{"id":563,"date":"2026-07-09T14:39:58","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T14:39:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=563"},"modified":"2026-07-09T14:39:58","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T14:39:58","slug":"could-abdul-el-sayed-upend-democratic-politics-for-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=563","title":{"rendered":"Could Abdul El-Sayed Upend Democratic Politics for Good?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Around 1 pm<\/span> on an overcast Fourth of July, I sat with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed on a park bench by the shores of Reeds Lake in East Grand Rapids, Michigan. The populist US Senate candidate had just finished walking his third parade of the day, tossing hundreds of pieces of candy and campaign pins, mostly to children, some of whom looked disappointed to get buttons instead of candy. El-Sayed was wearing a stars-and-stripes cowboy hat and bicep-hugging black T-shirt, in which he\u2019d started off the day by dancing to Taylor Swift\u2019s \u201cYou Belong With Me\u201d for a video that quickly went viral. He did not look classically senatorial, nor did he attempt to sound it.<\/p>\n

Read more Pedro S\u00e1nchez Is Living on Borrowed Time<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe world is not an episode of The West Wing<\/em>,\u201d El-Sayed insisted, after I mentioned that he seemed more confrontational than during his widely covered but unsuccessful 2018 run for the Michigan governorship. El-Sayed has called his Democratic opponent, Representative Haley Stevens, nothing more than \u201ca suit with a large AIPAC bank account.\u201d He has described the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers, as having \u201cthe charisma of a doorknob\u201d and \u201cthe aesthetic of the guy at a country club who sneers at you from his Lincoln.\u201d El-Sayed has promised that by the time he finished with Rogers, pieces of him would be \u201cscattered all over the state of Michigan,\u201d although he clarified that he meant \u201cpolitically\u201d rather than bodily.<\/p>\n

El-Sayed told me that these harsh comments are not slips of the tongue. Polls show Democrats want politicians who fight for them, and are sick of those who follow James Carville\u2019s advice to \u201croll over and play dead.\u201d For El-Sayed, the fear of seeming \u201cmean\u201d gives the advantage to bullies like Trump. \u201cWhat did you think fighting was?\u201d El-Sayed asked me. Being meek and polite when the times call for blunt talk, he says, \u201cis why we lose.\u201d<\/p>\n

With his credentialed background and soaring speeches, El-Sayed was compared to a left-wing Barack Obama during his first run for office. But he says that Obama\u2019s conciliatory approach toward Republicans produced disappointing results. While \u201cas a man and as a statesman, [Obama] was unparalleled in our time,\u201d El-Sayed told me, \u201cone of the big lessons that I\u2019ve learned is [Republicans] are never going to negotiate with you in good faith, so at the end of the day, don\u2019t give an inch on the things that people need, don\u2019t go in there assuming the compromise because they\u2019re going to fight it tooth and nail.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so you won\u2019t find El-Sayed paying cordial tribute to the fundamental decency of Republican candidate Mike Rogers. \u201cI have zero love lost for Mike Rogers,\u201d he told me. \u201cHe is a scion of a system that is picking people\u2019s pockets left and right. I\u2019m coming for him. I\u2019m coming for his political future. I want to make sure he never gets to run for office again, because everybody will remember what happened to him in 2026.\u201d Rogers recently threatened to sue El-Sayed for calling him a \u201cpharma lobbyist,\u201d which Rogers is not, although he did receive substantial campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry and arguably served their interests in Congress. (El-Sayed may have been following LBJ\u2019s famous notion that it\u2019s worth it to make your opponent deny an outrageous charge. In a blatantly insincere apology, he said: \u201cMy mistake\u2026 When I say Mike Rogers, do not think of a pharma lobbyist. When I say pharma lobbyist, do not think of a Mike Rogers.\u201d)<\/p>\n

