The Democratic Party is at war with itself, and nowhere is the fight clearer than the Michigan Senate primary. On one side: Rep. Haley Stevens, backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the establishment, who says the left is too untested and too extreme to win a general election. On the other: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the former public health official who wants to blow up the whole premise of the question.
More than $40 million in outside money has already poured into this race — a big chunk of it from pro-Israel groups lining up against El-Sayed — because it’s less a Senate primary than a proxy war for where the party goes next. And at the center of it sits that dreaded word: electability.
That term has become a catch-all used by Democrats to encapsulate whatever approach they think has higher odds of winning the general election.
This week on America, Actually, I sat down with El-Sayed about what his theory of electability actually means.
Here are three takeaways from our conversation:
1. His electability pitch is an “America First” argument
El-Sayed takes the two things his critics treat as liabilities — his opposition to US support for Israel and his populism — and fuses them into a single kitchen-table argument: money going abroad is money not going to you. Anti-war politics and affordability policy become one and the same.
“My priority is money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for all. That’s what I’m campaigning on,” he said. That reminded me of a similar argument I heard from Darializa Avila Chevalier, the socialist candidate who won an insurgent congressional primary in New York City.
“Kids need glasses, kids need schools, kids need functional infrastructure,” El-Sayed continued, fleshing out his case. “And I’m gonna find the money that we’re sending to do heinous things to other people and keep it here.”
He says that pitch appeals to a broader swath of the electorate than the traditional left: Voters, he says, feel that the government is making them “unable to afford my groceries, unable to afford a home… and then [it is] sending my money abroad telling me that somehow that’s in my best interest?”
2. He rejects the left-right dichotomy
El-Sayed also repeatedly rejected the left-right spectrum entirely. His read on Michigan isn’t that voters keep lurching between extremes — it’s that they are searching for a fresh type of politics, which neither traditional party was offering. Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, Donald Trump in that cycle’s general election, Joe Biden in 2020, Trump again in 2024. It’s not whiplash, he argues. It’s hunger. And that hunger reorganizes the whole map.
“If Michiganders wanted moderate[s], why would they have elected Donald Trump twice?” he asked.
“The better way to think about our politics is top-down: people who are locked out versus people doing the locking out. And if you’re on the side of the people doing the locking out, you’re going to have a really hard time in our politics right now.”
With this framework, El-Sayed thinks he can create a greater contrast with Republican nominee Mike Rogers than his Democratic counterpart can.
“Both Mike Rogers, the Republican, and Haley Stevens, my opponent in this primary, have been on the side of the people doing the locking out,” he said. “They take their money and do their bidding.”
3. The moderates are in hiding
The Stevens campaign rejected multiple requests for comment — which is becoming a bit of a trend on the Democratic establishment side of the party’s civil war. If you want to bash the left, they’ll talk. But if you’re interested in their vision, they are much less willing to be forthright. In some cases, it seems like the moderate lane of Democrats is downright scared of its own shadow.
But that’s also a political strategy. Stevens and her allies at groups like Third Way are making a bet: that if they can turn the race into a verdict on El-Sayed himself — the Hasan Piker streams, the old campaign clips, the loose-cannon caricature — voters will get nervous and retreat to the safe choice.
El-Sayed said the approach was an insult to voters: “It’s interesting taking political advice from a shop that exists specifically to launder old ideas and make them seem new again — and then, like, fail miserably at that.”
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