Two years on, the once Trump-loving Muslim community here looks back on those promises with bitterness. Some of Israel’s worst atrocities in the Gaza war, they believe, took place under Trump’s watch (and the bombings have continued even under his peace plan). Meanwhile, Trump has plunged America into yet another Middle East war — this time with Iran — that is now stretching into its ninth month. And it is putting upward pressure on gas and other consumer prices to boot. In Michigan, roughly 40% of the state’s population is struggling to afford basic necessities, and fuel costs have surged to nearly $5 a gallon, up from an average of $3 a gallon just before the war.

No wonder, then, that some of Trump’s own voters are beginning to reconsider their vote. Many are even prepared to back a very different kind of politician — Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive Democrat poised to become the state’s next senator, if polls are to be believed.

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Zohran Mamdani is no revolutionary

By James Billot

Earlier this month, MS NOW conducted a panel with 10 Michigan Trump voters, asking them whom they planned to support come 3 November. Only one voter raised her hand for Republican Mike Rogers, while five others raised theirs in support of El-Sayed. This seemed, to put it charitably, fanciful. Were half of Trump’s Michigan voters really planning to back a progressive well to the Left of most Democrats, never mind MAGA Republicans?

But last month, a New York Times/Siena poll suggested that a shift was underway, albeit less pronounced than the MS NOW panel suggested. It found that El-Sayed was garnering support from 8% of 2024 Trump voters, better than other Democratic Senate nominees in swing states. A recent UnHerd visit to Michigan revealed the reason: anger over the war in Gaza and the affordability crisis back home.

When Trump swept to power in 2024, Michigan was the final piece of the Democrats’ Blue Wall to crumble. In a state that Joe Biden had won narrowly four years earlier, anger over the war in Gaza and soaring inflation helped drive working-class and minority voters toward Trump. Nowhere were these gains more strikingly evident than in Dearborn, the nation’s largest Arab-majority city, where Trump won 42% of the vote.

Among those who voted for Trump was Faye Nemer, who migrated to Dearborn from Lebanon as a child. A lifelong independent, she had rejected Trump in his first two presidential bids but changed her mind after meeting him in Dearborn. “Kamala Harris’s disregard for us was a complete slap in the face,” Nemer told me. “She had no interest in changing the Democrats’ position on the Middle East, whereas Trump came to us and said, ‘I want to make sure you have a voice and a seat at the table.’” 

Ibrahim Duhaini, a Dearborn resident and local physician, felt similarly. Although he didn’t vote for Trump, he backed the Green Party, which won nearly a fifth of the ballots in Dearborn, potentially depriving Harris of a victory. But Duhaini felt comfortable with making what he described as a “soft vote” for Trump. “Although I did not vote for Trump,” he told me, “I knew that my support for the Greens would help him, too. I met Trump, and I had a very fruitful meeting with him. He said that he would bring peace and prosperity to the region.”

Today, both Nemer and Duhaini plan to vote for El-Sayed. They believe many others in their community, disillusioned by the war in Iran and the affordability crisis, will do the same. 

In West Dearborn, where mosques and Islamic centers stand alongside churches, Arabic signs line the streets, and bars are few and far between, there is not a Trump sign in sight. House windows and porches are plastered with Abdul El-Sayed signs reading: “Money out of politics! Money in your pocket! Medicare for all!” and Democratic volunteers are picketing on every street corner. Were Trump to show his face again here, it’s doubtful that he’d receive the same warm reaction as he did in 2024. 

El-Sayed, a 41-year-old former public-health official, is vying to become America’s first Muslim senator. A progressive variously described as a Muslim Bruce Springsteen and an Arab Pete Buttigieg, he’s quick on his feet, adept at both soaring Obama-ian rhetoric and the polemical jab. One day he’s bantering with Fox News hosts about circumcisions, the next he’s sparring with audience members about Right-wing claims that he supports the Muslim Brotherhood (the only evidence for which seems to be tweets from his half-sister from more than a decade ago).

To his detractors, El-Sayed comes off as thin-skinned and condescending, which even Democratic strategist David Axelrod described as a “not appealing quality.” The RealClearPolitics polling average puts him 2.5 points ahead of Rogers, but some moderate Democrats believe an establishment candidate would be doing better in a political climate favorable to the Left. Some are even encouraging voters to leave El-Sayed’s spot on the ballot blank. 

“I support Abdul because he is America First,” Nemer told me. “It’s not just his position on Israel — he wants to fix our broken health-care system and address the cost-of-living crisis. Ending the war in Iran is a good place to start.” Despite still receiving death threats over her vote, Nemer says that she doesn’t regret supporting Trump. She frames it as a wake-up call for Democrats, who took the Arab-American vote for granted: “The Democrats treated us terribly in 2024 — Harris deplatformed us at the DNC convention. The party still needs to improve, but there has been a sea change in its approach and outreach since that election.”

El-Sayed may be doing well with Arab-Americans, but there are other groups with whom he has struggled to connect. During his fractious primary battle against moderate Haley Stevens, El-Sayed severely underperformed with Jewish voters, in part thanks to his campaigning with far-Left streamer Hasan Piker, his equivocal remarks about a Michigan temple attack, and his uncompromising stance in favor of ending foreign aid for Israel (and, to be fair, all other foreign states). His standing with this community has not improved in the general, and last month, a coalition of Michigan rabbis and Jewish leaders petitioned voters to withhold their support until he tempers his Israel rhetoric and policies.

Long-simmering tensions between the black and Arab-American community in Michigan have also hurt El-Sayed. The Democratic nominee has responded with a not-so-subtle pitch to black voters that includes late-night visits to gas stations to purchase Doritos and soda. He has also ordered fried chicken on a black-influencer podcast. 

