Abdul El-Sayed pulled off a remarkable victory over the Democratic establishment, overcoming a massive spending disadvantage and opposition from party leaders to win the Michigan Senate primary on a message of drastically changing the political system.
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Now, the same establishment that El-Sayed bested fears that the Bernie Sanders-backed former public health official is too liberal for the purple state and could put the Democratic path to taking the Senate at risk.
His one-percentage-point win Tuesday over Rep. Haley Stevens was much narrower than polls — and some El-Sayed fans — had projected. The results leave both the insurgent left wing of his party and the establishment bruised, and El-Sayed will need both factions if he hopes to win in November.
But it is unclear whether El-Sayed in the next phase of the race will embrace mainstream Democrats whose instincts during the primary were so wrong. Indeed, he has spent months discounting their point of view.
“The funny thing about this party is they think that they’re going to intimidate you out of standing up for the truth,” El-Sayed said in an interview last month. “I’m like, y’all don’t seem to get the picture.”
El-Sayed’s victory was far from assured when he entered the race in 2025 as an underdog who was best known for losing the 2018 primary for governor to Gretchen Whitmer by 22 percentage points.
He eked out his victory by winning young voters and highly educated voters — the traditional base for more liberal candidates — and he posted big enough numbers in suburbs and rural areas to keep Stevens at bay.
Several factors powered El-Sayed’s success in the face of being outspent by more than 8 to 1. He was a candidate whose core message — getting money out of politics — was only amplified when a super PAC allied with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other outside groups poured tens of millions of dollars into the race. He benefited from an antiestablishment fervor in the Democratic base that put Stevens, a four-term congresswoman backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (New York), on defense. And Stevens did not denounce AIPAC and Israel’s actions in Gaza, turning off many Democrats.
Spending on advertising in the race was lopsided, with $7.4 million spent for El-Sayed and $64.7 million for Stevens, according to ad-tracking firm AdImpact. Stevens received more than $30 million in help from television advertising by AIPAC’s super PAC as it sought to stop a candidate who has pushed for ending military aid to Israel.
“Haley’s support for Israel is an authentically held belief, and she was never going to walk that back or water it down,” said one Democrat who, like others involved in the primary, spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal discussions and speak candidly. “She also was caught a little bit off guard about the vitriol towards AIPAC. She didn’t realize that it had become this giant albatross until it was too late.”
Michigan is key to almost any conceivable path to a Democratic majority in the Senate, and winning the seat became tougher when the incumbent, Sen. Gary Peters, decided not to seek reelection and Whitmer, a popular two-term governor, passed on running. Michigan is among the nation’s toughest battlegrounds — one that Donald Trump narrowly won in 2016 and 2024 and narrowly lost in 2020.
Party insiders fear what the fall race will look like, citing polls showing El-Sayed faring worse than Stevens would have in November.
El-Sayed will face Republican Mike Rogers, a former congressman who narrowly lost a Senate race two years ago to Democrat Elissa Slotkin.
Slotkin, a former CIA analyst who was viewed as a moderate when she represented a swing House district, won by 0.3 percentage points in a year that was good for Republicans. El-Sayed is banking on progressive energy to carry him to victory in a year when Democrats believe momentum is on their side because of Trump’s sagging approval rating.
His close primary margin shows he may have a lot of work to bring together the Democratic coalition. Had he won more decisively, he could have more easily built an argument that an electrified base would boost turnout in November.
The Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, has promised to spend $45 million in the race, and on Wednesday it branded El-Sayed as an “extremist” and a “dangerous threat to the safety and freedoms of every American.” The Senate GOP’s campaign arm referred to him by his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, in an online video ad Wednesday, a sign Republicans plan to emphasize his Muslim identity. El-Sayed would be the nation’s first Muslim senator if elected.
Trump in a social media post called El-Sayed “a Communist loser who hates Jews and Israel” and called El-Sayed’s primary victory “great news for the Republican Party.”
The newly minted Democratic nominee dismissed the potency of attacks against him or his identity. “It turns out that you can spend as much money as you want on lies, but it doesn’t make them true,” El-Sayed said in his victory news conference in Detroit.
In a statement congratulating El-Sayed, Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (New York), who leads the Senate Democrats’ campaign operation, said their party is united by a “common purpose” of “putting a check on Donald Trump.”
“Abdul El-Sayed has run an energetic campaign that inspired thousands of Michiganders across the state, with a clear focus on lowering costs and standing up for working families,” Schumer and Gillibrand said.
