Playing for Twits and Giggles

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, August 05, 2026

 

The left-wing goofball Democrats have nominated as their Senate candidate in Michigan has a bevy of enthusiastic cheerleaders, and it should surprise absolutely no one to learn that a great many of those cheerleaders are wearing stupid red hats.

 

Republicans ought to be running scared, but Democrats are running Abdul El-Sayed, who has bested normie Democrat Haley Stevens in the Michigan primary.

 

Michigan has lost more than 8,000 manufacturing jobs since Donald Trump announced his imbecilic “Liberation Day” tariffs. But many of the Michigan families that escaped the direct and intense economic pain of a lost paycheck are experiencing the pain of a diminished paycheck, a persistent if less intense economic discomfort resulting from continued high inflation, with high and rising fuel and food costs eating into family budgets. You’d think that Democrats would have chosen a candidate well positioned to keep that issue and similar “kitchen table” issues, if you’ll forgive the tedious cliché, front and center.

 

On top of the tariff misadventures, Republicans in Congress are studiously gazing at their Florsheims and pretending that the United States is not currently engaged in an illegal—and losing—war in Iran, one that is playing hell with the economy here at home and abroad. The president wanders around talking like an untreated stroke victim while even such utterly supine and slavering sycophants as Jeanine Pirro are walking sideways away from the hypertensive, sneering face of the Republican Party. That’s a lot to work with. Trump and the economic failures associated with him are “like an anchor around Republicans,” says Michigan pollster Bernie Porn, whose name you should definitely never, ever Google.

 

Wrongfooting the Republican nominee in Michigan, bland Trump factotum Mike Rogers, ought to be pretty easy.

 

Instead of grabbing that opportunity, Michigan Democrats have planted their flag in the camp of El-Sayed, who is oddly focused on the comings and goings and finances of distant Jews—in Israel and in Washington—a familiar campus radical type who characterizes the Israeli government (which does not run Michigan) as “genocidal” and who swans around with nutso lefty figures such as Hamas and Hezbollah apologist Hasan Piker, the “America deserved 9/11” guy who insists that Hamas—a genocidal terror group that recently carried out the worst anti-Jewish atrocity since the Holocaust—is “a thousand times better” than the Israeli state. On top of the moral issue of footsie-playing with jihad apologists and antisemites, cozying up to Hamas apologists is an excellent way to blunt Democrats’ edge vis-à-vis Trump’s manifest incompetence in Iran. As Americans should know by now, there is more than one way to be wrong about the Middle East.

 

El-Sayed isn’t only a lunatic on Middle Eastern issues, which bring out the crazy in a lot of people. He’s also way to the left on illegal immigration, police, and the usual range of dorm-room progressive priorities, and he advocates a state-monopoly healthcare system that would strip Michigan union members of cherished benefits for narrow ideological reasons. Which is to say, El-Sayed’s campaign is not directed at Michigan as a whole but at four or five ZIP codes in Ann Arbor and Dearborn.

 

Do Democrats want to talk about the price of gas, the quality of the public schools, and access to health care? Trade and NATO? Or do they want to talk about how many degrees of separation there are between Hamas and their Senate candidate—a practitioner of literal equivocation when it comes to bloodthirsty, murdering, raping Hamas terrorism?

 

El-Sayed is not doing himself very many rhetorical favors, insisting that his primary opponent was simply a vessel of—the too-familiar trope—dirty Jewish money, “a suit with a large AIPAC bank account,” as he put it.

 

Stevens has been elected to the House four times. El-Sayed lost, in spectacular fashion, the one other election he ever contested, the Democratic gubernatorial primary of 2018, when Gretchen Whitmer beat him by more than 20 points, with the lefty crusader barely breaking 30 percent.

 

El-Sayed is not the kind of candidate you run if you really care about winning a majority in the Senate—or if you care about being a majority party in general. He is precisely the kind of candidate you run if you are treating politics as a therapeutic exercise or an expression of tribal affiliation. Michigan voters at large are not thinking very much about Gaza, and neither are American voters at large. Stevens is a more or less normal person with a track record of winning elections in Michigan—that and $5.65 will get you a gallon of diesel.

 

Let’s do a little political math, Senate-style. In 2018—a year in which Donald Trump was the central issue—Beto O’Rourke, a Democratic member of the House, got within a whisker of unseating Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, but Cruz eked out a nearly 3-point victory by winning almost everybody who supported Trump and about 7 percent of those who opposed him. The people who approve of Trump amounted to only 49 percent of the electorate in the Cruz-O’Rourke race–to get a majority, Cruz needed a little bit of broader support. The flipside holds true, too: Trump is still awful in 2026, but anti-Trump sentiment will carry you only so far. Then as now, you have to bring in some support from outside the base.

 

Republicans who identify as “non-MAGA” are poised to be a force for Democrats—at the margins, where elections are won or lost—in the midterm Senate races: James Talarico in Texas enjoys 24 percent support in that group; Iowa Democrat Josh Turek is at 23 percent among non-MAGA Republicans, as is Democrat Jon Ossoff in Georgia; Roy Cooper in North Carolina enjoys 20 percent support in that group. That cross-party appeal, limited though it may be, is one big reason Talarico is ahead in the polls in Texas, which hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in Talarico’s lifetime. Cooper and Ossoff are leading in the polls, too, and Turek is within 2 points. El-Sayed, given his profile, is unlikely to pick up that kind of support from non-MAGA Republicans.

 

On their back feet, Republicans will insist that the Democratic Party is being captured by Jew-hating weirdos and socialist kooks. And, so, El-Sayed is going to pool parties with Jew-hating weirdos and socialist kooks—not the most obvious way to add votes at the margin.

 

“I have a lot of contempt for the system,” El-Sayed told an interviewer earlier in the race. “I’m not here to play nice.”

 

Just so.

 

That kind of self-indulgent radical posturing is the political equivalent of a big “Born To Lose” neck tattoo: It’s probably not a good idea at any time—but right before a job interview?

 

Playing for fun is different from playing to win.