Every now and then, a Senate race sets the direction for an entire party. In 1991, a state official named Harris Wofford – advised by a foul-mouthed Cajun named James Carville – upset his far better-known Republican opponent to win a special election in Pennsylvania. He did it by promising to expand access to healthcare – and thus created a template for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign the following year.
If Abdul El-Sayed can follow up his victory in last night’s Democratic Senate primary by winning the general election in Michigan this fall, he will have created a template of his own. Despite his closer-than-expected margin of victory, his campaign offers a model for how Democrats across the country can answer the political challenge posed by Donald Trump.
By casting the Michigan Senate primary as yet another battle between progressive insurgents and establishment centrists, media coverage of El-Sayed’s campaign has tended to overlook what is innovative about it. Like Zohran Mamdani and the democratic socialists who have won House races in New York, Pennsylvania and Colorado, El-Sayed wants to end unconditional US military support for Israel. But while Mamdani sometimes discusses Israel purely through the language of human rights and international law – as he did in his recent video arguing that Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested as a war criminal – El-Sayed’s message is more nationalistic. He rarely discusses the Jewish state without linking it to Washington’s failure to address problems at home.
In a recent interview, the New Yorker editor, David Remnick, asked El-Sayed whether he supports one or two states in Israel-Palestine. El-Sayed did not take the bait. He replied that his focus was less on “what’s happening there rather than what’s happening here”. His primary concern, he explained, was that the US was allocating money for Israeli weapons that it could be spending on schools in Michigan. While acknowledging: “I believe in equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination, for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike,” he said: “It is not my job as an American policymaker to decide what the ultimate peace should be. But it is my job to make sure that our resources are stewarded correctly for the people I’m responsible for: those kids going to those broken schools.”
In relentlessly linking US military aid to Israel to unmet needs in the United States, El-Sayed is crafting a progressive version of America First. In 2016, Donald Trump exploited the resentment many Americans felt after a decade and a half of failed wars in the Middle East. Now, in the wake of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Trump’s war in Iran, El-Sayed is turning the tables. The difference is that Trump fused nationalism and imperialism: he said that the Iraq war was a mistake because the US sought to “make western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interests in becoming a western democracy”; the US, he said, should have taken Iraq’s oil. El-Sayed, by contrast, is fusing nationalism with progressivism. He’s not attacking the humanitarian assistance once offered by USAID. He’s condemning military aid to Israel (and also to Egypt, where his father was born) because it both violates human rights overseas and denies resources to Americans at home. This isn’t a message that only resonates with the American left. Last summer, the late rightwing activist Charlie Kirk tweeted that young conservatives “are skeptical about the state of America’s current relationship” with Israel “and they want to be confident America’s leaders are putting their own country first”. A poll in May by the Institute for Middle East Understanding found that by a margin of almost two-to-one, Republicans under the age of 45 prefer candidates who support reducing taxpayer-funded weapons sales to the Jewish state.
But El-Sayed’s campaign offers Democrats another lesson as well. He isn’t only showing them how to reclaim nationalism from the GOP. He’s also showing them how to turn the Republican party’s financial advantage against it. In the last five weeks of El-Sayed’s primary campaign, outside Super Pacs supporting his opponent, representative Haley Stevens, spent more than 12 times as much on television ads as did those supporting him. Most candidates can’t overcome that kind of disparity. But El-Sayed made it a source of strength. Again and again, he used Stevens’s financial support from the pro-Israel lobbying group Aipac – which contributed the bulk of the outside money on her behalf – against her. He also linked her to other unpopular special interests. His supporters ran a television ad highlighting the contributions she had received from the Michigan utility, DTE Energy, which is widely disliked for charging high rates and allowing recurring power outages.
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El-Sayed’s relentless focus on the source of Stevens’s donations turned her financial advantage into an electoral albatross. When the Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell asked a Michigan focus group why they didn’t like Stevens, “voters repeatedly brought up Aipac and the appearance of corporate influence.”
El-Sayed performed this political jujitsu against a fellow Democrat. But this fall, and probably again in 2028, Democrats across the country will be badly outspent by Republicans. Donald Trump has turned the federal government into a cash cow for corporations and billionaires who profit massively from his administration and return the favor by writing campaign checks. Elon Musk alone recently announced that he will spend at least $100m supporting Republican candidates this fall. Overall, reported MS Now late last month, the Republican National Committee, the Republican House and Senate campaign committees and GOP-aligned Super Pacs have raised almost $600m more than their Democratic counterparts.
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El-Sayed’s campaign offers a template for how Democrats can respond: make the money the issue. El-Sayed drew a connection between Stevens’s backing from AIipac and her support for US military aid to Israel. But other Democrats can brand their Republican opponents as lackeys not just of Aipac, but of Elon Musk, big oil, big pharma or AI – and highlight the connection between their campaign funds and their support for policies that hurt ordinary people.
This strategy requires Democrats to eschew corporate and special interest funding and run campaigns that rely primarily on small donors. There’s no guarantee this will work. Not all Democrats can deliver a populist message as effectively as El-Sayed. But the staggering corruption of Trump’s presidency, and the obscene wealth gap that his policies have helped create, presents them with an opportunity. Which means that El-Sayed’s model could prove effective far beyond Michigan.
There are many reasons Democrats have struggled to defeat the Trump-era GOP. But among them are these: Republicans have owned nationalism and populism. If Abdul El-Sayed can win this fall, he’ll have handed his party a roadmap for how to reclaim both. Democrats across the country should be taking notes.
