Democrats Lived Down to El-Sayed’s Opinion of Them

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, August 05, 2026

 

There’s no question Abdul El-Sayed attracted enough voters with his single-minded focus on AIPAC to win last night’s Michigan Senate primary against Haley Stevens. But what was surprising was how limited a coalition it turned out to be.

 

“Noun-verb-AIPAC” worked well in younger, whiter, wealthier areas of the state—essentially the tentifada coalition. Stevens did better among black and working-class areas of Michigan. Yet these voting demographics tend not to be Israel’s biggest fans either. Which means “noun-verb-AIPAC” works mostly as a negative ploy: voters who seek a scapegoat will eat it up, but voters who are also critical of Israel but who see the world with more honesty and nuance will be looking for more substance.

 

They won’t get it.

 

Instead, partisanship looks like it’ll come to El-Sayed’s rescue. Stevens has already said she’ll do what she can to help her erstwhile foe. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who had endorsed Stevens in the primary, did the same. Other critics of El-Sayed’s anti-Semitism during the primary woke up this morning ready to bend the knee and tell others to do so as well.

 

In an age of spinelessness, all you have to do is get through the primary.

 

And that, in the end, was the real secret to El-Sayed’s success. Many in the political world had been wondering why he spent the last few weeks of the campaign mimicking the performative aggression of his hero Hasan Piker when he might have been expected to try to win over skeptical Democrats.

 

We have our answer: “noun-verb-AIPAC” was enough to win the primary, and Democrats will do whatever he wants once he’s the nominee anyway.

 

El-Sayed bet on his party living down to his opinion of it. And he won that bet.

 

What that means for the fight against anti-Semitism is clear as day. With the revelation that nearly all seemingly sane Democratic Party figures were only pretending to be offended by Jew-baiting, any recent progress will be lost. Even worse, fewer principled voices will stick their necks out next time around, because now they know they will have no institutional support for criticizing their own party.

 

Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ Senate floor leader, deserves special mention here. “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 Kirsten Gillibrand said in a joint pledge of loyalty to the man who couldn’t give an unqualified, total denunciation of the attempted massacre of Jewish children in his state. “Democrats are united by a common purpose: putting a check on Donald Trump by defeating his Republican enablers and taking back the Senate. We look forward to working with Abdul and Democrats across Michigan to win this seat in November.”

 

Aside from their national roles, let’s remember that Schumer and Gillibrand are the two senators from New York, where hate crimes are on the rise and are disproportionately aimed at Jewish targets. Where, in New York City, the mayor recites blood libels and Jews are stabbed in the streets.

 

Schumer has, throughout his career, implored the public to hold him to a special obligation to defend his people. “My name as you know comes from a Hebrew word,” he said in 2010. “It comes from the word shomer, which means guardian. My ancestors were guardians of the ghetto wall in Chortkov and I believe Hashem, actually, gave me the name as one of my roles that is very important in the United States Senate, to be a shomer for Israel, and I will continue to be that with every bone in my body.”

 

Every bone except those in his spine, apparently.

 

Abdul El-Sayed’s contempt for his fellow Democrats was a feature, not a bug. And now it has been vindicated more than even El-Sayed could possibly have expected.