The Extremely Online Senate Race Testing Democrats’ Midterm Strategy

MACKINAC ISLAND, Mich. — To understand the future of the Democratic Party — maybe even the future of politics writ large — you have to charter a plane or board a ferry and cross some five miles of choppy waters across the Straits of Mackinac, where Lake Huron meets Lake Michigan, to reach Mackinac Island, a roughly 4-square-mile scrap of land shaped like a turtle and wedged between Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas. It feels like traveling back in time. There are no cars on the island; horse-drawn taxis clip-clop amid the Victorian architecture. The place seems about as far from the digital cacophony that is politics in 2026 as you could get. Yet one week in late spring, the three millennial candidates in what has become the nation’s most online primary all arrived here by ferry for their first real statewide televised debate amid days of politicking.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. If Democrats lose the general election in November to prospective Republican nominee Mike Rogers, it will be all but impossible for them to reclaim the Senate — and the GOP knows it. Already, the Senate Leadership Fund, the Super PAC aligned with GOP Senate Majority Leader John Thune, has reserved $45 million in ads for Rogers this fall. In hypothetical general election matchups, the margins are thinner than the lilac cotton candy you can buy over at the Sanders Candy and Fudge Shop here.

Beyond control of the Senate, the Michigan primary could help determine what kind of Democratic Party will emerge from the midterms at a time when Democratic voters are furious with the party’s second electoral loss to President Donald Trump and hungry for major change. Two of the Michigan candidates — former public health official Abdul El-Sayed and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow— have called for a change in Democratic leadership. El-Sayed has said he’s the only candidate that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wouldn’t be “OK with winning.” McMorrow called for Schumerto step aside last March. On the other hand, primary candidate Haley Stevens, a U.S. representative, has Schumer’s endorsement and the support of the party establishment in Michigan. They are also debating how to rein in ICE and whether to adopt Medicare for All (El-Sayed backs the latter, while McMorrow and Stevens support a public option approach).

Just this week, leftist candidates backed by progressive New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani won three primaries in New York, unseating Rep. Adriano Espaillat, who is the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and delivering a blow to Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. A progressive win in the Michigan primary would compound the pressure on party leadership and indicate that a wave of left populism — a so-called Democratic Tea Party — could prove to be a substantive force, even beyond deep-blue New York. It would also turn the screws on Democrats who appear increasingly out of step with a voting base that has grown skeptical of Israel. It’s an issue that’s particularly important in Michigan, the state with the highest percentage of Arab American voters.

But the most important element of the Michigan primary may be just how online it’s become — and what that says about the future of political campaigning itself.

For the last year and a half, primary candidates haven’t just crisscrossed the pivotal midterm battleground of Michigan in an effort to win back control of the Senate; they’ve also crisscrossed the internet. They’ve torched X timelines with occasionally viral videosabout affordability, found themselves subjected to online trolling from Senate Republicans’ campaign arm and become supporting cast members in the popular and controversial far-left streamer Hasan Piker’s cinematic universe.

El-Sayed and McMorrow, in particular, are spending vast amounts of time campaigning in what has come to be known as the “attention economy,” a concept that is poised to define the future of political campaigns across the country. In 2024, Trump, a longtime master in the art of getting attention, sailed to victory in part thanks to his embrace of new and alternative media stars on YouTube, Twitch and everywhere else young men tune in to just-shooting-the-shit style commentary. After Trump’s win, liberal New York Times columnist Ezra Klein described the problem facing the party under the headline, “Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.”

On the other side of the political spectrum, Mamdani went from a virtual political unknown with an infinitesimal chance of winning office to the mayor of America’s largest city — and a potential standard-bearer for progressives — with a strategy of pumping out imminently watchable man-on-the-street campaign videos. It’s also a tactic El-Sayed has deployed.

Michigan presents a fascinating test case in how that trend will shape campaigns in the future. Both El-Sayed and McMorrow have a background in attracting online followings. El-Sayed worked for Crooked Media, before moving to his own content company and has been the subject of a documentary. And if you knew McMorrow already, it’s probably because of her viral speech shooting down Republican claims that her support for LGBTQ+ rights made her a “groomer,” a term conservatives often use for child predators. Both candidates also have Democratic super-strategists on their teams: Lis Smith, who guided former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg through the 2020 presidential Democratic primary, is advising McMorrow; and Rebecca Katz and her FIGHT Agency, whose firm worked with Mamdani during his mayoral bid, is shepherding El-Sayed.

So far, the strategy is working wonders for El-Sayed, who also happens to be the only one of the three who has run statewide before (in 2018 against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer). At the moment, it’s not working as well for McMorrow. El-Sayed scored a major bump — and provoked controversy within the party — when he stumped with Piker, the leftist streamer, in April. After McMorrow criticized Piker over past comments he made about 9/11, El-Sayed’s support began to soar. Now, El-Sayed is dominating the polls, with Stevens in second and McMorrow in a distant third. “It probably is the flub of this entire primary cycle,” Piker told me.

