Abdul El-Sayed's Argument for America--and Against His Own Party

The Michigan U.S. Senate candidate on campaigning with Hasan Piker, being a capitalist, and why his fellow-Democrats need to "stop compromising." Abdul El-Sayed, the front-runner in Michigan's Democratic primary for Senate, is sometimes lumped together with other rising stars on the left. He does refer to the Democratic Party's "brand" as "bullshit" and has taken clear left-leaning positions on health care, Israel, and much else. But, at the same time, he is a self-described capitalist. He is also a former public-health official and a Rhodes Scholar. As he told me when we spoke recently for The New Yorker Radio Hour, his influences include both Bernie Sanders, a socialist, and Barack Obama, a liberal Democrat. He refers to Israel's war in Gaza as a genocide, but unlike, say, Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is almost certainly going to win a congressional seat in New York, he denounces the October 7th massacre--and certainly would not have attended, as Chavalier did, a pro-Hamas rally on October 8th, or ever. El-Sayed is forty-one and the son of Egyptian immigrants. If elected, he would be the first Muslim ever to serve in the U.S. Senate. His opponent in the August 4th primary, Haley Stevens, represents the Party establishment: she has won endorsements from Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. She is a former Obama Administration official who worked on the rescue of the car industry, which is an especially appealing credential in Michigan. Stevens and groups supporting her have spent sixty million dollars on ads--half of that sum has come from the pro-Israel lobbying group . At this point, polls suggest that El-Sayed is leading Stevens in the Democratic Party race, but in a general election he is trailing the Republican Mike Rogers by ten points, while Stevens is running even. El-Sayed, who is both fluid and charming, also shows flashes of bravado and hauteur, particularly directed against his opponents. It was perhaps not a good idea, considering his Oxford and Ivy League bona fides, to say that Stevens could not "string together two coherent sentences." According to, El-Sayed recently said on a call with donors, referring to Senator John Fetterman, "You put one ogre on a pike, and then everyone else gets the message, and all of a sudden starts to sound a lot different." He is strong with younger voters; he is trailing with Black voters. He would ban, withhold funding for arms for Israel, push for Medicare for All, and "get money out of politics."