Maximum Stigma

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, October 29, 2026

 

This year’s campaign will be remembered for some truly horrendous strategic decisions. And not just by Republicans.

 

Yesterday the New York Times revealed one of the dumber examples of political “ratf–king” that we’ll ever see. It turns out that Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola’s operation was responsible for recruiting a namesake of her Republican opponent, Sen. Dan Sullivan, to run for the seat this year, producing a general election ballot featuring two men with the same name. The idea was to fool some confused Republicans into mistakenly voting for the wrong Dan Sullivan, depriving the senator of their votes and potentially tipping a tight race to Peltola.

 

It’s an especially deceitful instance of “ballot-stacking” (which the GOP has also stooped to in Alaska, although without trying to confuse voters). And it’s stupid four times over.

 

It’s stupid because, after some litigation, Sen. Dan Sullivan will be identified on the ballot as “Registered Republican (incumbent),” making it easy to distinguish him from his doppelganger. It’s stupid because Alaska has a ranked-choice voting system—meaning that, as long as a voter ranks the two Dan Sullivans first and second on their ballot, their vote for the “wrong” one will almost certainly end up going to the “right” one anyway. It’s stupid because it plays directly into the postelection narrative the president is preparing about Democrats cheating their way to victory. And it’s stupid because it exposes Peltola as just another cynical politician, the opposite of the persona she’s cultivated as a candidate. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.

 

Just not as stupid as the other party’s worst strategic gambits this cycle.

 

Nothing tops the idiocy GOP voters in Texas demonstrated by nominating scandal-magnet Ken Paxton for the Senate, with the president’s encouragement. He may yet win—most of those same idiots will be back at the polls next week—but his victory will have cost mountains of right-wing money that could have been spent to tip the balance in tight races elsewhere. Paxton prevailing while Republicans lose narrowly in Kansas, Iowa, Alaska, Ohio, Michigan, and Maine will not be a good outcome for Team Red.

 

Vivek Ramaswamy’s infamous attack ad weaponizing his opponent’s childhood sexual trauma looks to be another all-time screw-up. Axios has seen private polling that now has Ramaswamy behind by 8 points in the race after he trailed by 2 before the spot was released; respondents familiar with the ad said it made them more likely to support his opponent by a margin of 2-to-1. Barring a shocking comeback, his political career is over.

 

And according to Axios’ sources, he has no one but himself to blame. It was Ramswamy who reportedly wanted to run the spot, overruling reluctant staffers.

 

Then there’s the president’s bizarre barnstorming tour. If you squint, you can see the logic behind it: There’s a certain kind of right-wing voter who will only turn out for Donald Trump, and so the only way to persuade that voter to turn out next week is to have Donald Trump himself do the persuading.

 

The problem is that, in his dotage, the president has lost whatever marbles he once had. “Trump’s primary rationale for why voters should support the GOP, as best I can tell, is that the affordability crisis is a ‘hoax,’ Bill Maher is a ‘loser,’ and Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio has a nice physique,” Jonathan Lemire wrote today at The Atlantic, summarizing the president’s “message” on the trail. One unnamed Republican senator told Lemire, with dry understatement, “We may have lost the plot here.”

 

As he did with COVID briefings in 2020, Trump turned an opportunity to deliver productive information into an excuse to riff inanely before a large audience about whatever’s on his mind. It has to be the worst pre-election “closing argument” in American history, reminding late deciders every day how disinterested he is in their priorities.

 

There’s another notable strategic decision that Republicans may yet come to view as terrible, pending the outcome of Michigan’s Senate race. As our friends at The Bulwark observed this week, the GOP’s most impassioned attacks on Democrat Abdul El-Sayed down the stretch have zeroed in on his faith more so than his far-left ideology. The Democrat is a staunch progressive, certainly socialist-adjacent if not all the way into Bernie Sanders territory—yet socialism isn’t the main cudgel his opponents have chosen to wield against him in the campaign’s final days.

 

Why not?

 

What is, and isn’t, bigotry.

 

Michigan Democrats’ choice to nominate El-Sayed over Rep. Haley Stevens was itself an awful strategic gambit, reminiscent of Texas Republicans choosing Paxton over the “safe” establishmentarian, John Cornyn. In both cases, an easy general election win was forfeited for the sake of nominating a postliberal demagogue burdened with heavy baggage because he reflects his base’s political id.

 

Another way of putting that is that the GOP’s interest in El-Sayed’s faith isn’t entirely due to bigotry. His half-sister once claimed that their family “has long been MB”—that is, Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist political faction from which Hamas derived—and alleged that their mother agitated on behalf of the group as a college student. El-Sayed himself signed a letter in 2012 supporting the “revolutionary decisions” undertaken by new Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, a senior official in the Brotherhood. And El-Sayed has taken donations from the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America, both unindicted co-conspirators in a 2007 criminal case targeting funding for Hamas.