El-Sayed does not identify as a socialist or democratic socialist, but he got assistance from those who do, including Sanders (I-Vermont), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and progressive streamer Hasan Piker.
El-Sayed has embraced a progressive agenda by calling for Medicare-for-all, taxing billionaires and getting money out of politics. Along the way, he has criticized members of his own party.
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“Do we want to be a party that easily raises money from corporations?” he told The Washington Post last month. “And the implicit answer is yes. That’s what the Chuck Schumer answer is, and my answer is no, we don’t.”
On Tuesday night, he urged his supporters to be magnanimous in victory.
“If your instinct is to be like, ‘I told you,’ nope,” he said. “Let’s come together to build a movement that’s even bigger, that’s even stronger, that’s even more powerful, that reaches into the very depths of this state, that reminds us the best of who we are and who we can be.”
In his path to victory, he performed well with groups that usually favor progressive candidates while making inroads with other parts of the Democratic electorate.
Stevens had an eight-point edge in the counties with the highest Black populations, while performing about even with El-Sayed in the state’s Whitest areas.
El-Sayed dominated in counties with the highest number of young adults, while Stevens won older counties by narrower margins, according to a Post analysis of election and demographic data. El-Sayed won in counties with highly educated voters by 10 points, about equal to Stevens’s margins in the least-educated counties.
El-Sayed performed well in urban areas outside Detroit, including Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids, both of which he won by about 25 points. Stevens led by about five points in Wayne County, which contains Detroit, and suburban counties across the state.
Democrats who worked on the race say that El-Sayed’s decision to campaign with Piker in April was a turning point — in a way that boosted El-Sayed.
El-Sayed’s campaign was taken aback at the blowback it received for hosting Piker, who has said America deserved the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and made blistering critiques of U.S. foreign policy. Mallory McMorrow, a state lawmaker who had positioned herself as a more electable progressive alternative to El-Sayed, slammed him for inviting Piker to Michigan, which appeared to turn off progressive voters who were considering her.
“It was just an opportunity for the online left to recognize that she was never going to be one of them,” a Democrat involved in the race said.
McMorrow had been pleading with Washington Democrats to stay out of the race, arguing that if they did not back Stevens, she could beat both her and El-Sayed.
But in June, millions of dollars in AIPAC advertising began flowing to support Stevens. McMorrow’s support collapsed in polls, and she dropped out in early July.
With the race down to just Stevens and El-Sayed, the focus turned to money. Stevens began questioning why El-Sayed had not yet released his financial disclosure forms, and El-Sayed ramped up his attacks by calling Stevens a tool of corporate money.
El-Sayed’s populist platform seemed designed for the moment, but campaign aides became nervous at a flood of spending it could not match.
“We always knew that AIPAC was going to come into the race,” said one member of El-Sayed’s team. “It was kind of shocking how fast and hard they came in.”
Stevens suffered a setback in June when the United Auto Workers endorsed El-Sayed, even though she had served as the chief of staff to President Barack Obama’s task force on rescuing the auto industry and built her campaign on being the candidate supporting manufacturing in the state. But then she racked up a raft of impressive in-state endorsements, including Whitmer and Peters, as Democrats in the state began to fear that El-Sayed could win the primary — and potentially lose the general election.
But by then, El-Sayed’s momentum appeared unstoppable and Stevens struggled to answer questions at debates and in interviews about the AIPAC money, which had begun to haunt her campaign.
Late one night a week before Election Day, she let her frustration with the issue show, writing on X that El-Sayed blames “all of your problems on Jewish Americans” in response to a video in which he criticized the group’s support for her. That was a sign, some Democrats said, that she saw the race slipping away from her for good.
The fight over Israel caught the attention of some Democratic voters.
Duane Gholston, 35, said he didn’t think El-Sayed could win in November and didn’t notice Stevens until he saw the viral videos mocking her appearance and mannerisms, including one where she said, “I see Israel in my dreams.”
“Getting Israel out of politics is my No. 1 issue,” Gholston said in an interview while he attended an El-Sayed rally in Detroit. “The Democrats who are pro-Israel are more focused on what’s going on in a foreign country. We want them to stop.”
Now that El-Sayed has taken down an establishment-backed candidate despite being heavily outspent, some Washington Democrats fear he won’t be amenable to their advice on how to pivot in the general election, and that holding Michigan will be more expensive for the party preparing to be drastically outspent by Republicans.
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“We really screwed the pooch on it,” one Stevens ally said.
Scott Clement and Theodoric Meyer contributed to this report.
