Michigan

Gird your loins, but the real fight is up ahead

Democrats behaving badly in Michigan Senate primary:

A week or two ago, candidate Abdul El-Sayed, until recently the director of the Department of Health, Human, and Veterans’ Services of Wayne County (that’s Detroit), was on television saying something he’d said before that I’d hoped more Democrats would be saying this year, that regardless of who won the primary that’s at last coming on Tuesday he intended to be campaigning for the defeat in November of Republican Mike Rogers (starting around 21:30 on the video) and ensure a Democratic victory. He didn’t actually mention the name of his Democratic rival, Haley Stevens, who represents the suburbs of Oakland County north of Detroit, but it’s hard to see who else he could have in mind, given that the two of them are the only candidates left in the race following the departure in early July of State Senator Mallory McMorrow (whose district straddles Wayne and Oakland Counties). In fact he and Stevens and McMorrow have all said it, repeatedly and decisively, and not walked it back even as the climate has gotten so much more unpleasant, and I’d like everybody to keep that in mind as we make an effort to process what’s what on the way to tomorrow’s primary.

I think El-Sayed (transcript edited by the original poster for brevity and lack of clarity: you can get a better idea of what he said listening to the TikTok version here) should have said maybe “the least capable candidate in the race”, meaning he and McMorrow both do a better job of sounding like candidates, or better yet alluded to her more delicately or not at all. It’s clearly the Evangelical “faith leader” and podcaster former Rep. Rogers that Aipac (the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee superpac) wants to elect, but he’s unopposed in the primary, so it would be throwing away money to start spending it on him so early, and it has spent an extraordinary $54 million so far, not attacking El-Sayed’s views on Israel, however, but alleged disrespect for women, as Jewish Insider reported:

The 30-second ad highlights El-Sayed’s “long history of disrespecting women,” including criticisms of former First Lady Michelle Obama and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

The ad also highlights a discrimination lawsuit — in which El-Sayed was not a defendant — that claimed he told a woman he wouldn’t work with anyone over the age of 40, as well as allegations that he attempted to pay an employee to keep silent about his disparaging comments about women.

This is consistent with Aipac’s current approach to its basic task of ensuring a Netanyahu-friendly US Congress, disguising its identity and issues, often behind the name of an apparently left-leaning PAC like this report from March in Axios:

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Driving the news: Chicago Progressive Partnership — which shares vendors, donors and a treasurer with other AIPAC-linked PACs — went on the air Thursday against Junaid Ahmed, the Congressional Progressive Caucus-backed candidate in Illinois’ 8th district.

• Rather than going after Ahmed’s well-documented criticisms of Israel, the CPP ad highlights the left-leaning tech consultant’s personal wealth.

• It also cites an investment in Tesla that he disclosed in 2022 to tie him to Trump ally Elon Musk, and says he consulted for fossil fuel companies.

• The group has run a similar ad campaign against Kat Abughazaleh in Illinois’ 9th district, alleging the outspoken Palestinian-American progressive received funds from “right-wing donors” and noting her past Republican views as a teenager.

It’s my opinion that Aipac is floundering somewhat in the face of Israel’s unpopularity, not merely in the US, but in particular among American Jews since Israel’s genocidal revenge campaign in Gaza killing 70,000 Palestinians and counting, mostly women and children, as collective punishment for the Hamas forces’ massacre of 1200 mostly Jewish Israelis, evident in Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 defeat of Aipac-backed ex-governor Andrew Cuomo in the NewYork mayoral election and especially since Prime Minister Netanyahu hoodwinked our dim president Donald Trump into a financially destructive war with Iran at the end of this February, which clearly played an important role in the June primary victory of (Jewish and anti-Netanyahu) Brad Lander over (Jewish and Aipac-backed) incumbent Daniel Goldman.

The strategy in Illinois’s 9th of focusing on defeating Kat Abughazaleh was a factor in giving the primary victory to (Jewish and anti-Netanyahu) Dan Biss, who is now overwhelmingly likely to become yet another voice for restricting US arms sales to Israel, and made a similar error when their attacks on Tom Malinowski in New Jersey’s 7th ended up giving victory to the relatively radical Analilia Mejia, who will now have an easier than expected time beating incumbent Republican Thomas Kean, Jr., after his three-month disappearance during the campaign getting secret treatment for depression.

The interesting thing about the Michigan campaign for me has been the fate of Mallory McMorrow, who I was thinking of as the MS-NOW candidate, representing a very solidly progressive position on everything including opposition to arms for Israel, but in a way perhaps less threatening to some Michiganders than somebody named Abdulrahman El-Sayed (she’s not Jewish but her husband is; El-Sayed is a Muslim and child of immigrants from Egypt). It took me a long time to find a persuasive take on what caused her polling and fundraising to collapse at the end of June—I figured that must be Aipac too, but couldn’t find any real evidence of that.

In the end it looks like McMorrow did it herself, according to the Facebook account of the Michigan Democratic Progressives, with a little too much triangulation between the poles of the campaign:

Long adept at cable news interviews and creating viral moments online, Ms.
McMorrow began to bleed support in public polling after she condemned Dr.
El-Sayed for campaigning in March with Hasan Piker, the left-wing streamer
who has defended Hamas and called Israel “an apartheid state.”

The move backfired quickly. Her remarks helped burnish Dr. El-Sayed’s claim
that he was the lone progressive candidate in the race and the one most
willing to criticize American funding of the Israeli military. And she won
little support from moderate voters as millions of dollars of pro-Stevens
advertising poured into the state from the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee and other groups.

It looks now as if El-Sayed is certain to win the primary very convincingly, showing that Stevens’s judgment wasn’t really very good (her comparison of their 2018 primary results is flawed, in that he was running against the very popular governor Gretchen Whitmer and came out second of three, 30.2 to 52 percent, and Stevens running against a handful of unknowns won with 27 percent). Also, please don’t address your opponent as “buddy” and “bro” and for the love of God don’t falsely say that he “blames all his problems on Jewish Americans” when a significant number of his most enthusiastic followers are Jewish Americans who will recognize this as an absurd lie, while the Jewish voters who might believe you are almost certainly voting Republican anyway (they’ll just quote you on Facebook making you look bad to your friends).

It’s not so clear that El-Sayed will be able to beat Reverend Rogers in November, but I see a lot of reasons for hopefulness: he’s got a real charisma and speaks well on a number of subjects where Republicans are especially weak: including public health (he’s an epidemiologist by training) and the need to abolish ICE (Michiganders, in the awful hangover of having voted for Trump two years ago, hate ICE) and food insecurity and housing, and he’s absolutely ready for the kind of “fighting” campaign Democrats have been screaming for. And as much as Democrats seem to hate Democrats at the historical moment, they’re fond of their own local ones; Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and James Carville may never be able to endorse El-Sayed (I expect Jeffries will ultimately, fashionably late), but the Michigan Democratic establishment absolutely will, down to McMorrow and Stevens, and so will a range of celebrity politicians from Sanders to Obama. And a lot of people understand the importance of this year; Democratic turnout should be massive all over the place. So don’t despair.

From an April appearance at Michigan State University, East Lansing, photo by Cooper Schwartz/The State News.