The Michigan Senate candidate makes no effort to greet the corporate executives, lobbyists, and consultants drifting around him on Mackinac Island, where the state’s political establishment convenes every spring for a gathering of power brokers and deal-makers. Ferries shuttle attendees onto the car-free island, where horse-drawn carriages move at a leisurely pace and the sprawling Grand Hotel overlooking Lake Huron becomes a hot spot for the local elite.
This year, he found himself onstage at the conference’s hottest event: a televised debate in Michigan’s contentious Senate primary. Beside him were the two Democrats who had, until recently, been regarded as the front runners: U.S. Representative Haley Stevens, the preferred candidate of Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, and state senator Mallory McMorrow, who later suspended her campaign. Both spent the debate speaking the familiar language of consensus favored by the Mackinac crowd—calling for bipartisan legislation that benefits Michigan’s auto and manufacturing industries, and touting their own records and electability.
When he jumped into the Senate contest in April 2025, many in Michigan expected El-Sayed to be a footnote in the race. In 2018, he ran for governor on a similarly progressive platform and was trounced in the Democratic primary by 22 points. Instead, El-Sayed is leading narrowly in most polls ahead of the Aug. 4 primary. His surprising strength helped push McMorrow from the race. By tapping into anti-establishment frustrations that have only deepened since Donald Trump’s return to office, he has won the endorsement of the United Auto Workers, Senator Bernie Sanders, and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Democratic leaders worry that what works in the primary may not in November. The party’s path to reclaiming the Senate becomes much harder if they lose Michigan. Trump twice won this pivotal swing state, where party officials tend to emphasize centrism. “There’s no denying that there is a sizable progressive base in Michigan,” says former Michigan Democratic Party chairman Lon Johnson, who has endorsed Stevens. “But that’s not enough to win.”
Piker and El-Sayed in Ann Arbor on April 7 —Julia Demaree Nikhinson—AP
At his favorite diner in Sault Ste. Marie, overlooking the Canadian border, I ask El-Sayed why he thinks his campaign has caught on. He first points to the backlash over the Iran War, which coincided with his rise in the polls. El-Sayed says it reinforced his campaign’s argument that entrenched interest groups are distorting U.S. policy and politics. “It didn’t shift our message,” he says. “It validated it.”
El-Sayed has enthusiastically campaigned with Piker at Michigan colleges, and has repeatedly declined opportunities to denounce the streamer’s past remarks, including those widely condemned as antisemitic or extremist. “The establishment doesn’t quite understand how unpopular it is,” to attack his ties to Piker, El-Sayed tells me. “If you’re the person who’s out there saying, ‘I stand on my principles, and I don’t back down to anybody,’ a lot of folks are going to look at that and say, that’s a Democrat who doesn’t pretend.”
His alliance with Piker does in fact reflect one of the most salient developments in American politics: the left’s growing sympathy for Palestinians and a willingness to challenge long-standing orthodoxies around support for Israel. Stevens has drawn substantial financial backing from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and supports continued sales of American weapons to Israel’s military. (Before dropping out, McMorrow had sought to position herself somewhere between Stevens and El-Sayed. Late last year, she shifted her stance on the situation in Gaza, calling it a genocide.)
The issue carries particular resonance in Michigan, home to the country’s largest concentration of Arabs and Muslims. If elected, El-Sayed would be the country’s first Muslim U.S. Senator. The anger toward the Biden -Administration that swept through many Arab American communities over the Israel-Hamas war helped fracture the Democratic coalition. Some voters stayed home in 2024. Others shifted toward Trump. El-Sayed believes many of those voters are winnable again if his party reckons with what drove them away in the first place.
A lot of Democrats are weak and cowardly—Abdul El-SayedStevens used Netanyahu’s criticism to underscore how her position on Israel is more nuanced than El-Sayed alleges. “I am not afraid of bullies. I am not afraid to stand up,” she said at the debate. “And I continue to stand up for humanitarian aid, for the U.S. to work with the countries in the region and get aid into Gaza.” El-Sayed suggested that Netanyahu’s attack was intended to boost Stevens politically. “I don’t think Benjamin Netanyahu is attacking her to actually attack her,” he said. “I think he’s attacking her to try and steer away the stink of how staunchly she stands for their policy.”
The son of Egyptian immigrants, El-Sayed spent his childhood moving between identities and cultures. Raised in Bloomfield Hills, an affluent suburb just north of Detroit, in part by his white stepmother, and spending summers in Egypt with relatives, he often found himself navigating difficult spaces. “I never quite fit into any room I walked into,” he tells me.
Then came Sept. 11. Overnight, he says, the assumptions people made about him changed: “I went from being a brown kid with a funny name to a very particular kind of brown kid with a very particular kind of funny name.”
El-Sayed finds the comparisons flattering but incomplete. Obama, he argues, came to politics with greater faith in institutions. As for Mamdani, the difference is even more straightforward. “I’m not a socialist,” he says flatly, even though many of his signature policies overlap substantially with the agenda championed by his democratic socialist backers, including Sanders. The distinction matters to him. He is less interested in replacing capitalism than in constraining concentrations of power that he believes have distorted it. “I actually think that at the small and local scale, capitalism is a great way to allocate resources, as long as everybody has access to it,” he says.
In response to Trump’s election in 2016, El-Sayed decided to run for higher office. He resigned as health director to launch an unsuccessful campaign for governor that lifted his profile and honed his political identity. After the loss he launched a health podcast called American Dissected at Crooked Media before moving it to his own production company, Incision Media. He also spent two years as Wayne County’s health director, in which he helped oversee an effort that is set to erase hundreds of millions of dollars in medical debt.
Sanders and El-Sayed campaign together —Sarah Rice—Getty Images
El-Sayed predicts that he will defeat Rogers by 7 points in November. “It’s gonna be embarrassing for them when I wipe the floor with their candidate,” El-Sayed tells me. The confidence is striking given the warnings from many within his own party. But to El-Sayed, Rogers represents a familiar archetype. “If you had to draw a caricature of the average politician from the late ’90s, it would be Mike Rogers,” he says. “There’s nothing new about him or his ideas.”
“Abdul El-Sayed wants to export New York’s ‘commie corridor’ to Michigan,” says Bernadette Breslin, a National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesperson. “Michiganders want tax relief and common sense—not El-Sayed’s crippling tax hikes and radical agenda.”
El-Sayed doesn’t seem to think much more highly of his own party. He says Democratic leaders remain too focused on protecting existing power structures rather than confronting them. Asked about Schumer, who is backing Stevens, he says, “When I win this primary, I’m sure we’ll have to meet. I frankly have very little interest in that meeting.”
Yet over our two days together in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, El-Sayed rarely comes across as angry. Between campaign stops, he goes kayaking for a social media video and jumps into the St. Mary’s River, debates the best tasting fish of the Great Lakes, and talks about politics with the enthusiasm of someone who still finds the whole enterprise exciting. He insists that running for Senate is hardly the easiest choice for his family or himself. “Honestly,” he tells me at one point, “my life is easier if I don't win.” But he wants the job anyway. “A lot of people are going to tell us that that is a pipe dream, we're never going to get there,” he says. “Okay, we might never get there, but shouldn't we try?”
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