But behind the trash talk and weightlifting videos, El-Sayed is at heart a policy wonk. A Rhodes Scholar with an MD and a PhD, he taught epidemiology at Columbia, and his Google Scholar page is eye-glazingly long. He is not just an advocate for Medicare for All but cowrote the most comprehensive scholarly book on it, a densely end-noted volume from Oxford University Press, as well as co-editing the textbook Systems Science and Population Health<\/em>, also published by Oxford. Through stretches as health director for both the city of Detroit and Wayne County, El-Sayed focused on small interventions that could improve lives, like giving free eyeglasses to poor children and testing schools for lead.<\/p>\n

El-Sayed is not, however, a technocrat stressing incremental tweaks. He wants to fundamentally overhaul the political system, which he says is \u201cspitting out billionaires while union participation is at an all-time low.\u201d He wants to \u201cend the system that allows these 527s and 501(c)(4)s and super PACs to buy politicians and rig the system against us.\u201d In 2018, he described his campaign as an effort to \u201ctake and build on what [Bernie Sanders] had done\u201d two years prior. Bernie, he told me, taught him that \u201cstanding consistently and deliberately and passionately and confidently on principle matters.\u201d<\/p>\n

El-Sayed is running as much against Chuck Schumer as against Donald Trump, drawing applause when he says that anything Schumer and Trump agree on is probably bad for the country. They agree, he says, that we can\u2019t have universal healthcare, that we have to send money to Israel, and that \u201cit\u2019s more important to give a corporation a fat check than to raise the minimum wage for everybody.\u201d Plus: \u201cGo talk to Chuck Schumer and Donald Trump and they both agree that I shouldn\u2019t be inside the US Senate!\u201d (Schumer has not publicly endorsed in the race but has privately signaled his support for Stevens.)<\/p>\n

At a July 3 rally in Grand Rapids\u2019 historic Harris Building, El-Sayed electrified a crowd of mostly young supporters by lambasting a rigged political system. For El-Sayed, ineffective Democrats are just as much a cause of the country\u2019s woes as tyrannical Republicans. \u201cDonald Trump is not himself the disease of our politics, Donald Trump is the worst symptom of that disease. The disease is a system that allows big corporations, billionaires, special interests like AIPAC to buy and sell politicians that rig the system against us.\u201d He promised to \u201cmobilize union organizing in every single sector of American life,\u201d and to tax billionaires. El-Sayed drew especially large cheers when he promised to cut off unconditional military aid to Israel. \u201cWhy should our tax dollars get misappropriated abroad to buy bombs and tanks for other people\u2019s countries instead of buying schools and healthcare for our own?\u201d<\/p>\n

El-Sayed has been called \u201cthe Mamdani of the Midwest,\u201d and like Zohran Mamdani, he has built his campaign around a few simple economic promises. Mamdani liked to have audiences fill in the blanks to finish his sentences (\u201cFreeze the\u2026\u201d \u201cRENT!\u201d), and El-Sayed does the same with his own three signature slogans. Rally-goers know the points by heart and shout them out:<\/p>\n

\u201cMoney in your\u2026\u201d \u201cPOCKET!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMoney out of\u2026\u201d \u201cPOLITICS!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMedicare for\u2026\u201d \u201cALL!\u201d<\/p>\n

A Sanders-style insurgency may resonate better now than it did when El-Sayed ran eight years ago. With Donald Trump back in office, there is a \u201chunger for anti-establishment fighters\u201d among a Democratic base looking for leaders who do more to fight back than sending strongly worded letters. Leftists backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have recently been winning improbable victories, including Mamdani\u2019s successful New York City mayoral campaign, the ousting of the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Adriano Espaillat, by democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier, and the victory of Melat Kiros in Colorado, who showed that the phenomenon may be spreading outside New York.<\/p>\n