Stevens serves as something of a traditionalist control group to El-Sayed’s and McMorrow’s new and very online experiment. She’s so offline that she brags about being more familiar with her local car dealer at Skalnek Ford, in Lake Orion, Michigan — her nickname, Stevens tells me, is Casey Boom Boom, owing to an incident with firecrackers — than the latest trending meme. On X, El-Sayed has some 136,700 followers; McMorrow has upward of 226,500; and Stevens has less than 30,000. Her campaign sees her challengers as over-indexing on comment sections, rather than ballot boxes. Whether that’s a sharp tactical critique or outdated thinking will become clear when the ballots are counted on Aug. 4.

“You have two very online candidates — one a literal podcaster, the other a person who rose to prominence for making really good digital content,” says Rob Flaherty, the Democratic digital strategist and former deputy campaign manager for Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign. “And then you have Haley Stevens, who is probably not the perfectly designed online candidate. And then you sort of have the extremely online discourse about AIPAC, and so it sort of is this perfect storm, and then obviously you know this is a race where it is a little bit about the identity of the party.”

On this particular week, all three of them converged on this island for the Mackinac Policy Conference, a kind of Midwestern Davos organized by the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce. For a few thousand dollars plus hotel accommodations, much of the state’s congressional delegation, lobbyists, potential 2028 presidential candidates and journalists convened on the island for boozy fundraisers, lakeside yoga sessions and Ted-like political talks. Ironically, the opening salvo of a primary that’s arguably about the importance of internet attention would take place in a locale that couldn’t feel farther from the online din.

While the Democrats test out a maximalist approach in this new era of media mogging, Rogers and the Republicans are practically licking their chops. “I think Mallory has probably the most to lose with this, candidly,” he told me after Piker’s visit this spring. “She’s hopping up and down looking for attention, but they’re all just a few degrees off of where they are on all their positions. … It’s about who’s getting the most energy and the most attention. I think that’s why Abdul is doing so well.”

El-Sayed stood on the porch of the Grand Hotel in a suit jacket and paisley pocket square, face-to-face for the first time with Rogers, the GOP’s uncontested nominee. Inches away from Rogers, he jabbed his finger at his American flag-themed pocket square, asking him if it violated the U.S. Flag Code — trolling him, even though they weren’t officially opponents yet.

Next, El-Sayed interrogated Rogers’ height, wondering whether he was at least 6-feet tall.

“I’m six foot” at least, Rogers replied, “because I say I’m 6’2.”

El-Sayed rolled his eyes. The height question had become a running gag on the island. The day before, he confronted Michigan GOP House Speaker Matt Hall about whether he was actually 6-feet tall, too. “It’s about stolen valor,” said El-Sayed, who claims he’s about 5’9” himself. (“I stopped growing in eighth grade,” he told me. I once heard him tell Piker that he has a “6’7” personality.”)

The schoolyard ribbing fit with a persona that El-Sayed adopted in the wake of the 2024 election. It was like he flipped a switch from “sensitive professor mode” to “bro mode.” Where once the Oxford-educated epidemiologist extolled the ills of “racial capitalism” and argued for “decarceration,” now he shows off his muscles in T shirts and livestreams from the gym with Piker. (“I contain multitudes,” he told me.) If you squint, you might mistake him for one of those fitness influencers so many young men follow online. One of my earliest memories of him is comparing our “Whoop ages” on the popular fitness tracker Whoop, which estimates your “biological,” rather than chronological, age. It currently puts him at 38.3 years old; he’s actually 41. He’d cracked the code, he explained: daily iced honey lattes with high-protein milk; sardine-maxxing (“truly the omnifood,” he said) and a La Colombe cold brew regimen at specific intervals throughout the day.

His campaign has leaned into it, wrapping him in the flag and featuring him water skiing,cycling and flexing his biceps. And his rhetoric has been updated, too. One of his most memorable lines of the campaign so far has been his MMA modification of Michelle Obama’s famous line: “When they go low, we don’t go high,” El-Sayed has said. “We take them to the mud and choke them out.”

El-Sayed’s macho brand reached its apex last July, when he began streaming with Piker. The muscle-bound streamer has millions of followers, but has courted controversy, including among Democrats. Piker once said that “America deserved 9/11,” though he later apologized. After the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, Piker strongly condemned the Israeli response in Gaza and has criticized the government in terms some Jews and supporters of Israel have labeled antisemitic. Piker denies the accusations of antisemitism, saying that he’s critical of the Israeli government, not Jewish identity.

For his part, El-Sayed is an attention economy native. In 2019, he began a career with “Crooked Media,” the podcast company started by the Obama alums Tommy Vietor and Jon Favreau. He had a Substack. He was a CNN contributor from February 2020 to February 2023. In 2024, he took his podcast “America Dissected” and moved it to his own production company called Incision Media. He and his wife had a combined net worth of $432,000 in 2024, according to tax returns he provided to the Detroit News. His net worth rose to as much as $1.66 million, though he has resisted releasing his personal financial disclosure until after the primary.

