Abdul El-sayed Won’t Back Down

Abdul El-Sayed certainly enjoys an argument. Our first interview, in a kebab restaurant in Dearborn, Michigan, spun out into a wide-ranging discussion of America’s Middle East policy, and ended with me saying, reluctantly, “Well, let’s not relitigate the Six-Day War.”

El-Sayed is campaigning to be the next Democratic senator from Michigan, but he has also become one of his party’s leading critics of Israel. I had observed that Gaza’s Arab neighbors had shown little desire to help Palestinians escape the humanitarian crisis there; he had retorted that without Israel’s bombing campaign, they wouldn’t need sanctuary in the first place. But we had run out of time. With a week to go until the primary, his schedule was packed, and his team needed to get him to the next event. He exited the restaurant, bestowing clouds of back slaps, handshakes, shukrans, and habibis on the staff. The former means “thank you” in Arabic; the latter, coming from El-Sayed, is probably best translated as “bro.”

The 41-year-old is not one of those hypercautious candidates who acts as though they’re carrying a Ming vase across a slippery floor, and he is not content to let Donald Trump’s unpopularity carry the Democrats to victory in November. His campaign is a crucial test of what kind of Democrat can prosper in a swing state. Michigan is deeply purple: It voted for Trump in 2016 and 2024, but its governor and two senators are Democrats. That makes El-Sayed the great hope for the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party—an anti-establishment economic populist running against, basically, Big Everything. He is also a Muslim, the child of Egyptian immigrants, at a time when Republicans are more and more comfortable saying that Islam is incompatible with Western values. During the Democratic primary, which El-Sayed won much more narrowly than polls had predicted, he campaigned alongside the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, known for his admiration of Mao Zedong and the Soviet Union, and for saying that “America deserved 9/11.”

[Read: What El-Sayed does next matters]

Voters on the left and the right regularly say that they want candidates who are fighters: In this environment, El-Sayed’s scrappiness should be an asset. He is willing to go into hostile territory, such as Jesse Watters’s Fox News show, and to call his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, a “beta” and “Mike Dodger” for refusing to debate him. But El-Sayed does not always pick his fights carefully. “He’s an empath,” says Brittany Huckabee, who made a documentary about him in 2018, “but he steels himself with this protective armor, almost like a bully—which serves him well in some ways, but I think it also alienates some people.”

That B-word also came up unprompted in my conversation with Monica Marks, an academic who knew him when they were both Rhodes Scholars at Oxford. “He doesn’t see himself as a bully,” Marks told me. “He sees himself as a bullier of bullies.” She thinks of him as a mixture of “serious intellectual” and “stubborn street fighter.” As an Arab American, El-Sayed faces the same challenge that Black politicians have long struggled to negotiate: What might look like passion in a white candidate is interpreted instead as aggression. Mehdi Hasan, who founded the left-wing online news start-up Zeteo, contrasted the Senate nominee’s political persona with that of New York City’s smiley and charming mayor, Zohran Mamdani. “I put him more in my camp,” Hasan said of El-Sayed. “We have RAMF: resting angry Muslim face.” As a result, half of the Republican attacks on El-Sayed paint him as a rabid Islamist who wants to institute Sharia law. (The other half imply that he’s a cheesy and effete Millennial, another Democratic soy boy clowning for the camera.)

For El-Sayed, though, having an argument is the point of running in the first place. He told me that merely holding the Senate seat for the Democrats was not the goal. “Using the seat is the goal,” he said, and mollifying opponents would therefore be fruitless. “So what would be the point of saying a bunch of things I don’t believe in, to avoid them spending money on me, to hold the seat—not to be able to do the things I want to do with it?”

El-Sayed says he gets his combative nature from his parents. His father, Mohamed, is an immigrant success story who moved from Egypt to pursue a doctorate in engineering at Wayne State University, in Detroit, and is now a professor at Eastern Michigan University. His mother, Fatten, was a medical student when the couple met. “Both are strong-willed, charismatic, charming—and both are uncompromising, not only in their beliefs, but also in their approaches to life and their way of doing things,” El-Sayed wrote in his 2020 memoir, Healing Politics. They divorced after his birth: “I comfort myself by thinking that if my parents were a band, they would have been a ‘one-hit wonder.’”

