A Game of Horseshoes

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, October 27, 2026

 

Abdul El-Sayed and Vivek Ramaswamy have a lot in common. Both were born less than a year apart and raised in the Rust Belt by immigrant parents. Both are exceptionally bright and impeccably educated, possessing Ivy League postgrad degrees. Both are statewide candidates for office this year facing gale-force headwinds due to their race and faith.

 

And both happen to be associated with the ugliest ads of the 2026 cycle.

 

Where they diverge is that El-Sayed had the good sense to keep his campaign’s fingerprints off the ad that’s roiled Michigan’s Senate race over the last 24 hours. Ramaswamy was not as shrewd in Ohio.

 

The Michigan spot was produced by Rebellion PAC, an outside group founded by progressive podcaster Cenk Uygur. Uygur is the uncle of El-Sayed’s recently unpersoned pal, livestreamer Hasan Piker; he and his nephew are so strident in their agitation against Israel that they were barred from the United Kingdom earlier this year for fear that their presence “may not be conducive to the public good.”

 

Can you guess what Rebellion PAC’s ad is about?

 

Anti-Israel or antisemitic?

 

It opens innocuously, with a couple in a supermarket having an all-too-relatable conversation about which groceries they can and can’t afford. Then it takes a turn. Spend 67 seconds and see if you can identify the exact moment the vibe goes from anti-Israel to antisemitic.

 

When the wife says, “We have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians”?

 

A good guess. Given how U.S. aid to Israel operates economically, how vanishingly little of the federal budget goes to Jerusalem, and how much more drastically Trump’s idiocy on Iran and tariffs has affected prices, if you find yourself thinking about Gaza while deciding whether to buy eggs, you assuredly do have Jews on the brain. El-Sayed has claimed on the trail that he objects to all foreign military aid, not military aid to Israel specifically; yet, oddly, the couple in the ad don’t seem to mind their taxes being used to protect Qatar, say.

 

But that’s not the moment I have in mind.

 

When the narrator says Republican nominee “Mike Rogers is for they/them, Abdul El-Sayed is for you” while images of Benjamin Netanyahu and far-right Israeli politicians flash onscreen? Also a strong candidate. That’s a play on Donald Trump’s famous ad from the 2024 presidential campaign highlighting Kamala Harris’ radicalism on transgender rights, repurposed here by Uygur’s group to suggest that Rogers is a puppet whose support for Israel necessarily calls into question his loyalty to America. “They/them” also winks at the idea of Jews as the eternal “other,” and not very subtly either.

 

But that’s also not the moment that grabbed me. The moment that grabbed me is when the husband mentions that Israelis have universal healthcare and the wife responds, “We’re paying for that too, probably.” Probably.

 

In fact, we’re not paying for that. The only reason to suggest otherwise is to mislead the ignorant viewer about the extent to which Israelis depend on the United States. The Jewish state is a parasite using your money to pay for entitlement benefits that you yourself don’t receive: If your goal is to build irrationally venomous resentment toward Israel among your audience, that’s the lie you tell. And that is the goal of Uygur’s group, I suspect. So the ad told it.

 

As outrage grew online, El-Sayed’s campaign played innocent, sort of. “This ad is not affiliated in any way with the Abdul for Senate campaign,” a spokesman said in a statement. “Abdul is focused on pushing back against Trump’s agenda that is raising prices for Michiganders. No one speaks for Abdul but himself and his campaign.” Missing from that disclaimer was any objection to the ad’s content, and no wonder. Its core argument, that Israeli influence is a cancer on America, was also El-Sayed’s argument in this year’s Senate primary against Rep. Haley Stevens.

 

Not a good ad—but, I think, an effective ad. That’s another difference between El-Sayed and Ramaswamy. Unlike Vivek’s desperate play against Amy Acton in Ohio, this spot is likely to help the candidate whom it was designed to help.

 

America First.

 

El-Sayed and his allies have a theory of how to tip this race in his favor in its final days, and it’s a sensible one. They’re playing horseshoes.

 

They understand that there are two types of right-wing voters in this election. One is the Republican partisan, the kind of person who wouldn’t dream of voting for a Democrat even if that Democrat weren’t a far-left Muslim. That includes MAGA diehards even though they’re not dependable GOP loyalists the way that, for instance, National Review readers are. In this case, their god-emperor has made his feelings about El-Sayed as clear as he can make them; no Trump devotee is voting for an alleged “jihadist” against the president’s say-so.