If his rally in the majority-black city of Flint was anything to go by, El-Sayed’s outreach to this community didn’t seem to be landing. Most of the attendees were older and white, with Democratic Socialists of America and “AOC for President” badges pinned on their shirts. When he took to the stage, El-Sayed was met with raucous cheers as he lamented the money being spent to defeat him, imploring the audience to “choose between the many and the money.” He was most animated when attacking Rogers, his GOP opponent, whom he derided as a “non-playing character” (NPC) and a “human sock puppet, doing what Trump and the corporations want him to do.”

Trump and Rogers have made El-Sayed’s faith a centerpiece of the GOP campaign. The President regularly refers to him as Mohammed and “a Muslim Brotherhood guy,” while Rogers has more of a tightrope to walk. Wary of angering the state’s 350,000 or so Muslim-Americans, he has tried to distinguish between El-Sayed’s purported Islamist political ties and his faith. Out on the campaign trail, he tends to avoid the issue altogether. The GOP flyers handed out to Dearborn residents made no mention of El-Sayed’s Muslim background; all focused on his “radical” agenda.

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It would be wrong to suggest, however, that all voters switching from Trump to El-Sayed are Muslim-Americans. Stephania Messina, a Detroit resident, is a former Trump voter from a conservative Christian background. In 2016, she and her family were enamored with Trump and in particular his message on China. They saw Trump as the man who could bring back jobs from overseas after Michigan’s manufacturing industry was hollowed out by decades of offshoring. 

But over the last few years, she and other members of her community became disillusioned with Trump. “When you are confronted with the stark, visceral reality of Americans being murdered on the streets by ICE, that just cannot be written off as fake news,” she told me. These events “appalled” the evangelical Christians in her community, forcing them to reconsider their political allegiances. “Most of my family are evangelical Christians who voted for Trump. But in the last two years, my brother, my son, and his four friends have all denounced Trump. Nearly all of them are now voting for Abdul.”

Christian conservatives are, for the most part, still riding with Trump. But it is surely a worrying sign for the President that even members of this most loyal constituency are beginning to turn against him. That might sound like good news for Democrats, yet few of the people I spoke to expressed any real affection for the party, either. Add El-Sayed’s difficulties with two central Democratic constituencies — Jewish and black voters — and Michigan’s Senate race has become an unusually tangled contest of ideology, identity, and resentment. 

This race is defined as much by what voters oppose as by what they support: they are anti-Israel or anti-Muslim, anti-Trump or anti-Left. What many voters share, though, is a deep anger at the status quo, be it directed at the administration or the political system writ large. Whoever wins next week’s election — the Trump cipher or the hard-Left progressive — there is very little sign that that anger will dissipate anytime soon. As one Michigander told me after the Flint rally, “the whole country looks at Michigan when it’s an election. But it turns away as soon as it’s over.”

Call it Progress, Inc.: a machine for advancing full-spectrum progressivism, using working-class aesthetics as a sort of skinsuit, if need be. What the party — and the nation — end up with are politicians who certainly look the part — sometimes connected to the traditional labor movement, comfortable in plaid, tossing a football or drinking beer — but whose substantive views are indistinguishable from those that prevail in places like Brooklyn and San Francisco. 

Consider Dan Osborn. Last week, Osborn, the former industrial mechanic and union leader running as an independent for the Senate from Nebraska, was caught on tape calling President Trump’s border wall “a symbol of racism,” and admitting that he only claimed to support it to woo Republican voters. This, needless to say, will likely hinder his ability to lure back the working class and create a path to victory. 

Osborn has been promoting himself as antiwar, pro-union, and for breaking up health care monopolies. At the same time, he has sought to portray himself as not woke and aligned with the working class on immigration (which is to say, in favor of restrictionism). He thus fits right into the sweet spot of politics these days: Left on economics, but moderate or conservative on culture and immigration. But if an independent running in Nebraska holds the same views on the border as the mainstream Democratic Party — can he really call himself an independent?

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It turns out, those behind Osborn are the same people behind Graham Platner, Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and many other Lefty and socialist candidates this cycle. All of these candidates are products of Progress, Inc. I once worked inside Progress, Inc. as a leading fundraiser for it before taking the measure of its disconnect with what working- and lower-middle-class Americans actually want. 

These behind-the-scenes operatives want to find people with “working-class costumes,” and “masculine images” — not leaders with actual working-class views. Graham Platner was the most obvious example. Before he was #MeToo’d out of the Maine Senate race, the scion of a prominent family checked all the right “image” boxes: bearded, tattooed, with a stint in the Marines under his belt. Another is El-Sayed, whose “bro energy,” his backers believe, is enough to attract disaffected men who’ve left the Democratic Party, with no need to change position on the actual issues that alienate men. Both, however, hold standard-issue ultra-progressive views when it comes to divisive identity politics, among other hot-button issues.

Working-class voters can see through the act. In Maine, Trumpy areas with factory economies tended to support his moderate Democratic opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, while Platner mainly won over the gentry Left. Likewise, El-Sayed has struggled with working-class black Americans, delivering his best performances in places like Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan.

These candidates’ views on the economy, to be sure, recall those of the old labor Left and the New Deal coalition. But they come laden with the cultural excesses of the modern Left. So far, they’ve mostly been unable to moderate Leftist positions on trans athletes in girls’ sports, immigration, and law and order, turning off working-class voters of all races. 

New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani is the rare exception. He reversed his previous #defund position on policing, retaining Gotham’s tough incumbent police commissioner and giving the NYPD a relatively wide berth to do its job. Most progressive candidates aren’t nearly as nimble. El-Sayed appeared on Fox News in August and stood firm on his unpopular cultural stances — trans sports, gender-affirming care for minors, slavery reparations. It was a missed opportunity to highlight his subtly socially conservative positions on widespread weed legalization, online porn, and gambling. 

Those who do dissent, like Amy Acton, a Democrat running for Ohio governor, face backlash from the Left. In any case, the dissenters tend to be Democrats in reddish or swing states who are establishment figures, wedded to the economic status quo, and thus facing their own flavor of electability crisis: they are unwilling to run on the bold populist economics that progressives embrace and that appeal to the working class, like universal health care.