The young Abdulrahman—as he was then known—was raised by his father and his second wife, Jackie, “a distant descendant of Abigail Adams.” In one of his campaign ads, Jackie’s mother jokingly scolds him for saying the word heck. (Another ad spot features the uplifting strains of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” described by one commentator as the “white people’s national anthem.”) At school, he was a jock and a nerd: captain of his high school’s football, lacrosse, and wrestling teams, as well as a high-scoring student who went on to study biology and political science at the University of Michigan.

The teenage Abdulrahman was also aware of being a child of two cultures. He traveled to Alexandria, in northern Egypt, during one summer vacation and saw how poverty, corruption, and state repression affected his cousins. “My grandmother used to remind me, like, you have nothing over any of your cousins except for: You get to go back to America at the end of the summer,” he told me.

In Egypt, according to his memoir, he got into trouble for shouting rude Arabic words about the dictator Hosni Mubarak, and was saved by his grandfather brandishing the teenager’s American passport at the police. (Another argument it might have been wiser not to start.) He writes that back in the United States, after 9/11, he got called racial epithets during football games, and once delivered an uppercut to an opposing player in response. “Son, let me tell you something: You’re going to be Abdul El-Sayed for the rest of your life,” he records his coach telling him. “You can either use it as an excuse or you can use it as motivation.” His half brother had it worse; his name is Osama.

During his early days in politics, El-Sayed used to grouse about comparisons being drawn between him and Barack Obama. But reading El-Sayed’s memoir, or talking with him now, you can see the beats borrowed from the former president: gratitude for America, and a desire for it to be better. “I’ve been able to live an amazing life because of what America gave me,” El-Sayed told me in Dearborn. “And also, I have watched as America has systematically denied that for too many people.”

As a junior at the University of Michigan, he met and proposed to a freshman named Sarah Jukaku. They married when she was a sophomore, although they didn’t live together at first. Jukaku is now a psychiatrist, and the couple have two young daughters. Jukaku joined us for lunch in Dearborn, where she worried that her light-gray hijab was a poor choice for a meal that leaned heavily on finger foods. When I asked how she felt about the possibility of becoming part of the most famous Muslim family in America, she shook her head. “I speak for myself here,” El-Sayed interjected before turning to her and saying, “Sarah, feel free to jump in. I’m playing with house money. I’m supposed to be a cab driver in Egypt. That’s the life I’m supposed to have.”

After college, he received a doctorate in public health while studying at Oxford, and then earned a medical degree at Columbia University, although he never practiced medicine. In his memoir, he writes that his decision to become a public-health official rather than a physician was made for him by meeting an alcoholic he calls Martha in New York City. She arrived in the ER with a head injury, and the attending doctor did not want to order a CT scan; El-Sayed advocated for her and found her a bed, keenly aware that she lacked insurance and that treating her would thus lose the hospital money. He secured antiretrovirals for her HIV and even found a rehab place for her—only for Martha to inform him that she would instead be going home with her daughter.

A few weeks later, he saw her lying face down on the subway: “As she turned her head, the lights went out on my clinical career.” Nothing he’d done in the hospital could have helped Martha, he concluded. The problem was the system.

In 2015, El-Sayed became executive director of the Detroit Health Department, where his proudest achievement was helping kids get free eye exams. Two years later, he launched his first bid for elected office—a long-shot campaign for governor of Michigan. He was hoping to capitalize on the young, anti-establishment energy that Sanders had recently generated in the Democratic presidential primary. To run his campaign, he tapped Millennial idealists who felt crushed by what they saw as the party establishment’s imposition of Hillary Clinton as the presidential nominee.

Brittany Huckabee’s documentary about the governor’s race was called How to Fix a Primary. The filmmaker spent more than a year traveling with El-Sayed and his team and watched as they learned the hard lessons of machine politics. In one scene, El-Sayed consoles his policy director, Rhiana Gunn-Wright—who would go on to be the architect of the Green New Deal—over the lack of support he is receiving compared with Gretchen Whitmer, the eventual winner. “Now you know why I have to be just, like, super thick-skinned and kind of mean sometimes,” he tells her. “Because inside, I’m really mushy, and it makes me sad that the world is what it is.”

