Just a few hours before Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan last night, he told me that he was going to “beat the shit” out of his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, in the November general election. His tactic, he explained in a Detroit farmers’ market yesterday, would be to “staple his [Rogers’] sins to his forehead.” What those sins were, El-Sayed wouldn’t say. He has in the past criticized Rogers as a “corporate shill” who prioritized pharmaceutical and corporate interests over Michiganders while in Congress.
November looks likely to be a fight between capitalism and communism
In truth, although he did scrape to victory last night, it was El-Sayed who almost had the shit beaten out of him by Haley Stevens, a mainstream Democrat. Going into the contest, polls gave El-Sayed a 20 point lead. NBC have declared him the winner, but the vote is close. Ballots are still being counted and, at the time of writing, Associated Press has him on 48.6 percent versus Stevens’s 47.3. Stevens, it seems, couldn’t quite “stick it ‘em” as she vowed to do in a viral video.
El-Sayed inspired such little enthusiasm for his progressive agenda that it seems unlikely he can beat Rogers in November. Confidence is also falling in the much-predicted midterm Blue Wave. With so many Democrat candidates standing on a Democratic Socialists of America platform, the fear is that voters will view the party as too radical and it will miss the golden opportunity of slumping Republican poll numbers.
The list of sins El-Sayed hopes to pin on Rogers will have to be long and damaging if he is to beat him. A recent survey – not that such things have proved particularly accurate in Michigan – showed El-Sayed losing to Rogers in midterms by 10 points. The same poll found that Stevens would have beaten Rogers by a slim margin. Independent voters favored Rogers over El-Sayed by more than 27 points.
But beat him he must if the Democrats are to retain this seat and regain control of the Senate. The party needs a net gain of four seats this fall to take the chamber. If El-Sayed falls short, he might end up turning out to be Trump’s secret weapon.
Although El-Sayed has tried to distance himself from the DSA, senior members – most notably The Squad and Bernie Sanders – have endorsed him. “I am not somebody who is a socialist. I believe in capitalism, I just believe that capitalism has to be regulated,” he told CNN.
It’s hard to see where any of his policies really diverge from those of the DSA. He wants Medicare for all, to break up healthcare monopolies, to lower the cost of drugs, and to tax billionaires. He promotes unions and is a sustained critic of Israel and AIPAC, so much so that Stevens accused him of lapsing into anti-Semitism. “Everyone in America understands you want to blame all of your problems on Jewish Americans,” she told him.
On Monday El-Sayed campaigned with Hasan Piker, an influential left-wing political commentator, who has described Hamas as “a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state” and who once said “America deserved 9/11.”
The only thing El-Sayed appears not to like about the DSA is the label. Terms like “socialism” are not popular in purple Michigan, a crucial swing state that Trump took in 2024, Biden in 2020, Trump in 2016 and Barack Obama in 2012. If El-Sayed goes on to lose, it bodes ill for the DSA insurgency and their dream of President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The DSA has rung up big victories of late. Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York last year ushered in a slate of DSA candidates, many of whom won their races for state legislatures last month. Across the country in blue enclaves, the DSA is on the march.
Yet many of the DSA’s long-term goals, such as abolishing the prison system, opening the borders, defunding the Pentagon and getting rid of the Senate, are not goals shared by most Americans. There is a real risk that the DSA is getting high on its own supply.
Just look at last night’s result in Missouri, where Cori Bush – a former Squad member – lost her challenge against Wesley Bell. Bush was turfed out of office in 2024 by Bell thanks, in part, to her obsessive focus on Israel. In his victory speech last night, Bell said: “What we’ve seen over and over is talking about an issue that is not impacting folks right here in St. Louis, and while we take those issues seriously, you know, the M in Missouri doesn’t stand for Middle East – it stands for Missouri.”
The Michigan midterms will be about domestic politics too. Rogers told the New York Post yesterday that he believes El-Sayed is too “radical” to win in Michigan.“This is that fight between Democratic socialists who want to take America into a dark, dreary, inopportune place. Or somebody who believes in the hope of America.”
November looks likely to be a fight between capitalism and communism. It is the dichotomy that Trump has chosen. “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty,” he said last month. The problem for the Democrats is just how close El-Sayed’s victory was last night. He won with young, suburban, and white college educated voters. Stevens seems to have wrapped up the working class, rural and black voters. The question, then, is who truly represents the disenfranchised? The Republicans hope that, by November, it’ll be them.
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