Both wings of the party desperately need to compromise, but on different points. The progressives need to rein in cultural excesses, whereas the establishment needs to stop representing the wealthy donors who prevent it from holding populist positions.

Progress, Inc.’s mentality is not to compromise, but to push ideas into the mainstream until “they become popular.” This is what I was told firsthand by some colleagues while working inside progressive politics. The playbook, as I learned, is to go hard in midterm elections, then use that energy to get every presidential candidate in 2028 to run on Leftist causes. The strategy was learned from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, when she used her popularity and the energy behind her victory to push the Green New Deal, leading a whopping 10 democratic presidential candidates to embrace the idea in 2020.  

What groups make up Progress, Inc.? The Democratic Socialists of America have received the most attention, because they have the scary word “socialist” in their organization’s name. But there are many more players at work. For instance, there’s the Justice Democrats, a political group whose main focus over the past decade has been backing insurgent primary challengers. The group endorsed 13 candidates this cycle — and eight of them won their primaries. Former Justice Democrats operatives worked on the victorious campaign to elect Darializa Avila Chevalier as the Democratic nominee for New York’s 13th Congressional District. The organization’s executive director, Alex Rojas, described how she recruited Chevalier to run for Congress during a podcast episode hosted by another Progress, Inc. group called Way to Win, a donor collective that boosts progressive candidates. Outside money unquestionably propels these candidates. 

Then there’s the group that advised Platner’s campaign: Daniel Moraff (who recruited both Platner and Osborn to run for US Senate) and Rebecca Katz and Morris Katz, co-founders of Fight Agency, all of whom are emblematic of Progress, Inc. Moraff is the grandson of the founder of Toys ’R’ Us, and Morris Katz, raised in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood, is the son of a screenwriter father and children’s-book-author mother. When I was inside Progress, Inc., I worked with Rebecca Katz on a New York City district-attorney race. A fundraising firm where I served as a director worked with Morris Katz on a race in North Carolina in 2022. There’s also Left Rising, a fundraising firm, where I worked as a director, and Middle Seat, a huge small-dollar fundraising firm that has worked with nearly every Progress, Inc. candidate this cycle, among many others. What I saw was a total disconnect between those now steering the direction of the Democratic Party and the people it once stood for.

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By James Billot

Before Platner’s campaign imploded in July, Morris Katz was documented speaking to donors at the home of Tory Burch, where he was “holding court with roughly two dozen prominent guests about what he cast as a repeatable solution for Democrats,” according to Politico. He told the crowd, “We found a model here to win over working-class voters … a guy that looks like he’s a union working-class guy.”

This line of thinking was one of the main reasons I became exasperated with many of the people I knew when I worked inside Progress, Inc. 

Since 2019, I’ve witnessed this as the prevailing strategy, which I believe was born out of AOC’s upset win in 2018 and the creation of The Squad. Identity politics is such a deep, pathological undercurrent in the way they see themselves and the world; it would never occur to them to find candidates with actual working-class views. 

To be fair, I probably did the same thing when I was working in progressive politics. When you are inside of Progress, Inc., it is hard to see outside of it. You begin to parrot the people around you, thinking that it is you and your friends against the world. At times, I still sympathize with them. I have always supported people willing to challenge power structures, which, to the progressives’ credit, they do often.

Still, the movement’s thinking is fundamentally flawed. As I wrote in my recent book, Nothing Left, I first realized it over lunch at the “Dems Club” in DC, a private restaurant for Democratic politicians and their staff, where I was dining with two new co-workers. I believed we were there to represent working-class voters like my own mother and grandmother in Missouri. My co-workers wore Tory Burch dresses and talked about vacationing in Europe and Hawaii, while giggling about fighting for student-loan forgiveness on Capitol Hill. I felt profoundly alienated.

Many of the consultants inside Progress, Inc. are highly competent and talented people, including Morris Katz. They are a big part of the reason the Left is now so strong. But they are also part of the reason the Democratic Party won’t reconnect with working-class voters. The establishment has its own problems and is equally out of touch, but shouldn’t the anti-establishment be the solution to this problem, not adding to it?

Which brings us back to Osborn’s border crisis: I thought he represented the unique mix that could become the Democratic Party’s North Star — a bold outsider who leads on populist economics, while eschewing woke themes. While leading a union strike at Kellogg’s in 2022, Osborn even allegedly helped alert ICE when undocumented workers were being used as scabs. But winning back the working class, like Osborn’s candidacy seeks to do, can only be done by offering ideas that appeal to them — and that means championing their views on issues like immigration.

Neither wing of the Democratic Party is giving working-class voters what they really want. That leaves a huge constituency without a political home. Trump’s current doldrums may suffice to clinch the midterms for the Democrats. But that won’t resolve the party’s deeper contradictions. 

El-Sayed, a former public-health official, managed it, clinching (as of this writing) 48.5% of ballots, against 47.5% for his centrist opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens. The narrow margin might prompt Democratic-establishment crowing about El-Sayed’s chances in the general. But consider that AIPAC and other outside groups poured some $60 million into Stevens’s campaign, with more than half of that amount coming from the political action committee of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby — making this the most expensive Democratic primary ever. Outside groups backing El-Sayed, by contrast, only managed fewer than $5 million. 

Sixty million bucks couldn’t buy a Democratic primary. We have, in every sense, entered a new era.

Stevens was the sort of candidate who, not long ago, breezed to the nomination in a statewide contest. When Mallory McMorrow, the third Democrat in the running, dropped out, it was assumed Stevens could consolidate the anti-El-Sayed vote. This was how centrists almost always beat the Left, after all. In 2020, Bernie Sanders was doomed when Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Beto O’Rourke dropped out of the primary, endorsing Joe Biden. Even when Leftists were strong, they were factional candidates, doomed to electoral ceilings. Sanders couldn’t get more votes than Biden or Hillary Clinton. The Left had to content itself with small-scale victories, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knocking off Joe Crowley in a single New York House district.