The documentary showcases El-Sayed’s undoubted strengths: He can work a crowd, he can hone a line, he can land a joke, and he can deliver a speech that will move some audience members to tears. His anger at the various corrupt structures of American public life—Big Tech, Big Ag, Big Pharma, a health-care system that bankrupts people over medical debt, a political system in hock to megadonors—appears genuine. He also has a keen eye for populist issues that have been overlooked by the main parties. The first time I saw El-Sayed speak was from a makeshift plinth, a mile down a dead-end road in Saline Township, in eastern Michigan, where one of the country’s biggest data centers is being built. “Just look at it,” he told the small crowd, gesturing at the squat gray building behind him, his words underscored by the faint beeping of construction work. “Who governs this?”

The project, euphemistically called the Barn, has torn the local community apart. Town board meetings, once sleepy, have turned into bitter shouting matches, and local politicians have received death threats. “Look, nobody wanted this,” Saline’s lawyer, Fred Lucas, told me. More than 1,400 data centers were built or approved last year, according to Business Insider’s project tracker, and variations of the Barn dispute have occurred across rural America. In Louisiana, for example, Meta had had public officials sign nondisclosure agreements for the company’s proposed Hyperion data center. Legislators smuggled tax breaks into law in a bill about fiber-optic cables.

[Rogé Karma: Data centers are a distraction]

The speed with which public opinion has curdled against data centers is extraordinary—and that has become fertile territory for the Bernie faction, who harbor an innate suspicion of billionaires and their grand projects. Back in June, Whitmer happily posed with OpenAI’s Sam Altman at a groundbreaking ceremony for the Barn. “When Whitmer started pushing those really, really hard, I would just get calls from residents saying, Hey, can you help us too?” Robert Dube, the lawyer acting for the protesters in Saline, told me. El-Sayed has woven data-center opposition into his larger theme of the distorting power of corporate donations and the resultant rip-offs faced by ordinary Americans. The issue cuts across traditional party lines: About 70 percent of Americans do not want a data center in their area, according to polls. Belatedly, politicians across the spectrum are running away from data centers. The resistance to a proposed data center in Marshall, Michigan, “was made up of people who literally founded the Green Party of Michigan and some very Trump-supporting individuals,” Dube said.

At an event in the cornfield next to the Barn, a reporter asked El-Sayed whether taking money from Big Tech should be disqualifying for political candidates. “A corporation with interests in front of the government should not be able to pay money to help elect the people who are going to advance their interests,” he replied. “Economists call that rent-seeking. I think in politics we call that frank corruption.” Around him, locals held signs that read REAL BARNS NOT BRIBES. One woman wore a T-shirt offering to EAT THE RICH.

He discovered the strength of feeling against data centers the old-fashioned way, months before they became a campaign issue for other politicians. “I remember hearing about it in three town halls in a row in October,” he told me. “I’m like, we gotta move on this; this is one of those issues that you can see is just really, really freaking people out.” In recent weeks, he has also voiced concerns about the use of Flock cameras in law enforcement, an issue that unites reflexively anti-surveillance right-wingers and leftists who are suspicious about the power of the police. He gives a surprising amount of credit to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who criticizes junk food while also espousing a lot of unevidenced woo-woo. “The hard part about him is that he’s right about all the problems; he’s just wrong about all of the solutions,” El-Sayed said, adding: “Our food environment in America is trash. We eat ultra-processed food in large part because the big food corporations and Big Ag have colluded to figure out how to put a choke on our food environment, so we eat the least healthy things that make them the most money.”

El-Sayed’s advocacy for Medicare for All, another cherished cause of the Sanders faction, is a similar mixture of pragmatism and vibe-surfing. The slogan can mean many things, including the replacement of private health insurance with a single, government-run scheme.

Over the course of this campaign, El-Sayed has eased his previously dogmatic opposition to private health-care providers. What Medicare for All now means to him is a public option, with transparent pricing and less of a cut going to middlemen. This approach was considered lily-livered when the centrist Pete Buttigieg championed it in 2019 under the slogan “Medicare for All Who Want It.” Thanks to his reputation as a left-wing street fighter, El-Sayed has managed to sell his base on a milder version of the policy.

