El-Sayed Stumbles in His General Election Pivot

By Judson Berger

Friday, August 28, 2026

 

Heading into Michigan’s Senate primary election, soon-to-be GOP nominee Mike Rogers suggested to National Review’s Kamden Mulder that he wasn’t too concerned which Democrat he’d be facing. He argued that Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed are both radical in their own way.

 

Presumably, the Republican was hedging in case Stevens won. She didn’t. And Rogers can’t be displeased that he’s facing the other guy. As he told NR at the time, “[El-Sayed] just adds a whole other level of crazy to the whole mix.”

 

Crazy, of course, can win — the RealClearPolitics polling average shows El-Sayed with a slight edge over Rogers. But El-Sayed, who only narrowly won his primary, is facing early difficulties presenting a friendlier, more palatable version of himself for the median Michigander.

 

Before broaching the subject of Israel, let’s begin with the immeasurable glibness of his recent appearance with Fox News’ Jesse Watters. The Democratic nominee attempted to shut down questioning about whether he supports child gender surgeries by inquiring whether the host is circumcised.

 

“Abdul, Michigan’s not going for that,” Watters replied, after El-Sayed emphasized the above comparison.

 

You can say, as the Democratic candidate did, that Fox was ignoring “the issues that people actually care about in Michigan.” But, as Noah Rothman writes, El-Sayed himself ignores the harm associated with youth gender transitions:

 

The minimally curious should by now have grappled with the medical literature that finds young people suffering from gender dysphoria do not, on balance, experience positive mental health outcomes as a result of surgical or pharmaceutical interventions. Indeed, their conditions often worsen. El-Sayed and others should be expected to have surveyed the landscape in Europe, where the public health apparatus expresses increasing uncertainty about the value of those interventions.

 

They should recognize, at the very least, the political peril associated with their incuriosity, especially if they’re running for office. . . . If El-Sayed had acquainted himself with even the basic contours of the issue, he probably wouldn’t have struck the condescending posture he adopted on Monday night. Instead, he smirked his way through an exhibition of profound ignorance.

 

Meantime, the candidate’s association with Hasan Piker is causing growing problems for the campaign. As NR’s editorial recounts, El-Sayed tried to create the appearance of distance between himself and the far-left internet personality after the latter claimed that “if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action — not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews”:

 

While Piker’s comments could be charitably interpreted as his sympathetically noting the way things are, rather than arguing that this is how they ought to be, there is very little reason to give him the benefit of the doubt.

 

Piker has claimed that “America deserved 9/11” and regularly defended terrorist groups. He said Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel, that he did not have “a single issue with Hezbollah,” and that what the Houthis were doing was “not only moral, but it’s just.”

 

As the editorial points out, El-Sayed avoided directly criticizing Piker even as he tried to quiet the controversy; after all, they’ve done several campaign events together. “That Piker would again say something controversial about Jews during the campaign was not an unforeseeable event.”

 

Hasan Piker is quickly becoming El-Sayed’s Jeremiah Wright, if Barack Obama had made his pastor a prominent campaign surrogate and GOTV booster rather than cast him as an avuncular kook.

 

Understandably, Rogers is making a play for Democratic voters, including Jewish voters, in the run-up to the general election. Jewish Insider reported that Jewish leaders in the state have circulated an open letter urging Democrats and independents to support Rogers.

 

Try as he may, El-Sayed will struggle to court the center — and credibly distance himself from Piker — now that a primary season that rewards rabidity is over. As Jim Geraghty previously explained, pointing to the candidate’s scheduled appearance at an Islamic Society of North America convention alongside some radical figures, “either A) El-Sayed doesn’t want to moderate or B) he just can’t moderate; this is who he is, through and through.”