But now we have a Left surge of a kind not seen since the late 1960s and early ’70s. Back then, Left-leaning Democrats won primaries on the strength of their full-throated opposition to the Vietnam War. Just so, today it’s Israel-critical Democrats who are being rewarded for aligning the party with popular sentiment. And popular sentiment is clear: the Jewish state is now viewed unfavorably by nearly all major demographic groups (save for Republicans over age 50).

El-Sayed, like Mamdani, is a fierce critic of Israel. Both shattered taboos around what could be said about the Jewish state. AIPAC knew what was at stake, hence its unprecedented spending. The state’s Democratic establishment, led by outgoing Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and outgoing Sen. Gary Peters, likewise lent its backing to Stevens. Before the mid-2020s, that sort of endorsement power alone would have just about ended any statewide primary.

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Progressives, of course, can’t claim total victory. The margin was uncomfortably tight, and El-Sayed must survive the general election come November. But here, too, the deck is stacked. Moderates get to lose elections all the time, but if the Left blows a race to a Republican, the alarm bells are heard ringing all across the country. It’s the same way with governance: a centrist like Eric Adams, the former Gotham mayor, can depart City Hall in utter disgrace. But Mamdani, the democratic socialist, must run the city without a whiff of scandal; the slightest failure on his part (supposedly) indicts the entire American Left. 

What makes El-Sayed’s victory over Stevens most intriguing, though, is that progressives will finally be able to test a thesis they’ve long entertained: namely, that their brand of politics — populist on economics but still socially liberal — can win in a battleground state. Progressives, typically, haven’t won primaries where a strong Republican is waiting in the wings. If El-Sayed can win Michigan, one of the most pivotal states in the country, he will be a true national star.

For now, at least, the progressive Left has been able to leave its cultural baggage behind. El-Sayed can’t be credibly called anti-woke, but he might be, like Mamdani, post-woke. Mamdani abandoned his earlier calls to defund the police. He does not, like the Democratic Socialists of America and 2010s progressives, support an open border. 

El-Sayed has trod a similar path. With his bulging muscles and willingness to mix it up on the podcast circuit and alternative online channels, he codes as the sort of pol who might be able to solve the Democrats’ problem with woke-weary young men. He possesses a certain machismo that, for Leftists, is a more recent phenomenon. And he speaks forthrightly to the cultural crises of young men, telling UnHerd’s Sohrab Ahmari that Leftists should address the structural causes behind male malaise — issues like online gambling and porn addiction — rather than write off men as “toxic.” Whether this is enough to convince young men to vote Democratic again nationally remains to be seen.

The bigger story, though, is the pro-Palestine current running through the party, and the generational shift well under way that will eventually tug top Democrats away from Israel. Like all small-d democratic groups, they eventually respond to their voters, and this is clearly what their voters want. Social media were rife with videos mocking Stevens for her over-the-top devotion to the Jewish state — “Israel comes to me in my dreams” — and the AIPAC largesse floating her campaign. 

There was her voice, too, almost a peculiar parody of the Michigander accent — I’ve spent a great amount of time in the state and never heard anyone speak that way — that had many online critics pulling up old clips of Chris Farley. Were these attacks sexist? Maybe. But they came from as many young women as young men. Swaggering El-Sayed was the one they wanted.

The pundit class contends that El-Sayed is a terrible bet in the general election against the Republican nominee, Mike Rogers. Whether they have a point or not, we will find out soon enough. What the Michigan primary proved was that Democratic voters are no longer compelled by that pitch. They once were; the entire premise of Biden’s 2020 campaign was his contention that only he could defeat Trump. Now the electorate is restless. They saw the Democratic failures of 2016 and 2024. They are weary and angry about living, again, under the yoke of Trump. When a Democratic politician or star operative lectures them about electability, they tune out. Wasn’t the failed reality-TV star supposed to be unelectable? Then he won — and won again. Stevens could talk all day and night about how she flipped a Republican seat. Very few people cared.

The harsh reality for the Democratic establishment is that they have, like Republicans in 2016, lost their grip on the party. They have no one but themselves to blame. In 2024, Michigan was the home of the Uncommitted movement: progressives who refused to fall behind Biden and Kamala Harris over the horrors unfolding in Gaza. Why would Stevens, AIPAC’s foot soldier, be the right candidate for 2026 in Michigan of all places, with its sizable Arab and Muslim population? 

Now that it has been proved that AIPAC cannot buy a Democratic primary, the group’s influence on Democratic politics, already waning, will collapse sharply. Even if El-Sayed loses in November, there won’t be a lane for Israel hawks in future Democratic primaries, and they will migrate fully to the GOP (where, it must be noted, a warm embrace isn’t certain to greet them). 

Organic support for Israel is vanishing, and the vast reserves of cash can’t bring it back. Stevens herself once won a House primary bludgeoning a progressive Jewish Democrat, Andy Levin, whom Israel hawks believed was insufficiently supportive of the Jewish state. Now she is finished. At best, she will be a footnote: one of the very last pure AIPAC Democrats. Like the Rockefeller Republicans of old, she and her cause will fade into history.

This would be a fair description of the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, which saw Hillary Clinton and the party establishment successfully deploy woke 1.0 tropes against Bernie Sanders and his supporters. But I’m speaking of the party’s current Senate primary in Michigan, where the party establishment is … trying to do the exact same thing. And likewise in several other contests nationwide.

A decade ago, Clinton’s allies smeared Bernie Sanders’s movement as “Bernie Bros” — supposedly hyper-aggressive masculine activists bent on preventing the election of the first female president. The Clintonites also implied that Sanders was dismissive of black voters and their concerns. At one point, the lawmaker (and Clinton ally) John Lewis excoriated Bernie Sanders’s 1960s integration activism, stating: “I never saw him. I never met him.” (It would have been difficult to see him, as Sanders protested segregation in Chicago, not the American South, where Lewis took his historic stand.)