This isn’t the only area in which he and other members of the Bernie Sanders Cinematic Universe have moved toward the center. Ben Krauss of the centrist think tank Searchlight Institute told me that El-Sayed “talked a lot about the Green New Deal” when he ran for Michigan governor in 2018. But today, as El-Sayed seeks to win over voters in the traditional center of the auto industry, mentions of climate change are far harder to find on his website. (El-Sayed told me that climate discussions have gotten hung up on wonkish stuff about “one and a half degrees or two degrees” of warming, and that he preferred to talk about how Americans “shouldn’t have to breathe unclean air or drink unclean water, and we deserve not to have to pay an arm and a leg.”) On the stump, El-Sayed has shaved his message down to a three-part refrain, which he is unashamed about repeating ad nauseam: “Money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for All.”

El-Sayed does not drink alcohol, but he did dabble with the great vice of the American left: Woke 1, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez memorably described the peak phase of social-justice progressivism. Ahead of the primary, he scrubbed dozens of old YouTube videos, including one suggesting that Fourth of July fireworks “suck.” His campaign said they no longer represented his views; he told me that during the pandemic, some people became “internet-brained” and “sanctimonious,” and that “the excesses of that moment were a function of that moment.” He added that he was “not interested in defunding anything.”

El-Sayed is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and he describes himself as a capitalist. These days, when he is asked about divisive cultural issues, he tries to pivot to affordability. When that fails, he falls back on conservative-friendly formulations such as Leave it to the states to decide and Health care should be between a patient and their doctor. “I don’t think people like to talk about it on the left, because they don’t want to say he’s moderating,” Krauss said. “And then no one wants to talk about it in the center, because they want him to moderate more.”

There is one issue on which El-Sayed’s positions have not moderated, however, and it is the one causing him the most grief: Israel.

In retrospect, the pool party was an error. On the day before the primary last month, El-Sayed attended a photoshoot next to a swimming pool, where he was pictured in his usual black V-neck and jeans, grinning alongside Hasan Piker. In another image, El-Sayed peered over his sunglasses, flanked by two women pointing finger guns at him. Cheesy? Yes. Tone-deaf, when he was about to squeak home by fewer than 15,000 votes? Also yes.

During the 10 days I spent in the Midwest ahead of the primary vote, Piker was everywhere. Without the streamer’s endorsement and appearances on the campaign trail, El-Sayed’s campaign might not have caught fire in the way that it did. In August 2025, the pair worked out together in Dearborn, on a livestream; El-Sayed—six years older and a head shorter—confidently corrected Piker’s form through kettlebell lifts and bench presses. It was an unabashed display of swole leftism, a rejoinder to the pencil-necked caricature of progressives that has taken hold on the right. “We’ve gotta get Zohran in here next time,” El-Sayed told Piker after benching 315 pounds.

In April, the two appeared together at a college event. Young leftists were delighted: A celebrity, a real-life celebrity, wanted to hang out with them! The controversy attracted volunteers and media attention, and helped El-Sayed outmaneuver another progressive candidate, Mallory McMorrow, who eventually dropped out in July. At the same time, the entire Michigan Democratic establishment was horrified, given Piker’s comments on 9/11. (He subsequently insisted that he never meant to say Americans deserved the attack, and he has apologized, as he put it on X, “for the words that i used.” El-Sayed has called the 9/11 remark a “dumb statement.”) Whitmer, the state’s moderate governor, and its outgoing senator, Gary Peters, both endorsed El-Sayed’s other primary opponent, Representative Haley Stevens.

