Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won Michigan's Democratic Senate nomination over four-term Rep. Haley Stevens, despite more than $50 million spent by groups backing her campaign.
The Associated Press called the race Wednesday morning after counting more than 1.5 million ballots statewide. El-Sayed, a former health official who ran on "Medicare for All" and halting military aid to Israel, led Stevens by just 14,893 votes, a margin under one percentage point. He now advances to a November general election against Republican nominee Mike Rogers, a former congressman who ran unopposed for his party's nod.
The outcome sets up a general election fight that will help determine which party controls the U.S. Senate during the final two years of President Donald Trump's term. And the man Democrats chose to carry their banner ran one of the most aggressively left-wing campaigns in recent Senate primary history, a fact that should give Republicans in Michigan real optimism heading into the fall.
Stevens entered the race with institutional advantages that should have been overwhelming. A four-term congresswoman who once served as chief of staff to President Barack Obama's auto task force, the federal effort that rescued General Motors and Chrysler, she pitched herself as a pragmatic candidate focused on manufacturing and the economy. Retiring Sen. Gary Peters endorsed her. So did much of the Democratic Party's Washington infrastructure.
Groups backing Stevens poured more than $50 million into the race. AIPAC and its affiliates alone spent more than $30 million on her behalf, Newsmax reported, the largest single-race investment in the pro-Israel lobby's history. Stevens stressed her record of winning tough races and positioned herself as the candidate who could hold the seat in November.
None of it was enough. El-Sayed cast himself as the anti-establishment alternative, backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and framed the contest as a grassroots movement against big-money politics. He campaigned on campaign finance reform alongside his progressive policy agenda. In a party that talks constantly about getting money out of politics, the candidate who actually ran against the money won, barely.
The result mirrors a broader pattern. Democratic socialists ousted three House incumbents in primaries elsewhere, exposing a leftward lurch that party leaders have struggled to contain.
El-Sayed is no stranger to losing big in Michigan. In 2018, he ran for governor and lost the Democratic primary to Gretchen Whitmer by 21 percentage points. That drubbing would have ended most political careers. Instead, El-Sayed rebuilt, found a more favorable electorate in a Senate primary shaped by the Israel-Hamas conflict and progressive energy, and squeaked through.
At his watch party inside Detroit's Majestic Theatre, El-Sayed addressed supporters Wednesday morning with a line borrowed from Muhammad Ali:
"In the words of Muhammad Ali, we shook up the world."
He also struck a unity note earlier in the evening, before results were final, telling the crowd that regardless of the outcome, Democrats had a duty to keep Rogers out of the Senate. Stevens, for her part, called El-Sayed to concede Wednesday and issued a statement backing his general election bid.
"This was a thorough and rigorous campaign that brought out the full span of views within the Democratic Party, and that is why we have primaries," Stevens said. She added: "I am proud to offer my support as he takes on Mike Rogers in the general election."
If Democrats hoped El-Sayed's win would quiet the intra-party fight over Israel, AIPAC made clear within hours that the battle is just beginning. The organization issued a statement Wednesday saying it would oppose El-Sayed and "his radical anti-Israel agenda" in the general election.
El-Sayed campaigned on halting U.S. military aid to Israel, a position that put him at odds with much of the Democratic establishment. The issue split the party openly during the primary. Sen. John Fetterman refused to back El-Sayed, publicly calling him a "pro-Hamas candidate", a sharp break that highlighted just how deep the fracture runs.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who supported El-Sayed, offered a different read. He called the victory a message to party leadership, saying it "should be a wake-up call to the Washington Democratic establishment." Peters, the retiring senator who had endorsed Stevens, offered only a brief "Congratulations to him."
The contrast between Van Hollen's pointed commentary and Peters' clipped response tells you where the party's internal tensions stand. Sen. Elizabeth Warren broke with Senate leader Chuck Schumer over the primary endorsement, backing El-Sayed in a move that further exposed the rift between progressive and establishment wings.
For Republicans, El-Sayed's nomination is the outcome they should have wanted. Michigan Democratic Party chair Curtis Hertel tried to project confidence Wednesday, urging unity and calling El-Sayed "a fighter for the people." But unity is easier to demand than to deliver when your nominee ran against the very donors and institutions your party relies on.
El-Sayed says he is not a democratic socialist, but his platform, single-payer health care, cutting military aid to Israel, campaign finance overhaul, sits comfortably in the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez lane. Progressive influencer Hasan Piker and Melat Kiros, who recently beat a longtime incumbent in a Denver-area House primary, were both at his Detroit watch party. The company a candidate keeps tells voters something about where he'll govern.
Sanders and AOC rallied behind El-Sayed throughout the primary, framing the race as a broader fight against establishment politics and big-money spending. That framing worked in a Democratic primary. Whether it works in a general election in a state Trump carried is another question entirely.
Rogers, a former congressman, ran unopposed for the Republican nomination. Republicans have reserved large sums for his general election campaign. He enters the fall race against a Democratic nominee who won by fewer than 15,000 votes out of 1.5 million cast, who alienated a significant chunk of the party's donor base, and who holds positions on Israel and health care that poll well on the progressive left but face headwinds with the broader Michigan electorate.
Analysts have predicted that nominating El-Sayed could hand the seat to Republicans, and the margin of his primary win does nothing to dispel that concern.
The Senate race was not Michigan's only contested Democratic primary Tuesday. In the state's 13th Congressional District, which covers Detroit, state Rep. Donavan McKinney defeated incumbent Rep. Shri Thanedar. McKinney argued the city should once again have a Black representative in Congress, after Thanedar's 2022 win left Detroit without Black representation in the House for the first time since the early 1950s. In a heavily Democratic district, McKinney's primary victory all but guarantees him the seat.
Democrats are sorting themselves out in Michigan, and the sorting is moving left. El-Sayed's win, McKinney's win, and the broader progressive primary wave across the country all point in the same direction: the Democratic Party's activist base is pulling nominees away from the center and toward positions that energize primary voters but complicate general elections.
Republicans don't need to do anything exotic in Michigan this fall. They just need to let voters see exactly what the Democratic Party nominated, and ask whether that's who they want representing them in the Senate.