Clinton’s success in that primary — followed by her humiliating defeat by Donald Trump later that year — created a handbook of sorts for the Democratic establishment. If you’re facing a revolt within your party, don’t bother discussing the big ideas. Don’t compare policy plans or debate your vision. Just find ways to subtly or not so subtly insinuate that your opponent is racist and sexist, and then rely on the party’s core constituencies of women and minorities to put the rebels in their place.

The party establishment has dusted off just the handbook in Michigan, where Rep. Haley Stevens faces a Left uprising from former Detroit public-health officer Abdul El-Sayed. Stevens is backed by the party establishment, including the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. But the bulk of her campaign spending is coming from outside groups, most generously the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

AIPAC’s ad spending in the state is as notable for what it says as what it doesn’t. None of the group’s ads even mention the Jewish state (El-Sayed is a critic of the US-Israel relationship, and Stevens a defender of it). Instead, AIPAC is running ads suggesting that El-Sayed has disrespected women, a misleading claim that’s already been torn apart by the local press.

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Even judged against the rock-bottom standards of political advertising, the anti-Abdul campaign is astonishingly — and repellently — dishonest. It points to a December 2010 op-ed by El-Sayed, in which he addressed Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign as “commendable, if ineffectual.” AIPAC twists this to suggest that El-Sayed denigrated “Obama’s work with children” as “uninspired and ineffectual.”

Is it supposed to be disrespectful to women to merely disagree on the effectiveness of the then-first lady’s public-health campaign? Of course not, but implying that El-Sayed is sexist is key to polarizing Democratic and African-American women against him.

Meanwhile, other outside ads backing Stevens feature Barack Obama praising Stevens’s work on the Detroit auto bailout and suggesting that he has endorsed her — but the former president has made no endorsement in the race.

The takeaway from these ads is clear: El-Sayed has a problem with women, especially black women like Michelle Obama; and some voters have already been convinced that Stevens is actually Barack Obama’s pick for the race.

Michigan isn’t the only place where the woke 1.0 handbook is being redeployed. In New York City, the upstart Mayor Zohran Mamdani has found popularity and policy success. And his allies in the Democratic Socialists of America are picking up seats in the New York state legislature and winning congressional primaries (which effectively means they’re sweeping the seats).

The response from the local party establishment isn’t to engage in a dialog with these rebels — who clearly represent the future of the Democrats in Gotham — but to attack them for not winning the votes of some older black and Latino voters. Self-appointed “black and Latino leaders” have attacked the DSA as a group of outsiders, lacking roots in the community. This disregards the fact that they’re winning over solid majorities in highly diverse districts.

Farther north, in Maine, the exit of Graham Platner has brought with it the ascension of Troy Jackson, a logger, former Maine Senate president, and ally of Sanders. Jackson is all but certain to be nominated by the party thanks to his strong organizing. But the liberal media are already feasting on stories about his temper (he once threw a water bottle in the presence of a female lawmaker — gasp!).

Although there is no indication that Jackson has engaged in discrimination, sexual assault, or any kind of gendered abuse, a CNN piece on the incident uses the word “female” six times, clearly implying that Jackson has some kind of problem with women. 

Neera Tanden — a long-time Hillary Clinton aide and the head of the Center for American Progress (where, full disclosure, I used to work) — is perhaps the most ritualistic abuser of these gendered attacks. Tanden recently implied that El-Sayed may have some kind of Platner-like scandal in his background. She had no evidence, but since when does dirty politics demand that?

The Democratic establishment has made clear that it is incapable of arguing ideas or electability. After all, these people lost to Trump — twice. Who in the world is looking to them for advice on how to persuade the American people?

But the Democratic primary process does not include the masses of American voters. These primaries are typically decided by relatively small coteries of Democratic activists, largely women and minorities. The presidential primary, for instance, has served as a sort of graveyard for populists after they were smeared as sexist and anti-black. The Democratic establishment knows that fear tactics can work on these groups.

Yet the strategy may be reaching its limits of effectiveness. In a number of different states, Left-populists and socialists have managed to break through in primaries in which the Democratic establishment deployed all the usual sectarian attacks.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, an upstart socialist candidate, won her congressional primary in New York City against longtime incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat. In the run-up to the vote, one of Espaillat’s senior advisers accused her ally Mamdani of trying to change the demography of Washington Heights by overrunning it with Muslims and Haitians. Voters rejected that race card. He narrowly lost his race.

Yet it should be said that Chevalier has an advantage that many Democratic populists don’t: she’s a Hispanic woman. This makes it more difficult for the Democratic establishment to use gendered and racial attacks against her. Other candidates may not be so lucky.

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El-Sayed, for instance, seemed to concede the validity of charges of sexism against his movement recently when he tweeted that “it’s become impossible to ignore the way that people online make fun of my opponent for things that have nothing to do with her policies or politics. It’s unkind and unhelpful. If you support me, please stop.”

Can you imagine Trump or JD Vance ever tweeting anything like this? There’s a reason Left-wing populism hasn’t enjoyed the same success as the Right-wing variety. Right-wing populists are simply willing to fight much harder against negative attacks, whether they’re smears or the truth.

Left-wing populists can’t win without changing their approach to the party establishment. Rather than conceding bad-faith racial and gender attacks, they should turn them to their advantage. When Sanders was endlessly attacked for the behavior of his supporters online, he validated those attacks. “I don’t want that support,” he said of his supposedly sexist backers online.