Stevens was a solid candidate with strong working-class support. She also once said that she loved Israel so much that the country “comes to me in my dreams.” This is not something that happens to Piker—well, in his nightmares, maybe. He is the 6-foot-4 embodiment of Tom Wolfe’s article on “radical chic,” given an irony-soaked 2020s update. In the 1970s, white Brooklyn intellectuals liked to feel the warm tingle of associating with Black Panthers. Today’s college grads like to listen to a good-looking streamer who thinks Chairman Mao gets a bad rap. (He once described Mao as “one of the great leaders of this world.” When his fans challenged him, he replied that there were “a lot of fucking excesses, let’s be real”—a generous concession toward a man-made famine that killed upwards of 15 million people—“but the People’s Republic of China would not exist without Mao Zedong.”) The streamer once interviewed a Yemeni pirate who had gone viral for being hot; Piker called him by the nickname “Tim-Houthi Chalamet” and unquestioningly accepted the pirate’s suggestion that he was motivated not by “loot” but by a sincere interest in Palestinians’ welfare. On Twitch streams, Piker has argued that supporters of Israel should not hold public office, because, as he once put it, “any kind of fucking Zionist tendency should be treated in the same way as being a fucking rabid neo-Nazi.”

[Read: The Hasan Piker question]

Piker returned to the Midwest in August for some last-minute campaigning with El-Sayed, and with Francesca Hong, the democratic-socialist candidate for governor of Wisconsin. (She lost to a moderate.) There he was again at El-Sayed’s Primary Night party, held in a theater in downtown Detroit. Earlier that day, Stevens had attacked El-Sayed for indulging “demagogues or people citing allegiance to Mao.” I elbowed my way through the flocks of adoring fans to ask Piker about this. He had spent the entire primary dressed, to my eye, as Clark Kent, and that night was no exception. He wore a double-breasted suit with a tie pin (a tie pin!) and large round glasses designed to make him appear bookish.

I asked whether he planned to be more careful with his language in the future. “Yes and no,” he replied. “I’ve always been careful. It’s just impossible not to get clipped out of context.” Moments later, Piker was livestreaming from the party, dropping a “take nuke”: He believed that all the people arguing that El-Sayed needed to mend fences with the establishment were “unbelievably Islamophobic pieces of shit,” he said. So not much more careful, then.

Some Democrats have asked El-Sayed to disavow Piker—as Barack Obama did with his pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who said that 9/11 happened because “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” When asked about his association with Piker, El-Sayed defaults to a kind of aggressive bafflement. I mentioned Piker over lunch in Dearborn, and he told me that his campaign was all about broadening the tent—he would speak with Joe Rogan, or even Nick Fuentes, to get his message across about America’s broken systems.

I tried again a few weeks later, and he gave me his new line: Why was everyone obsessed with a streamer from California? El-Sayed would talk to anyone—look at the interview he had just done with Jesse Watters. “And, you know, it turns out that with Hasan—a lot of things we might agree on, including the fact that our health care is too expensive. There is the fact that we should not be fighting stupid wars.”

My patience expired.

“I don’t think that’s an unreasonable argument,” I said, “but I think it’s a bit cute, because you’re not going campaigning with Jesse Watters.”

El-Sayed returned to complaining that it was not “serious” for the media to focus so hard on Piker. But a very good way to have avoided this repetitive conversation would have been not to attend a pool party with him.

Eventually, though, Piker crossed a line of sorts. In late August, after the Michigan primary, he put up a picture of the Democratic congressional candidate Jeremy Moss on his stream, along with a post claiming that Moss had been caught on tape pledging loyalty to Israel over the United States. (Moss has said the audio is “either stitched and edited together or a just a complete fabrication.”) Piker then suggested that Israel’s actions would lead to violence against American Jews, which his critics read as wishful speculation. The El-Sayed team put out a statement declaring that “nobody speaks for this campaign besides me and my campaign spokespeople.” He has said he will not campaign alongside Piker again.

Some critics want a fuller renunciation. Why hasn’t this happened? Those around El-Sayed seem to believe that the Piker controversy is a proxy for him being too critical of Israel—that what the critics really want is for El-Sayed to drop his support for an arms embargo. “There’s many in his base who will be furious if he bowed to bad-faith right-wing pro-Israel attacks at this point,” Mehdi Hasan told me. Piker, meanwhile, simply cannot stop talking; after all, it’s his job. On Thursday, Axios published a long interview with the streamer where he ruminated on whether America was worse than al-Qaeda, “pound for pound.”

