defeat Republican Mike Rogers in November. “However much we might disagree with our Democratic opponent, there is so much more that unites us than divides us,” he said.
Uniting the party may not be easy, though. His victory after an onslaught of opposition spending by outside groups was a rejection not only of Stevens but also of the power brokers who had lined up behind her, from Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Instead, Michigan Democrats voted, narrowly, to shake things up.
Just three months before Election Day, Michigan’s contest stood as the most significant test to date of whether the Democratic prescription for the midterms this fall − and the presidential election in 2028 − should focus more on appealing to swing voters in the middle or on energizing new voters on the left.
For better or worse, the Republican Party has a defining leader in President Donald Trump at a time Democrats are facing an identity crisis in full public view. In a CNN/SSRS Poll in July, nearly 6 in 10 Democrats and voters who lean Democratic said the party needed major changes or complete reform.
Democrats remain reasonably confident of taking control of the House of Representatives and hopeful of challenging Republicans for the Senate in November’s midterm elections. They are counting on Trump’s dismal approval ratings to help give them a platform for power in Washington after two years on the sidelines.
But that optimism is being tempered by concerns over message and money.
Michigan’s race is part of that nervousness. To win control of the Senate, a high bar, Democrats must flip four Republican-held seats while holding all their own. Some strategists worry that keeping the seat now held by retiring Sen. Gary Peters just got harder.
Let’s look at the numbers
This year’s primaries have been a season in the sun for the Democratic left.
But it’s one thing for Democratic officeholders to be uprooted by leftist candidates in New York City and a Denver-centered congressional district. In those deep blue precincts, newcomers affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America seized nominations from the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and a 15-term veteran of Congress. Progressive contenders also have won nominations over an incumbent congressman in New York and a two-term governor in Maine.
In Michigan, the political landscape is purple, a quintessential swing state that Democrat Barack Obama carried in 2008 and 2012, Trump won in 2016, Democrat Joe Biden won in 2020 and Trump regained in 2024.
Even so, El-Sayed waged an unapologetically liberal campaign that blasted Democratic leaders as too timid for the times, embraced “Medicare for all” and other progressive programs, and denounced Israel’s war in Gaza as a “genocide.”
His lead of roughly 15,000 votes among more than 1.5 million cast was closer than the double-digit percentage edge several recent statewide surveys had found, and his core support was different from the party’s classic coalition.
El-Sayed gained momentum by drawing the most liberal voters and White voters with college degrees. He led in Dearborn and other Arab American neighborhoods in the Detroit suburbs, and he swamped Stevens among younger voters and in college towns like Ann Arbor and East Lansing.
In contrast, Stevens drew her strongest support from Black voters in Detroit and from seniors. She did well in working-class communities in the suburbs, and she carried many of the more conservative and predominantly White rural counties.
“The Democratic coalition is undergoing a pretty significant transformation in real time,” Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist who has worked in Senate and presidential campaigns, told USA TODAY. With the party’s brand “compromised” among disenchanted voters, “our establishment leaders are going to have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable allies with newer voices.”
It’s a tightrope, he said.
“There is just as much risk in this moment to alienating the grassroots base of the Democratic Party … as there is alienating those in the middle.”
Stevens, a four-term congresswoman born in the Detroit suburb of Rochester Hills in 1983, is a political scrapper with a Michigander accent that went viral during the campaign. El-Sayed, who was born in Rochester Hills in 1984, the son of Egyptian immigrants, is a former public health official who has amassed a sizable online following and the support of top progressives such as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
If he wins in November, he would be the first Muslim member of the Senate.
El-Sayed accused Stevens of being in the pocket of AIPAC and other pro-Israel outside groups that contributed millions of dollars to her campaign. Stevens depicted El-Sayed as an elitist and celebrity wannabe who blames “American Jews” for all his problems.
After that bruising primary campaign, the task of getting her supporters to back him is likely to be daunting.
Republican Mike Rogers’ attack: ‘He’s so radical’
Republicans have already united behind Rogers, a former congressman who ran unopposed in the GOP primary. He has signaled his eagerness to take on El-Sayed.
“If he wins, I think we’re in good shape,” Rogers said in a private phone call with supporters in July, reported by CNN. “I mean, I think he’s so radical.” Later, in an interview with Fox News Digital, he mocked the Democrat. “Abdul, he has his own special sauce of crazy,” he said.
The latest public poll, released the day before the election by EPIC-MIRA, showed Rogers leading El-Sayed by 3 percentage points − but trailing Stevens by 2 percentage points − in a general-election matchup.
He came within a hairbreadth of winning the state’s other Senate seat in 2024, losing by less than half a percentage point to Democrat Elissa Slotkin.
Then Democrats faced headwinds in the 2024 campaign, which featured a messy switch at the top of the ticket after President Joe Biden withdrew under fire. Now, the headwinds are hampering the GOP, led by a president with sagging approval ratings amid economic angst and an unpopular war in Iran.
But the GOP’s significant financial advantage in the fall continues to widen as the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, pledged that his super PAC would spend at least $100 million on the midterms. Trump’s own super PAC, MAGA Inc., reports it has $400 million in the bank, as much as the Democratic and Republican party organizations combined.
Republicans hope for and some Democrats fear repercussions from the rise of candidates on the left, especially those affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America. The DSA’s national platform proposes drafting a new Constitution and abolishing the Senate as well as replacing capitalism with “a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods and society.”
Trump says the Democratic Party has been taken over by “hardcore, godless communists” − though in fact only a handful of Democratic candidates are members of the DSA, and they don’t identify as communists. For his part, El-Sayed says he is a capitalist, not a socialist.
Now the battle to define the Democratic Party heads from Michigan to the swing state next door.
In Wisconsin, state Rep. Francesca Hong, a chef and restaurant owner who is a member of the DSA, is seeking the gubernatorial nomination in the state’s Aug. 11 primary. Increasingly frantic efforts by centrist Democrats to oppose her have stumbled: The early front-runner pulled out of the race after campaign finance irregularities, and another dropped out amid allegations of sexual misconduct.
Hong led the field at 38% in a Marquette University Law School poll in late July, a double-digit edge over the other candidates.
One-third of Democrats, however, were still undecided.
On (to) Wisconsin.