 

Uygur’s ad will offend many of these Republican partisans, but so what? They were off the board for El-Sayed from the jump. But the other type of right-wing voter might be in play.

 

That’s the postliberal populist, the sort of person who was drawn to Trump in 2016 and/or 2024 not because they were captivated by him personally but because they broadly shared his disdain for Washington’s “uniparty” conventional wisdom. They’re a heterodox group—some are committed goldbugs or groypers, others more apathetic yet unhappy with the economic status quo—but they found the president directionally correct more so than his liberal opponents. Tighter borders; less stultifying “woke” thought-policing; fewer foreign interventions.

 

They might not define the term “America First” the same as Tucker Carlson (on certain issues, hardly anyone does), but they’re united in grievance by the belief that the political establishment does too little for the average American and too much for special interests, domestic and foreign. That makes them more open to radical alternatives down toward the end of the proverbial political “horseshoe” that promise to shake up “the system” than Republican partisans might be.

 

My guess is that type of voter tends to be male, has been disenchanted by Trump’s “neocon” attack on Iran and his unseriousness about reducing the cost of living, and is young enough that he hasn’t yet formed enough of a habit of voting Republican to feel tribally obliged to support GOP nominee Mike Rogers. As it happens, late deciders in elections (presidential elections, anyway) also traditionally have skewed young; as it also happens, young Americans overwhelmingly view Israel unfavorably and are far more likely than older ones to cop to holding antisemitic attitudes.

 

That’s the voter El-Sayed and Uygur are after by dropping an Israel-bashing ad one week out from Election Day, I suspect. They’re reaching across to the other end of the horseshoe and inviting disaffected Tuckerites, Joe Rogan fans, and every Republican-leaning conspiratorial populist in between who isn’t slavishly wedded to the success of the president’s party to turn out, vote Democratic this year, and defeat the candidate who’s for “they/them.” El-Sayed will fulfill Trump’s broken promise of putting Americans first, and that starts with putting Israel last.

 

And if you think I’m wrong about all of that, then I’ve got another ad for you to watch.

 

Michigan First.

 

Take 60 seconds and digest this spot released a few days ago—this time by El-Sayed’s campaign, featuring the candidate himself. In it, he pitches himself directly to right-wing populists by highlighting matters on which they agree. “Washington is a corrupt swamp,” he says. “Release the Epstein files. … We should make America healthy again. Stop wasting our tax dollars on overseas wars and end bad trade deals.”

 

Then he introduces a sizzle reel of Fox News personalities and other right-wing commentators praising him or denouncing Rogers to make the case that he’s the truer “America First” candidate in the race. (There’s even a nod to his years playing high school football to burnish his “bro” credentials.) The highlight is a snippet of Carlson himself declaring on a podcast this summer that he wouldn’t vote for Rogers “at gunpoint,” which isn’t news to readers of this newsletter but will be to a lot of Michigan voters.

 

In that same podcast, not coincidentally, Tucker called Rogers “basically a tool of Israel and the intelligence agencies.”

 

The ad ends with El-Sayed declaring himself “Michigan First.” He’s playing horseshoes here, as overtly as he can, understanding that the difference between victory and defeat could be convincing just 1 or 2 percent of Republicans that he’ll serve the cause of postliberal populism better than his Trump-endorsed opponent will.

 

All of which, in context, makes Uygur’s ad seem like a smart, sinister play. It could cost El-Sayed some votes among Jews and supporters of Israel, I suppose, but how likely is someone in those categories to turn on him now after keeping an open mind about him through months of demagoguery about AIPAC and revelations about family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood? In for a penny, in for a pound.

 

Besides, the population of left-leaning voters who still back Israel and the population of Jews in Michigan are surely small relative to the number of Republicans and independents who feel uninspired by Rogers and might perk up for a populist pitch, especially if it involves Israel. (Chuck Todd noted on the latest Dispatch Podcast that polling shows military aid to the Jewish state is now one of the least popular things a congressional candidate can support, behind only data centers and the war in Iran.) Rebellion PAC is potentially sacrificing a few fish in smaller demographic ponds for a chance to fish in a much larger one.

 

The ad could even help El-Sayed with a few key constituencies he’s counting on to show up for him. He’s shaky with black voters, most of whom broke for Stevens in this year’s primary, and he needs to pad his margins with Michigan’s Arab Americans, many of whom voted Republican in 2024. According to a Pew survey of opinions on Israel published this summer, Muslims and black Protestants both view Israelis less favorably than they do Palestinians. The lament about Israeli influence in Uygur’s ad could make El-Sayed seem more sympathetic to both groups—especially given the preposterous connection it makes to the cost of living, the ur-grievance in America’s midterm campaign.

