The ad placed by the left-wing commentator Cenk Uygur was not broadcast on television but has drawn attention online.
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Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate in Michigan’s competitive Senate race, distanced himself this week from an outside group’s incendiary ad that tied rising costs in the United States to its role in the war in Gaza.
The one-minute spot from the group Rebellion PAC shows a man and a woman in a grocery store going through various items for their kids’ lunch when she tells him to put a carton of eggs back on the shelf.
“They don’t like eggs anymore?” the man asks.
“No, they like eggs. But we have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians,” she answers, before decrying the cost of supplying arms to Israel in its war on Gaza.
The ad has had a minimal footprint in a battleground state being pummeled with appeals to voters. Rebellion PAC, whose founder used a similar spot in his presidential bid two years ago, has reported spending $10,000 against the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers, in text message blasts, $1,000 in digital ads and no money on television.
But it has nonetheless drawn pushback from some prominent Democratic supporters of Israel as the party struggles over the war in Gaza, which has fractured Democrats before and is likely to reemerge in the 2028 contest.
Rebellion PAC was originally registered to support an unsuccessful House run by the left-wing commentator Cenk Uygur, according to FEC filings. Uygur first ran a version of the ad in 2024 during his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The political action committee now frames itself as a populist group opposed to both President Donald Trump and Democratic leadership.
Uygur said his PAC is “not super resource intensive” but has received high engagement online.
“As soon as this ad took off and people loved it, I knew that everyone in Washington would hate it because it leads to people saying, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t fund our beloved Israel,’” Uygur said in an interview. “There’s nothing that makes Washington angrier than that.”
El-Sayed spokeswoman Roxie Richner said in a statement that the ad was “not affiliated in any way” with the campaign of the former public health official.
“Abdul is focused on pushing back against Trump’s agenda that is raising prices for Michiganders. No one speaks for Abdul but himself and his campaign,” Richner said.
The Rogers campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment, though Rogers posted on X that Uygur, who is the uncle of streamer Hasan Piker, “is bankrolling anti-Israel ads for @AbdulElSayed” and said Piker and El-Sayed are “still too extreme for Michigan.”
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Both candidates say they view the election as a test of which party might bring down the rising cost of groceries and gas. But in some political circles, the race is also become a testing foreign policy, particularly highlighting some tensions around the issue among Democrats. The ad struck a nerve.
Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Michigan), a vocal supporter of Israel who clashed with El-Sayed on Gaza and narrowly lost to him in the Democratic primary, re-shared the ad online with a warning that “this type of fearmongering about Israel is wrong.”
“Do we need to lower costs by building more homes, securing people’s health care, and creating a fairer federal tax code? Yes, we do!!” she wrote on X. “How we do so is not by blaming the high costs of our goods on the only Jewish homeland in the world.”
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-New York), who lost his primary over his support for Israel, also went after the ad online.
“If @AbdulElSayed truly means what he says about treating the Jewish community as he would treat his own children, then he would immediately condemn this dangerous ad,” Goldman wrote on X.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the most prominent pro-Israel lobby group, has funneled tens of millions through its super PAC to support Goldman and Stevens. The group is now spending more than $9 million to support Rogers, whose allies at one point reportedly asked AIPAC not to contribute money to his campaign directly.
Uygur pushed back on notions of the ad as antisemitic, noting that the ad ends with footage of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and two of his far-right allies — not other Jewish figures.
A Fox News poll found that El-Sayed’s one-point lead among all voters increases to an eight-point advantage among those who consider Israel “extremely important” to their vote. A majority of Michigan voters at 54 percent say they support reducing or eliminating military aid to Israel, compared with 61 percent of independents.
Faye Nemer, who founded a Michigan-based chamber of commerce that focuses on the Middle East and North Africa, said she voted for Trump in 2024 and hosted him that year in the heavily Arab American city of Dearborn.
But she said in a recent interview that she was frustrated that money seemed to be going toward conflicts overseas when the president had campaigned on “America First” policies.
“We’re seeing the allocation of that [defense] budget to these unnecessary wars,” said Nemer, 40, “where it could be doing some of the things he committed to, like making the cost of living more affordable.”
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Erin Cox and Laura Beveridge contributed to this report.