Will the Piker problem damage El-Sayed? Many American leftists think that the party’s pro-Israel faction does not understand how much the ground has shifted on this since the start of the war in Gaza. Centrist Democrats used to be able to dismiss pro-Palestinian activists as a bunch of college kids in Temu keffiyehs, but polls show that 60 percent of Americans now view Israel unfavorably. Even Nancy Pelosi, the embodiment of the Democratic establishment, voted against continued military aid to Israel in July, arguing that America needed to send a “message.” (The measure nonetheless passed the Republican-controlled House.) Some on the right have soured on Israel as well. On September 3, Tucker Carlson said that he “wouldn’t vote for Mike Rogers at gunpoint,” because he is a “tool of Israel and the intel agencies.”

On many foreign-policy issues, El-Sayed sounds like a standard-issue liberal Democrat circa 2022. Unlike Carlson and the “America First” crowd, he has no reservations about America giving military aid to Volodymyr Zelensky. “In supporting Ukraine against Russian invasion—we find ourselves on the right side of justice,” his campaign website states. He is dovish on China, and he backs the established policy of “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan. He is also opposed to letting Iran obtain a nuclear weapon, but thinks this should be achieved through diplomacy.

To some skeptics, El-Sayed’s pointed attitude toward Israel reflects the wider paranoia into which populism can lapse—the everyone is against us tendency. “The El-Sayed formula is to describe just about any policy as a conspiracy by a corporate entity or wealthy cabal to enrich itself at the expense of the people,” my colleague Jonathan Chait has written. “The villains in his stories are motivated by pure greed, and trade-offs do not exist.”

At the same time, pro-Israel groups are out to get El-Sayed: AIPAC poured $32 million into the primary in hopes of a win for Stevens. The ads and mailers were attributed to AIPAC’s electoral arm, the blandly named United Democracy Project, and very notably didn’t talk about Israel at all. The main charge was that El-Sayed was guilty of “disrespecting women,” because he’d said that Whitmer had been “bought and sold,” and described Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity initiative as “ineffectual.” According to Frank Woods, an El-Sayed supporter in the primary and the chair of the Wayne County Democratic Black Caucus, the suggestion that El-Sayed was dismissive of the former first lady damaged him with Black voters, who were reluctant to back him in the primary. “That was one of the big ones,” he told me. “He had a right to criticize her plan. But they spun it like it was disrespect.”

To me, a Briton, the idea that a lobbying group would fund unbranded ads attacking the candidate over a completely different issue does illustrate the distorting effects of dark money on American politics. During the primary, though, El-Sayed leaned into the story, running as much against AIPAC as he did against Stevens.

One of his earliest supporters was Andy Levin, a former congressman from Michigan who lost his primary in 2022 after AIPAC poured money into that race too. Levin is Jewish and was a self-described Zionist, but he had sponsored a bill calling for a two-state solution that described Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem as occupied territory. “By today’s standards, just a few years later, it was weak tea,” Levin told me. “It wasn’t a very radical bill at all.” But AIPAC was outraged and became the No. 1 donor to his intraparty rival—one Haley Stevens. Levin and others in El-Sayed’s camp have concluded that people who disagree with them on Gaza are probably corrupted by special interests: “It’s a quick test, right? If you won’t say genocide,” Levin said, “you’re bought and paid for by somebody.”

Two things can be true at once: The word AIPAC can function as a euphemism for Jewish money, evoking old anti-Semitic tropes, while also describing a powerful organization that has harshly punished politicians who step out of line.

The association with Piker and El-Sayed’s bold decision to turn AIPAC into a villain are not the only facts that trouble some prominent Jewish Michiganders, including senior Democrats such as Attorney General Dana Nessel. In March, Ayman Mohamed Ghazali, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Lebanon, drove his truck into the Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield when more than 100 children were inside. El-Sayed’s first remarks were that he was “horrified and heartbroken” and that “there is no room for anti-Semitism in America.” The next day, however, he posted a video noting that members of Ghazali’s family had been killed by Israeli air strikes: “We can and must condemn the attack on Temple Israel,” El-Sayed said, “and we can and must condemn the violence 6,000 miles away.” He also said that onlookers should remember that “hurt people hurt people.”