But a better approach would have been for the Vermont senator to say something like this: “Yes, some people online say rude things. That’s true for my supporters, that’s true for Secretary Clinton’s supporters. But if you go to my rally, you see thousands of women who are volunteering for me, donating for me, and working towards an America where everyone has a shot at the American dream. Smearing those people as sexist is not just wrong, it is offensive. And I think the reason they’re doing it is because they want to smear a movement that is capable of taking them on and transforming this country.”

Think of it as the Left-wing version of Trump’s “they’re not after me, they’re after you, and I just happen to be standing in the way.”

As the nation approaches another presidential election where these attacks are likely to once again be deployed, Left-wing populists have to understand that the stakes are much higher than simply winning a Democratic primary.

For years, the party has badly alienated white men, the majority of whom now vote Republican. Imagine what these people are thinking when they watch progressive populists crumble before false accusations of racism and sexism. If even Sanders and El-Sayed can be defamed as sexists, what room is there for a conservative or even moderate white male in the Democratic Party? Defeating these bad-faith tactics, then, is essential to the health of populism, the Democratic Party, and American politics.

Ultimately, Biden settled on his vice president, Kamala Harris, following through on his post-George Floyd aim to add a nonwhite politician to his ticket. Harris had flamed out as a presidential contender and ended up an ineffectual VP; her struggles in the White House incentivized Biden, despite his senility, to attempt another presidential run. If the physicists are correct, surely there is an alternate universe in which Vice President Big Gretch eased out Biden in early 2024, seized the nomination, and stopped Trump in his tracks.

But we don’t live in that universe. In ours, Whitmer has remained governor of Michigan, where she’s waffled on whether she will run for president come 2028. On paper, she would be viable: a two-term governor from a swing state with a real track record of beating Republicans. If she did take the plunge, she would receive plenty of media attention and wouldn’t struggle to fundraise. Unlike California’s Gavin Newsom, she doesn’t govern a state that produces many unflattering headlines. Opponents couldn’t point to any great homelessness crisis, natural disaster, or affordability crunch occurring on her watch.

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A Whitmer presidential campaign would, however, be a test case for a kind of politics that is growing more alienating by the day: relentless and unapologetic support for artificial intelligence. If Whitmer ran for president, she’d be the pro-AI candidate in whatever pro-AI lane exists. Few governors have catered more to the industry than Whitmer, whether it is championing tax breaks or ramming through massive data-center projects that have drawn local backlash — the kind that, shockingly, hasn’t seemed to rattle Whitmer at all. In 2026, developers have scoped out at least 16 data-center sites in 10 Michigan counties, according to an MLive tally. A massive $16 billion data center in Saline Township, which just broke ground, has been a signature Whitmer project, generating intense grassroots opposition.

Across America, Democratic and Republican politicians are growing more skeptical of AI. Red states like Florida, Utah, and Oklahoma have enacted regulations on energy use for data centers, as have deep-blue ones like California and Washington. New York passed a one-year moratorium on data-center buildouts. Maine, Idaho, Nebraska, Oregon, and Washington now regulate what chatbots can communicate to human users. The polling points the way toward more aggressive regulation: half of all American adults say the increased use of AI in daily life makes them feel more concerned than excited, according to a Pew survey from last year. Merely 10% say they are more excited than concerned.

Yet the term-limited Whitmer has been a tireless AI champion, as has the Democratic frontrunner to replace her in the governor’s mansion, Jocelyn Benson. Read any release from Whitmer’s office, and it is obvious that she views the AI expansion as a job-creating opportunity that can’t be passed up. The Saline Township data center being built by Oracle and Related Digital, she promises, will yield 2,500 union construction jobs, more than 450 ongoing jobs on the site, and 1,500 more across the county. “This investment from Oracle and Related Digital sends a simple message to anyone who wants to build the future — you can build it in Michigan,” she enthused.

Yet there are several intractable problems with data centers that Whitmer has mostly waved away or vaguely promised to address in the future. Electricity bills can surge. The water supply can be endangered. There is the noise and pollution generated from the diesel-powered backup generators. And there is a great risk, too, if AI amounts to a bubble. Hundreds of billions have been spent on a technology that remains unprofitable, and if a reckoning ever comes, towns and rural areas across the country will be left holding the bag: half-built centers, farmland wrecked for no purpose.

Hence, why prominent politicians of the Left and the Right have grown more skeptical of AI.  The likes of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Josh Hawley — representing the socialist Left and the populist Right, respectively — have positioned themselves as fierce industry opponents. Candidates for office have seen their fortunes rise just on the strength of their willingness to regulate AI. But Whitmer is cut from a different cloth. In some sense, this might be because she represents an older wing of the Democratic Party, one that remains deferential to corporate power. As both Harper’s and the nonprofit news site Bridge Michigan have pointed out, Whitmer has, since taking office in 2019, spent nearly $1 billion in taxpayer cash on corporate incentives that have delivered on only a fifth of the promised jobs. In 2024, she backed legislation to grant total exemptions on sales and use taxes for large-scale data centers, overcoming opposition in the state legislature.

In Michigan, AI companies have forged a close relationship with the dominant utility, DTE Electricity, which is eager to do big business powering the data centers. While Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat like Whitmer, has lambasted DTE for its frequent demands for rate hikes, Whitmer hasn’t been nearly as outspoken. DTE is a prolific donor in the state; Whitmer has been, naturally, a beneficiary of its largesse, bagging at least $550,000, according to Detroit News. Jocelyn Benson — the secretary of state and Whitmer’s likely successor — is married to Ryan Friedrichs, a vice president for Related Companies, not only the firm behind the Saline Township data center, but a major donor to Benson’s campaigns.

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Top Michigan Democrats are compromised enough by the data-center and utility lobbies that it fell to Tom Leonard, a former leading contender for the GOP gubernatorial nomination, to speak out against AI’s conquest of the state. Leonard called for an end to tax breaks for data centers, as well as a one-year moratorium on building new facilities. He has since dropped out, and if Michigan experiences a blue wave akin to the 2018 midterm that swept Whitmer to the governor’s mansion, Benson will probably end up the next governor.