 

And even if it doesn’t work out for him on Election Day, it’ll still work out for the underlying cause of demagoging Israel.

 

Jonah Goldberg made that point in the DisPod episode with Todd. Conveniently, there’s no way Uygur and progressives who share his politics can lose here. If El-Sayed wins, as he’s favored to do in such a Democratic-friendly national environment, critics of Israel will credit his victory to enthusiasm for the ad’s message. If El-Sayed loses, the same critics will say that the establishment’s Israel cabal conspired to engineer his defeat.

 

So long as the race is seen as being “about” Israel in its final days, when the premortems are being written, either outcome can be exploited by Uygur-ites. The ad ensures that it will be.

 

Unseated.

 

The irony of El-Sayed winning this race with help from former Trump voters is that I’m convinced Trump’s party will look for a pretext to refuse to seat him in the Senate. It won’t succeed, but some of its members will try.

 

How could they not, given the freakish degree of alarm to which the president has resorted over his candidacy? “If Abdul and the Democrats win, they will open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadis to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas,” he said at a rally last week. At the same event, he called El-Sayed a “jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member” and warned that someone with his background “would be screened and unable to get a seat on an airplane. They certainly should not give him a seat in the United States Senate.”

 

In case that was too subtle, later he called for El-Sayed to pass through a metal detector in order to enter the Senate chamber. And somehow, if you can believe it, Trump’s rhetoric wasn’t the ugliest uttered that day.

 

The entire point of American postliberalism is to guarantee the ruling racial and religious tribe’s dominance in American life. Letting a far-left Muslim of Arab descent join the Senate without a peep of Republican objection would betray that cause even more thoroughly than ratifying Joe Biden’s victory without objection on January 6 would have. The base will demand that the Senate GOP do something to block El-Sayed, and, as usual, the cowards and panderers in the conference will make a show of trying to satisfy them.

 

How serious the attempt will be depends on which side holds the majority next year and by what margin. Presumably, if the blue wave is powerful enough to sweep a candidate as flawed as El-Sayed to victory in Michigan, it’ll be powerful enough nationally to deliver control of the Senate to Democrats. In that case, he’s safe. Republicans will lack the votes to refuse to accept his victory or, later, to expel him.

 

Things would get more interesting if we ended up with a 50-50 chamber—or even a 51-49 Democratic majority, with John Fetterman poised to flip to the GOP. (There’s already bad blood between him and El-Sayed.) In theory, there’s a scenario in which J.D. Vance plays tiebreaker and gets to decide the new senator’s fate. And boy oh boy, is it easy to predict what he’d do in that situation.

 

But in practice, how do Republicans get to 50? They’d need Lisa Murkowski’s vote. And John Curtis’. And Susan Collins’, assuming she prevails in Maine’s Senate race next week.

 

The effort will fail—but there will be an effort of some sort, especially if El-Sayed’s victory is a narrow one that makes the inevitable accusations of cheating more facially plausible. Trump will hector Senate Republicans about it endlessly, if nothing else. Already, there’s an argument floating around on the right that newly elected members of Congress who subscribe to democratic socialism “and other communist, Marxist, Muslim, or other anticonstitutional movements” should be denied their seats until they’re investigated by their chamber. If the inquiry determines that their personal beliefs are incompatible with the oath they’re required to swear to support the Constitution, then out they go.

 

The goal, you see, is to make sure that America isn’t governed by people who might “use the United States’ own institutions as a Trojan horse to undermine the republic, the Constitution, and the culture that sustains the American people. … [An officeholder] cannot be permitted to obtain the powers and privileges of constitutional office by reciting an oath pro forma while retaining a commitment to destroy the order he or she has sworn to support.”

 

Disqualifying public officials who despise the constitutional vision and hope to treat it as a vehicle for their own illiberal authoritarian designs? What an interesting idea. You could sell me on that. I might even have a suggestion about where to start.

 

And I bet Democrats would have lots of interesting ideas of their own about how to apply that precedent once they’re back in charge in Congress.

 

But it’s a little late, at this stage of American decline, to suddenly decide that contempt for the Constitution is a litmus test we should use to weed out candidates from either end of our political horseshoe. Michiganders know who El-Sayed is at this point; if they choose him anyway, he will—and should—serve. And I think they will.