This distressed many Jewish Democrats, who felt that it verged on making excuses for a would-be murderer. “It’s a dangerous, dangerous world to live in where you have somebody who supports that kind of logic,” Nessel told my colleague David Frum. Andy Levin took the opposite view. “The idea that talking about that is excusing it is frankly ridiculous,” he told me. He saw El-Sayed as someone who was sincerely wrestling with the perpetrator’s motive: “It’s appropriate to talk about how violence begets violence.”

When I asked El-Sayed whether the stubbornness he noted in his parents had been passed down to him, leading to an unwillingness to admit mistakes, he cited his Temple Israel comments as an error that he was trying to rectify. “I put out a statement where it felt to a lot of people like I was trying to put an asterisk on their pain,” he said, adding: “I’m taking the opportunity to apologize to folks in the Jewish community.” He repeated these sentiments to the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus. “I should have issued a statement, of course, condemning it, and it just should have been the full stop,” he told the room. The campaign is now also hiring a liaison officer for Jewish voters.

Nevertheless, an open letter has been circulating under the banner of a new group called Michigan Jews Against Extremism, in which more than 400 self-declared Jewish Democrats and independents have publicly pledged to support Mike Rogers, the Republican. “I care the same for Jews in Israel as I do my Jewish neighbors here. My personal and tribal safety as a Jew are at heightened risk if El-Sayed wins,” one of the signatories, Troy Zukowski-Serlin, told me.

The idea that the state of Israel and Jewish people more generally should not be conflated is one of the most hallowed principles in American political life, and yet no one adheres to it consistently. Some view El-Sayed’s call for an arms embargo against Israel—leaving it defenseless amid a sea of Muslim states that would happily see it falter or even disappear—as anti-Semitic. “The lines between being anti-Israel and anti-Semitic, if they ever really existed, have now converged,” Mark Davidoff, a Detroit businessman who also signed the letter, told me. “When a candidate states that Israel is driven by ‘illiberal values,’ the candidate is leaping beyond criticism of Israeli-government policy—the candidate is advocating for the abolishment of the Jewish homeland.”

In interviews, El-Sayed has refused to say whether he believes Israel has a “right to exist.” CNN’s Kasie Hunt pressed him on the issue three times in July. He called this a “gotcha game.” He told her that he believed in self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians, adding: “Israel exists. The question is whether we want a politics where our money is sent over to Israel to fund genocide and apartheid instead of investing in our own kids.” Shortly before publication, I asked El-Sayed how he thought Israel should have responded to the October 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas, but I have not yet heard back.

The night before I interviewed him in Dearborn, Stevens had posted that “everyone in America understands you want to blame all of your problems on Jewish Americans.” I read the quotation to El-Sayed as we waited for our food to arrive. Stevens’s words were, he said, typical of someone who took money from “an organization focused on a foreign government” and from greedy corporations. “I frankly find it offensive to try to make that kind of argument, and I think it’s consistent with the cynicism that we’ve seen,” he said. “As I’ve always said, I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people.”

While these debates over anti-Semitism have been raging, the immense prejudice directed at El-Sayed himself has received surprisingly little attention.

In 2018, after El-Sayed lost the governor’s race, Corey Stewart, a Republican candidate from Virginia, tweeted that “Michigan almost elected a far left ISIS commie.” Stewart said that the tweet had been sent by someone else and quickly deleted it. But the days when a Republican might feel embarrassed enough to distance themselves from flatly bigoted libels are gone. “Michigan Democrats just voted to send a TERRORIST to the Senate,” Senator Tommy Tuberville, an Alabama Republican, declared on X on August 6. “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed is a RADICAL ISLAMIST who will do everything he can to destroy America.” Donald Trump posted a picture of himself with Melania next to one of El-Sayed and Jukaku. “Two VERY DIFFERENT America’s,” read the caption. After the primary, Rogers put out a statement suggesting that El-Sayed, not Piker, had said that America deserved 9/11. This made explicit what I had assumed: that the right hopes that saying “9/11” over and over again will associate a Muslim candidate with Islamist terrorism.