And while the next US senator from Michigan will have far less say over the future of data centers than the governor, the fight over AI has divided the Senate primary, too. Abdul El-Sayed, the Sanders-backed progressive candidate, has called for AI companies to be regulated as public utilities and criticized his rival, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, for supporting Whitmer-endorsed data-center tax breaks in the legislature. Meanwhile, Haley Stevens, the congresswoman who is the most conservative of the three Democratic contenders, has generally defended the AI industry in the context of national security and competing with China.

For Democrats nationally, especially those who over the years have fawned over Whitmer and the political operation she’s built in Michigan, there will be the question of what kind of party they want to form. If Whitmer plunges into the presidential race, she will be the Democratic warrior for AI. If she doesn’t, others might take up the cause in the name of innovation. But they would be wise not to ignore actual voters. An AI revolt is brewing in Michigan, and it is headed anywhere else where data centers are proliferating. The AI Democrat, like the AI Republican, may only be able to survive for so long.

“I got a good friend where our entire relationship has been comprised of talking about athletes of the past,” El-Sayed tells me in a wide-ranging phone interview. “You just spitball: name an athlete from the past and their best moment, or whether LeBron James or Michael Jordan is the GOAT” (greatest of all time). He adds parenthetically: “It’s Jordan, by the way.”

ESPN used to be at the center of the friendship. But more recently, El-Sayed and his buddy can’t watch it, because the network “has become one gigantic billboard for sports betting, and he has problematic gambling. It’s was such an important of his identity, and it’s gone from him. We don’t talk about that.”

The $100 billion sports-betting “industry” raises bankruptcy rates by a third within four years of a state legalizing the practice, according to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles. That’s about 30,000 additional bankruptcies per year nationally. Yet for El-Sayed, the deeper crisis is how gambling firms, and other corporate peddlers of vice, “monetize men’s dopamine circuits.”

A gym rat and former star athlete, El-Sayed says he doesn’t know “any young man between the ages of 14 and 40 who doesn’t have some kind of problematic relationship with one of the following: sports betting, gaming, porn, cannabis.” Each “leaves people feeling small and kind of broken.” Meanwhile, elite discourse blames men “for this sort of ‘toxic masculinity,’ ” while the likes of Andrew Tate promote a misogynistic caricature of what it means to be a man. “All of these working together have led to this massive MAGA-pilling of young men.”

In response, El-Sayed thinks, Democrats should return to what their party was founded to do: empowering ordinary people relative to the market forces profiting off their misery. In this case, El-Sayed argues, that means regulating vice advertising that attempts to ensnare Americans at ever younger ages. His own daughter Emmalee (age 7), he says, has started to notice a marijuana dispensary called Cookies on the way to hockey practice in Ann Arbor, where the El-Sayeds live.

El-Sayed recalls, “I had to explain to her that they don’t sell cookies. How do I explain to [her] that they’re trying to market a product that isn’t meant for children, but [is] explicitly marketed to children?”

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Post-puberty young men are even worse off, in thrall to those who would addict them (Pornhub), and to those who farm online engagement by shifting the blame (Tate). As El-Sayed puts it, “When you’ve been sapped of all your energy because you’ve just looked at porn for the third time today, because it’s literally everywhere, and then somebody comes and tells you that ‘the reason you feel so bad is because of women,’ you’re talking about people in a very vulnerable place.”

The progressive alternative, El-Sayed contends, should be a combination of self-help and collective action: “You can tell young men, ‘OK, put on your pants, go to class, show up better in your life, hit the gym, all of it.’ But also: ‘Let’s talk about why you feel this way. It’s not about the women in your life. It’s about these huge corporations that have tried to separate you from your dollar in ways that make you feel bad.’ ”

It’s this relentless economic populism — combined with a blunt, here-I-am rhetorical style, especially on Gaza — that has made El-Sayed one of the most talked-about candidates amid the progressive ferment roiling the Democratic Party. Indeed, he comes closest to being the true heir to the aging Bernie Sanders progressives have spent years looking for.

The only question is whether El-Sayed is more like the 2016 Sanders (a heterodox rebel) or the 2020 Sanders (more conventional, more willing to play ball with the party mainstream). The shorter answer is: El-Sayed has elements of both. But on the whole, he’s more Bernie 2016 than Bernie 2020.

Abdul El-Sayed was born in 1984 in Rochester Hills, Mich., to Egyptian parents who’d moved to the area so his father could study engineering at Wayne State University. His parents later separated, and he grew up, as he told a radio interviewer in 2021, with a “Daughter of the American Revolution” stepmother and his immigrant father — the kind of only-in-America blended family that belies fantasies of racial purification animating the online Right.

He finished his undergraduate degree and the first two years of medical school at the University of Michigan before being awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where he earned a public-health doctorate. Back Stateside, he completed his medical degree at Columbia but skipped residency to pursue a career in public-health research. In 2015, at age 30, he returned to Detroit to serve as the city’s health director before running for governor three years later.

His gubernatorial bid failed, but along the way, he garnered endorsements from the likes of Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Meanwhile, he co-authored a book making the case for Medicare for All that doubled as a decent history of American health care and insurance.

Then came 2024. Michigan proved to be an especially challenging battleground for Democrats — in ways that touched on El-Sayed’s biography. Not only did the Biden-Harris campaign fail to motivate the state’s Muslim-American community, the country’s largest, but Donald Trump even won major endorsements from a number of imams and mayors. When the dust settled, Trump had clinched a majority of ballots in Dearborn, Mich., the country’s most heavily Muslim city.

How does El-Sayed explain the loss? In a word, Gaza. “Unfortunately,” he tells me, “President Biden was on the wrong side of that. His ‘hug-Bibi’ strategy put us in a situation where our values and our aims were not consistently applied as Democrats. . . . Folks got sick and tired of their tax dollars being spent to watch children being murdered who looked like their own children.”