 

His vitriol toward Israel has at times smelled more antisemitic than anti-Zionist. When a Lebanese American attacked a synagogue near Detroit earlier this year, El-Sayed condemned it but rationalized it as an example of how “hurt people hurt people,” a remark for which he later apologized. He mainstreamed Hasan Piker, an even more venomous and inflammatory critic of Israel and its Jewish American supporters, by inviting the livestreamer to appear with him during this year’s Senate primary. And El-Sayed pointedly declined to denounce the obnoxious ad that ran on his behalf earlier this week absurdly linking America’s affordability crisis to the budgetary sliver of military aid that goes to the Jewish state.

 

And no wonder: As Seth Mandel explained in a piece for Commentary, El-Sayed himself has scapegoated Israel for the high cost of living in America. “Israel is an affordability issue,” he said in an interview in August. “Every time you want to put glasses on kids’ faces or give people health care or fix a school, somebody pops up and is like, Well, how are you going to pay for that? I don’t know. Maybe we should keep our money here instead of sending it there to drop bombs on people’s schools or their hospitals. That’s our money. You just saw $3.3 billion voted to send abroad to a foreign government that, by the way, has guaranteed health care and can guarantee college education without debt. We can’t. And you want to send my money over there? That’s insane.”

 

It’s not bigotry for Americans, particularly American Jews, to worry about what lessons will be drawn if a message like this proves capable of winning a statewide race in a perennial battleground. (“Every time he talks about genocide, Jews get death threats,” Haley Stevens’ fiancé said yesterday of El-Sayed, announcing that he intends to vote for Republican Mike Rogers next week.) That was always a core argument against Trump among critics like me, in fact: If you reward postliberal demagoguery with electoral victories, you’ll get much, much more of it in your politics. And so we have.

 

Especially this year in Michigan. Increasingly, and I’m sure deliberately, it’s hard to tell whether Republicans object to El-Sayed because of his views on the Middle East or simply because he’s Arab and Muslim.

 

“This character Abdul El-Sayed [should] be nowhere near Washington, D.C.,” Sen. Bernie Moreno said yesterday. “Do you think he understands that concept, that our rights come from God Almighty? That Jesus came here for our salvation?” Does Moreno himself understand that, by the logic of that Christian nationalist religious test, his Jewish colleagues in Congress should also be excluded from office?

 

On Monday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took a break from destroying American public health institutions to add his two cents in Michigan. “There’s 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they don’t produce science. They don’t win the Nobel Prize, they don’t win the Fields prize, they don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature,” he complained, blaming the Arab world’s intellectual stagnation on the Muslim Brotherhood. But Arabs have won all of those prizes, as the Times notes—and El-Sayed is an odd target for a rant about Islamic ignorance, given that he’s both a Rhodes scholar and an Ivy League medical school graduate.

 

If you’re looking for advice on vaccination and you’re forced to choose between listening to RFK Jr. or El-Sayed, take Abdul.

 

Other attacks smell suspiciously like far-right blood-and-soil critiques of Muslims tweaked slightly to make them more palatable. With the president by his side, the father of Flight 93 hero Todd Beamer said last week of El-Sayed, “He has a birth certificate but he’s not an American. He had the choice to be an American or not. He has chosen otherwise. He has blood that’s red. However, he has chosen to remove any strain of the white and blue part in his blood. We cannot allow this man to invade and occupy our country.” The reference to “choice” is a nod to El-Sayed’s views, but the mentions of exotic invaders and pure blood is thinly veiled nationalist invective about which Americans are “real” and which aren’t.

 

The worst offender is Trump, though, who often refers to El-Sayed as “Mohammed” on the trail, doubtless for the same reason that he still refers to “Barack Hussein Obama,” to underline the fact that his enemy is culturally one of Them, not one of Us. The president has used the Muslim Brotherhood oppo on El-Sayed as an excuse to call him a “jihadist,” a “terrorist,” and a man who should have to pass through a metal detector to enter the Senate chamber. (Ted Cruz’s critique of El-Sayed as a sleeper agent was more artful.) “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,” Trump warned at one recent rally.

 

They’re coming for Christmas. It doesn’t get any more serious than that.

 

This, rather than “El-Sayed is a socialist who’ll open the prisons and woke-ify everything,” is apparently the GOP’s closing argument in Michigan. Why?

 

Us and them.

 

Regular readers know why. Postliberals don’t fear big, aggressive, imperious command-and-control government. They love it! What they fear is “foreign” interlopers challenging their racial and religious tribe’s sacred right to be in charge of that government.