But it is an open question whether staunch progressivism can win in Michigan. El-Sayed is not a DSA member, but he is a proud Berniecrat, and the conventional wisdom is that this makes him less electable in a \u201cpurple\u201d state that voted for Obama, Trump, Biden, and then Trump again. The centrist think tank Third Way has published a list of \u201cTen Reasons Why Mamdani Politics Won\u2019t Win Outside of NYC,\u201d arguing that \u201cthe far left doesn\u2019t flip swing seats.\u201d Eric Levitz of Vox<\/em> has argued that \u201cto date, the insurgent left has demonstrated little ability to win\u201d in \u201cpurple-to-red jurisdictions.\u201d Stevens and her backers argue that El-Sayed is a risky choice. Former senator Debbie Stabenow said that Democratic senators who supported El-Sayed or Mallory McMorrow (who suspended her campaign on July 5) \u201cdon\u2019t know Michigan.\u201d At their first one-on-one debate, Stevens told El-Sayed that the GOP wants him to defeat her, because they think it will be \u201ceasier for Mike Rogers to win if you are the nominee.\u201d If El-Sayed wins in August, and then in November, it would deal a devastating blow to the theory that purple states want centrists. What if brash anti-corporate populism is not, in fact, a liability in Michigan? What if it is an electoral advantage? What then?<\/p>\n

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Dan Scott, a social worker I spoke with at an El-Sayed event in Grand Rapids, says the whole premise that Democrats should run to the center in order to win Michigan is based on a misunderstanding of the state\u2019s political culture. \u201cPeople always say Michigan is a purple state. It\u2019s bullshit. Michigan is a populist state. It\u2019s a labor state.\u201d Scott says that he grew up among Trump supporters and still shoots and hunts with them. \u201cI can kick it with those guys, and get them talking excitedly about Medicare For All. If we can get someone like Abdul\u2026when they see their lives get better, when they see their small towns not getting decimated by corporate policy, I think they\u2019ll shift.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ivan Diaz, a 28-year-old democratic socialist candidate for the Michigan state Senate, said he\u2019d already seen a shift. \u201cPeople are so fed up,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re done with parties.\u2026 Politicians like Abdul, the ones who understand that they\u2019re the ones with the best chance of winning.\u201d He says the political environment is different from during El-Sayed\u2019s 2018 run, and the Michigan electorate is far more open to El-Sayed\u2019s antiestablishment message. Diaz credits the pandemic-era stimulus checks with showing people that government could easily help people if our officials actually want to. They\u2019re angry knowing their representatives could be helping them but choose not to.<\/p>\n

Mason Pressler, an El-Sayed\u2013supporting school board member in Bay City, told me he\u2019d been surprised, in talking to older members of his family, by how open they are to El-Sayed. \u201cThey\u2019re all like, \u2018Oh, Abdul is great, we love him, I think he\u2019s right on the issue of Gaza.\u2019\u201d Pressler has found it \u201cvery interesting to see how these older, typically more conservative white Democratic primary voters have really shifted in terms of where they\u2019re at ideologically.\u201d<\/p>\n