While noting that he endorsed Kamala Harris, El-Sayed isn’t shy about where he thinks principle and politics should lead Democrats when it comes to the Middle East. For starters, he wants more Dems to get comfortable with the G-word: “I call this a ‘genocide’ in large part because that’s a technical term for a horror that’s being inflicted on people. I don’t know another word for killing 60,000-plus people, at least 18,500 of them children. Rendering their homes unlivable. Trying to push them into other countries because they happen to speak the same language.”

El-Sayed’s immediate solution to the Gaza crisis is to cut off all funding to the Israeli military (and, he quickly adds, to all foreign militaries): “I think we would do well to spend our money here to feed our children who are going without food, to build our kids’ schools, to empower our people to have health care, to build our infrastructure, rather than decimating and devastating people abroad.”

Unfavorable views of Israel are now overwhelming among Democrats, a majority of Independents, and a growing share of younger Republicans (though, as a whole, the GOP remains stalwartly pro-Israel). Yet the mainstream leadership of the Democratic Party isn’t ready to follow its base, notwithstanding a recent vote in the Senate that saw an astonishing half of the Democratic caucus call for withholding offensive weapons from the Jewish state.

Case in point: Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s transportation secretary and a likely 2028 presidential aspirant, faced broad ridicule for a podcast appearance in which he pontificated at length on Gaza without taking any clear stances. (When I ask El-Sayed to comment on this —Buttigieg is from neighboring Indiana, after all — he demurs: “I’m not a pundit.”)

But besides cutting off arms to the IDF, what’s his long-term plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Does he envision a two-state solution? “Every president before Donald Trump, since the founding of the State of Israel, has agreed that we want a two-state solution. That has been their stated aim. There is an Israel — there is not a Palestine. And yet our taxpayer dollars continue to be spent to aid, arm, and abet the very people who want to foreclose on the possibility of Palestine.”

Squint hard enough, and you might detect a grudging acknowledgment of official US policy there — two states for two peoples. Then again, El-Sayed’s cynicism is well-founded, in that leaders in Jerusalem increasingly reject Palestinian self-determination, most recently with an overwhelming vote in the Knesset in favor of annexing the West Bank.

Given the widening gap between Israel’s leaders and political culture, on one hand, and younger Americans of all political persuasions, on the other, even centrist Democrats are likely to shift in El-Sayed’s direction, even if not all the way. What makes him a potentially transformative leader for the party, however, isn’t his vociferousness on Israel per se, but his hospitals-here-not-bombs-there attitude. It echoes Sanders’s 2016 campaign — and could win back moderate or marginal GOP voters: not MAGA die-hards, but working- and lower-middle-class Americans who pulled twice for Obama before switching to Trump over the past decade.

El-Sayed is open about trying to reach disaffected Trumpians. “The fundamental divide,” he says, “is between people who have felt locked out of our system for a very long time and people who’ve been trying to lock them out. I want to work for the people who’ve been locked out. . . . How they’ve voted in the past, where they stand on social issues — I’ve got my opinions about those things, but I think we’re better as a society when people who’ve been locked out get a fair shake.”

If El-Sayed is indeed the closest thing progressives have to Bernie 2.0, his success will turn on his ability to navigate the tension between class-based economic populism and the identity-and-grievance jockeying that has shaped the party since the mid-2010s.

In 2015-16, Sanders denounced “open borders” and ran an unabashedly class-first message. In response, the party’s neoliberal center derided his followers as “bros” and often accused them (preposterously) of racism and sexism. Hillary Clinton asked: “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow … would that end racism? Would that end sexism?” Four years later, amid “peak woke,” Sanders fell in line on immigration and lost his edge.

Where is El-Sayed on all this in 2025? At first, he bristles at the question and its left-right, class-versus-identity framing: “I’m a little bit too much of a scientist to take on premise a lot of the implied lenses that you’re using to make sense out of our political moment.” Yeah, OK. Obama, too, had wearied of red and blue, right and left by the time he gave his career-defining speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

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On immigration — an issue that massively contributed to Trump’s re-election last year, and which has dramatically altered politics across the developed world — El-Sayed sounds more conventionally progressive notes. While disavowing “open borders,” he mostly fumes against the cruelty of the newly supercharged Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Masked, anonymous ICE agents, he says, “are literally tearing mothers from babies and babies away from mothers. Tell me how this is something that benefits all of us. I just don’t see it, I’m sorry.”

Fair enough. But this doesn’t overcome the deeper economic argument against the free movement of labor: that it allows capital to engage in wage arbitrage, especially at the lower rungs of the labor market. It was just this that impelled the labor movement, and many trade-union and civil-rights icons, to back restrictionism until relatively recently. And it’s why the Bernie of old denounced porous national frontiers as a “Koch Brothers policy.”

El-Sayed disagrees: “The answer to going after the DoorDash economy, is to go after fucking DoorDash.” Meaning: pro-worker and pro-consumer legislation and regulation. So would that include national E-Verify, holding employers responsible for the immigration status of employees? Not quite. His bottom line is that border enforcement can’t and mustn’t be thought of as a means for boosting labor’s market power.

Immigration aside, El-Sayed’s vision resembles Bernie 2016 to a great extent. Class and economic power are at the heart of it: “I’m interested in trying to achieve an America where everyone has their best shot at a dignified life,” he says, “and I understand that the central challenge to doing that has been the power of extremely wealthy people to corrupt our politics, to shape an economy that funnels more and more money to the very top, against and despite everybody else who does all the work.”

He goes on to call for Medicare for All, higher union density in the private economy, robust antitrust enforcement, and the removal of corporate influence from politics. Add his communitarian concern about widespread male addiction and alienation, and his agenda could prove extremely popular in years to come. Doubly so if the Trumpians continue to deliver a George W. Bush program — Medicaid cuts, Mideast war — under the banner of America First.