 

Sure, they rant about “socialism,” but to them that’s a meaningless pejorative. It’s a word they toss at Democrats who can’t be accused of something more sinister and objectionable, like being a Muslim. When they want to inflict maximum stigma on an opponent, they’ll always zero in on the fact that he doesn’t belong to their tribe rather than on his ideological sins.

 

Yesterday at National Review, John Puri elegantly demonstrated the hollowness of nationalists’ complaints about socialism by listing 25 reasons to fear a Democratic takeover of Congress. “Blowing out the national debt.” “Seizing control of private enterprises and turning them into effective arms of the state.” “Promising to hand out trillions of dollars in ‘free’ benefits.” “Favoring certain groups of people based on their race.” “Reigniting a politics of identity and victimhood.” On and on it went, with a link embedded in each reason to illustrate the point.

 

And of course, in each case, each link led to a news story about the Trump administration doing the very thing Republican voters are supposed to worry that Democrats will do.

 

There is no nationalist case against socialism. Both ideologies have the same approach to government, just with different ideas about which constituencies the state should favor. So why would modern Republicans try to make some sort of case against El-Sayed? The president feels so much affinity for certain prominent young socialists, in fact, that he no longer bothers to conceal it. His unlikely bromance with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is well-known, but a few days ago during one of his daffy rally riffs he remarked, “Somehow I don’t mind AOC [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] that much. I don’t know why, she doesn’t bug me too much.”

 

Why he’s comfortable with Ocasio-Cortez and especially Mamdani, another Israel-bashing Muslim, while demonizing El-Sayed viciously is an interesting question. Possibly it’s because, of the three, El-Sayed is the one who most directly threatens his own power: A Democratic Senate would give Trump headaches not just on legislation but on nominations. But there’s probably also an accident of birth that contributes to it. Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez are dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers, as the president is, and so they share a “tribe” in a way—or enough of one, at least, to make Mamdani less objectionably foreign to Trump.

 

Either that or Mamdani, the GOP’s original bogeyman in this election, and Ocasio-Cortez are simply too personally charming for Trump to sustain hatred for them.

 

There’s another reason crying “socialism!” isn’t the best play for Republicans in Michigan. According to a Gallup poll published last month, 43 percent of Americans now view the ideology positively, the first time ever that it’s enjoyed more than 40 percent approval. That’s surely due in part to Republicans having devalued the term through years of overuse; if “socialism” means wanting to raise Elon Musk’s taxes by 1 percent, a lot of voters will decide that they’re socialists after all. But it’s also surely no coincidence that support for socialism has peaked amid a yearslong stretch of high inflation that’s made life less affordable. (The share of independents who view socialism positively is up 8 points in the last year alone.)

 

Shouting “socialist!” at Abdul El-Sayed might not hurt him much, in other words. For some voters frantic about how to make ends meet, it may even amount to an advertisement.

 

And for those whom the GOP is desperate to turn out, it might not be very galvanizing. Republicans believe the difference between modest losses and a wipeout lies in convincing low-propensity Republican voters to show up—which, as noted earlier, is why the president has been on the trail every day. A disaffected populist in rural Michigan isn’t turning out for a bland old has-been like Mike Rogers, but he might turn out if his hero, Donald Trump, can figure out a way to excite him.

 

Well, which is more exciting? “Abdul El-Sayed wants to take away private health insurance”? Or “Abdul El-Sayed is an undercover terrorist who’s going to make us all say the Shahada on Christmas”? Even some not-very-Trumpy voters might be susceptible to the latter.

 

Beyond all of that, I’d argue that by attacking El-Sayed for being a Muslim, Republicans are—sort of—attacking him for being a socialist. It’s not as either/or as the question I posed at the start of this piece implied.

 

Last year Jonah Goldberg reflected on “the Omnicause,” a term used to describe leftists’ belief that all of their pet grievances are connected. War in Gaza, climate change, skepticism of transgenderism: It’s all linked, all part of the same system of oppression. If you want “justice” in one theater, you won’t get it unless you’re for justice in all of the others.

 

The postliberal right has its own version of “the Omnicause,” though. Crime, socialism, woke culture, Islam and other heathen faiths: They’re all linked, all products of America’s suicidally high tolerance for foreigners and other dark-skinned undesirables. If you want a country that functions like it did in the 1950s, when it was safer and saner and socialism was anathema, you need a country that looks like it did in the 1950s.

 

There’s no need to yell “he’ll bring socialism to America!” at Abdul El-Sayed, in other words. By yelling “he’s a Muslim!” it’s implied.

 

I don’t think it’s going to work for Republicans this year, as the political climate has simply been too spoiled for them by the president’s villainy and incompetence. But that’s not necessarily good news: Once Democrats nominated El-Sayed, the outcome of Michigan’s Senate race was destined to become proof of concept for one party or the other that poisonous demagoguery aimed at some vulnerable American minority works. The candidates of the future will take note and act accordingly.