Illinois Representative Delia Ramirez, who came to Grand Rapids to rally for El-Sayed, had a similar assessment. \u201cIf you talk to a senior in a very rural community and a senior in an urban community, they want the same damn thing,\u201d she told me. \u201cThey want to be able to retire with dignity, not to have to find a new job at 75, they want their kids to have a better life than they\u2019ve had and they want their grandchildren to be able to buy a house one day.\u201d The belief in running centrists, she said, is not actually about their superior electability. It \u201cis really about making sure you maintain the status quo for the people who have profited from the pain of our communities.\u201d El-Sayed, she said, is \u201csomeone who is going to call out the crap that Democrats have offered.\u201d Speaking at an event for Latino community leaders earlier in the day, Ramirez told them Abdul was \u201csomeone who will fight like hell for Latinos, who will fight like hell for Palestinians, fight like hell for working people, fight like hell for humanity, fight like hell for Michigan.\u201d Abdul showed what it would be like to have \u201cauthentic public servant leaders who are going to put the BS aside and actually care for people.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAuthentic\u201d is a word you hear a lot among El-Sayed supporters, along with \u201cnot bought by corporations.\u201d But while they have similar reasons for liking him, El-Sayed\u2019s supporters come from eclectic backgrounds. At one Fourth of July parade, I spoke to the vice president of a bank (he asked to remain anonymous, for obvious reasons), who said he had been a hardcore member of the MAGA \u201calt-right\u201d before realizing that Trumpist politics were incompatible with his feelings of compassion for humanity. At El-Sayed\u2019s Latino roundtable I met Ana Olvera, a 33-year-old stay-at-home mom whose brother was deported to Mexico by the Obama administration, and who said she was sick of Democrats\u2019 not pushing seriously for immigration reform and encouraged by El-Sayed\u2019s forthright insistence on abolishing ICE outright. At another parade, I encountered Bob Wood, a political science professor who had been teaching in Ukraine for four years, but who had quit his job and moved back to the United States specifically so that he could campaign for El-Sayed. Some supporters cited specific actions taken by El-Sayed that gave them confidence in him. Dina Carlisle, a registered nurse who serves as president of Local 40 of the Office and Professional Employees International Union said that since his gubernatorial run, El-Sayed had shown he \u201cwalks the walk\u201d for labor. Other candidates, she said, had only started showing up to labor events when election season started, while El-Sayed \u201chas attended every single strike, picket, and rally we have hosted.\u201d<\/p>\n

But there is one phrase that El-Sayed\u2019s supporters repeat more often than any other: \u201cHe\u2019s not funded by AIPAC.\u201d El-Sayed may prefer to focus on kitchen-table issues, but the issue of Israel-Palestine is inescapably important to the race, and may well prove decisive in determining its outcome. Stevens was elected to her current seat in Congress in part thanks to millions of dollars in AIPAC funding, which helped her beat Andy Levin, a Jewish critic of Israel. Stevens herself, while not Jewish, is so devoted to Israel that she said the country \u201ccomes to me in my dreams.\u201d (I met several people in Michigan who suggested that to win, El-Sayed should simply play the clip of Stevens\u2019s \u201cdreams\u201d quote over and over. Several days later, his campaign produced a website that does just that.) She has voted to ban the State Department from citing the Gaza Ministry of Health\u2019s death statistics, called on Columbia University to crack down on Gaza protesters, voted to sanction the International Criminal Court for pursuing war crimes charges against Benjamin Netanyahu, and has rejected the consensus of human rights groups that Israel has committed genocide. (The Stevens campaign did not reply to multiple e-mails seeking an interview.) El-Sayed disagrees with every one of these stances. Speaking to Current Affairs <\/em>last year, he was scathing about those who tell Americans that \u201cthe best use of their tax dollars was to be sent abroad to backstop an apartheid regime, to subsidize genocide, and to now fight a war [in Iran] that we have no business fighting at the behest of a foreign government\u2019s prime minister.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pro-Israel groups are working hard to ensure that Stevens defeats the man who would be America\u2019s first Muslim senator. When I arrived in Michigan, United Democracy Project, a pro-Israel PAC, had just dropped $2 million on an attack ad against El-Sayed, part of over $34 million in pro-Stevens ad spending during the cycle. The new ad doesn\u2019t mention Israel, likely because AIPAC and its affiliates are aware that Democratic voters have turned sharply against the country. Instead, it accuses El-Sayed of having a \u201clong history of disrespecting women.\u201d The charges are thin. Even the Detroit Free Press<\/em>, which does not support El-Sayed, published a fact-check calling it \u201cunpersuasive\u201d and said it \u201cstretches its facts.\u201d (It cites an op-ed in which El-Sayed called Michelle Obama\u2019s nutrition campaign \u201ccommendable, if ineffectual\u201d as its first example of \u201cdisparaging women.\u201d) But the sheer saturation of the Michigan airwaves is astonishing. The spot is everywhere. I saw it three times within 30 minutes of flipping on my hotel TV, and about a dozen times in total over a long weekend in the state.<\/p>\n