El-Sayed is not running away from his religion. His Election Night–party drinks were all mocktails, and I walked in at 9 p.m. to find a small group of men prostrate on the floor in the atrium, facing Mecca. But he also doesn’t want to dwell on the bigotry that this contest has revealed. His preferred line on Trump is to mock his pronunciation of Abdul, which the president likes to linger over: Abdooolllllll. “I’ve been Abdul in Michigan my whole life,” he told me. “And Michiganders are really open-minded and bighearted.”

Brittany Huckabee told me that she had expected to make El-Sayed’s religion a bigger part of the documentary, partly because his candidacy exposed the tensions among America’s Muslims. “He actually struggled to get support from the Michigan Muslim community,” she said, “and the main issue was his support for LGBTQ rights. That was a bridge too far for a lot of people in Dearborn.” (His half sister Eman Abdelhadi identifies as queer and has participated in a documentary called Coming Around.) Eventually, though, he convinced at least some of them. He also faced pushback from a group that Huckabee nicknamed the “Dearborn trolls”—Shia Muslim protesters and online rabble-rousers who considered him insufficiently hard-line in his faith. And while this was happening, El-Sayed was fending off ambushes from the right. At one point in the 2018 campaign, Laura Loomer, who believes that no Muslims should be allowed to hold public office in America, went to an El-Sayed meet and greet to shove cameras in his face and ask him about Sharia law.

El-Sayed has reacted hotheadedly to some of these incidents. Huckabee told me about one scene that didn’t make the film, but that she expects to resurface before November’s vote. At a panel event for both parties, Republican State Senator Patrick Colbeck claimed that Muslims are waging a “civilizational jihad” on America. When passed the mic, El-Sayed called out Colbeck’s “blatant racism” before criticizing the other Republicans for refusing to distance themselves from him. “Now, you might not hate Muslims,” El-Sayed concluded, “but I’ll tell you Muslims definitely hate you.”

Yeah. You can imagine how that is going to sound out-of-context in a Republican ad right around mid-October. “Afterwards, he told me, ‘I’m going to regret that until the day I die; that is going to haunt me forever,’” Huckabee said. “That was not something that he stood by; it was like, basically, he let himself get flustered.”

Over the phone, I asked El-Sayed how he planned to deal with that clip reemerging. “Patrick Colbeck is a deeply distasteful human being,” he said, adding: “It’s not just Muslims that hate Patrick Colbeck; a lot of people hate Patrick Colbeck. He’s earned it.” And there’s the street fighter again.

[Jonathan Chait: The crisis for Democrats in Michigan]

Fortunately for El-Sayed, most Democrats in Michigan put a high premium on niceness. Stevens, after battering him in the primary, has acted with unimpeachable good grace in defeat, hugging him onstage at the party’s traditional unity rally. Michigan’s other senator, the former CIA officer Elissa Slotkin, has backed him, arguing that “Abdul El-Sayed and I don’t agree on everything—and that’s okay. We can have real debates on those issues, like adults.” Whitmer has kept any doubts to herself, and Pete Buttigieg, who now lives in Traverse City, stayed neutral during the primary so that he could convincingly campaign with the winner. This is more indulgence from the Democratic establishment than El-Sayed—who spent the primary insisting that he was “dangerous” to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—had any right to expect. Obama even called him on the phone, and Kamala Harris endorsed him. (Unlike Mary Peltola in Alaska, he did not reject the former vice president’s gesture.)

The counterpoint is that El-Sayed has been unlucky in his opponent. Rogers has lately embraced election denialism and the shameless devotion to Trump that is now required for all Republicans. Yet he also comes off as generic in the exact way that is most unhelpful to opposing campaigns. Rogers has held few events and stayed out of the media—my interview request went unanswered. El-Sayed proposed five debates; Rogers has already skipped the first. Republicans have asked AIPAC not to advertise on Rogers’s behalf, fearing that the group’s support might be counterproductive. “Rogers has gotten away with zero media coverage,” Mehdi Hasan, the Zeteo founder, told me. “No one knows anything about him. There’s barely any mention of him, even on MSNBC or CNN.”

This is what happens when a street fighter squares up to an opponent who hopes to win on points. If El-Sayed wins, the Sanders wing will take his victory as confirmation that the left can be competitive outside deep-blue areas. If he loses, the centrists will tell the progressives to get back in their box.