The long shadow of Gaza was evident even during an early-morning Fourth of July parade, where I walked the route alongside Stevens. As we snaked through a leafy, Rockwellesque neighborhood of front porches and tire swings, with a marching band blasting \u201cYankee Doodle,\u201d she was repeatedly heckled from the crowd over her support for Israel. One man shouted \u201cTake down the AIPAC ad!\u201d at Stevens. A few blocks later, while a group of Boy Scouts recited the Pledge of Allegiance, an older woman screamed \u201cGENOCIDE! GENOCIDE! You\u2019re killing children! GENOCIDE!\u201d I spoke to the woman, Jo Anne Zarowny, a retired court administrator, and asked her why she decided to heckle the congresswoman on Independence Day. Zarowny pointed to a pin she was wearing. \u201cIt\u2019s from the Holocaust museum,\u201d she said. It reads \u201cWhat I Do Matters.\u201d \u201cI know my history. What do we wish people were doing in 1938 in Germany? Talking about it? Smiling?\u201d With a \u201cfascist\u201d in the White House, and a genocide in Gaza, she felt the minimum she could do was speak out. Zarowny is supporting El-Sayed.<\/p>\n

A few hours later, as I talked with El-Sayed on the shores of Reeds Lake, the last dregs of the parade were passing by. There had been men dressed as Captain America, women as suffragettes, and George Washington on a unicycle waving Old Glory. As the patriotic display wound down around us, I could not shake the feeling that here, on America\u2019s 250th birthday, I might be watching the end of one era of our country\u2019s history and the beginning of another. Perhaps that was wishful thinking, a desperate hope in dark times that something major must be about to change. But after spending a weekend meeting the extraordinarily passionate supporters of El-Sayed\u2019s campaign, all of whom were ready to throw out their party leadership in an effort to transform the country, it was impossible not to wonder whether Democratic politics might be headed for a major earthquake. In 2018, when I first met El-Sayed, my first impression was that I was speaking to the future first Muslim president of the United States, and the left\u2019s most formidable statesman-in-waiting. This guy could be the real deal<\/em>, I thought.This might be the moment when things start to change. <\/em>It wasn\u2019t, and El-Sayed has since spent nearly a decade in the political wilderness. But his supporters tell me things are different this time. On August 4, we shall see if they are right.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you can do it in Michigan, you can do it anywhere,\u201d El-Sayed told me. \u201cIf a politics centering people and their needs\u2026can succeed here, then it disabuses us of this idea that milquetoast moderate policy that continues to accommodate corporate power to do corporate bidding is the recipe for winning in the Midwest.\u201d He\u2019s right that if Sanders-style politics prevails in Michigan, a lot of received wisdom will suddenly seem shaky. Could it be that the recipe for winning in the Midwest is not what Democrats have been saying? Could it be that a smack-talking, Oxford-trained, leftist Muslim doctor is the party\u2019s secret weapon for winning back the heartland?<\/p>\n

But if El-Sayed does beat Stevens, it remains an open question whether the forces within the party that have tried to keep him from getting the nomination will fall in line behind him in the general election. Centrist Democrats will have mixed feelings at best about helping El-Sayed to the Senate. An El-Sayed primary victory sets up a high-stakes test of what kind of Democratic politics are most effective against the right. If Michigan sends a Senator Abdul El-Sayed to Washington, traditional \u201celectability\u201d assumptions will have been shattered for good. It will no longer be possible to argue that centrism and pragmatism are synonymous, and insurgent progressives everywhere will have a stronger case that they are the Democratic Party\u2019s future.<\/p>\n

Read more The Higher Education Revolution We Need to Have<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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