His skill with the media was apparent in April as Piker prepared to stump with El-Sayed in Ann Arbor and East Lansing. His team strategically lined up Fox News hits for him the morning of, allowing him to say he was reaching people across the ideological spectrum. McMorrow expressed disapproval in an interview with Jewish Insider, saying Piker “was somebody who says extremely offensive things in order to generate clicks and views and followers, which is not entirely different from somebody like Nick Fuentes” — a reference to the avowedly far-right and antisemitic internet personality. Piker and El-Sayed went on to electrify campus crowds, and El-Sayed’s surrogates have argued McMorrow’s comments marked the moment she started to nosedive in the polls.

“This whole gotcha game, platform policing, cancel culture — I thought we were over it,” El-Sayed told me earlier this year. “I thought we lived through the whole discourse of ‘should have gone on Rogan,’” he said, referencing the idea that, if only Vice President Kamala Harris had podcasted with the uber-popular Joe Rogan, she might’ve won. Essentially, it was an argument for grabbing more attention. And condemning voices like Piker’s, he said, is one reason Democrats “too often fail to get our message out.”

Piker had leapt from the Internet and his IRL campaigning and McMorrow’s reaction to it had changed the trajectory of the race.

In the back of a horse taxi with El-Sayed, I brought up how all the internet-driven attention had shaped his campaign — and the fact that I had tweeted out his interaction with Rogers on X.

“The online discourse mirrors what people are talking about in their daily lives, and then they tweet about it,” El-Sayed told me. “Look at what you just did. You saw an in-real-life interaction, and you’re like, ‘This would be really interesting online,’ so you tweeted it. That’s how really good social media works, is that you generate buzz in real life, and then people take that into their online spaces, and then it becomes robust because it connects to people who also had that in-real-life experience. That’s the thing I think a lot of campaigns miss, is that they just want to exist online, and that’s not a real way of existing.”

El-Sayed’s theory of the case faces a big test on Aug. 4. His online persona and podcasting background have gotten him plenty of eyeballs, but they also mean he has a long digital past that could come back to bite him, including deleted posts from 2020 about defunding the police. McMorrow and Stevens haven’t yet used those against him, but there are signs Rogers and Republicans will use their tens of millions of dollars to do exactly that — and translate them to attacks on the rest of the party. “Abdul now is the standard bearer for the Democrats across the state of Michigan,” Rogers said.

Michigan Democrats have their own concerns about where all this is headed. “I don’t think they’re the only ones around the country, but I certainly think there’s a lot of engagement, positive and negative, online right now — specifically to this primary, because we have a lot of online interest and online backgrounds,” said Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who knows what it’s like to beat Rogers in a general election. “I think some of the candidates really have an online background, but the vast majority of Michiganders are not that online.”

Across the island, over at the promenade deck at Mission Point Resort, McMorrow contorted herself into a series of yoga positions as the mid-afternoon sun beat down. She was leading a session called “Policy and Poses,” which promised attendees an opportunity to “balance your body with a yoga stretch, unwind and find a moment of calm during the Conference,” according to a description in the agenda.

But despite the strawberry-infused water on hand, it was not entirely a moment of calm for McMorrow’s campaign. She was polling well behind both challengers, and El-Sayed had risen to first place with the kind of viral online playbook that once made her a breakout star.

It’s not that she had lost her talent for attracting eyeballs. Last fall, her viral video pegged to the NFL RedZone (which is now carrying commercials) attacked the sports channel’s move to run ads as “the latest example of corporate greed,” tying the development to costs of groceries. It earned nearly 2 million views. Again this spring, McMorrow launched another video that would go viral, this time on surveillance pricing, racking up nearly 6 million views. Both neatly fit into the affordability arguments carrying Democrats in other states to victory and turning the screws on the Trump administration.

And while she was on the island, McMorrow was quietly producing a 2-minute long video clip about the Florida-based, billionaire-run private equity company that owns the ferries that took her to the island, targeting their raised rates for Michiganders — proving that the Senate Democratic primary is virtually content all the way down.

That ability emerged from both her political and professional origin stories.

McMorrow first flashed into the national political consciousness in April 2022, with a viral speech defending herself against unfounded Republican attacks that she was a “groomer.” She turned the 15 minutes of political fame into millions of dollars, building a national political network, scoring a book deal and guest spots on podcasts and cable shows. It contributed to leaving her and her husband millionaires on paper, according to their most recently filed personal financial disclosure, with an estimated net worth as much as $1.9 million. Stevens’ campaign attacks both her and El-Sayed over their finances, demanding they release their tax returns. El-Sayed has said he’ll release his latest disclosure after the primary after filing for and receiving an extension. (The campaigns released their tax returns to The Detroit News).

If others merely adopted the attention economy as a political tool, McMorrow was molded by it. In 2012, after a stint at an Urban Outfitters and three years of working as a designer at Mattel leading product design and global licensing for Hot Wheels cars, McMorrow landed a job as a creative director at Gawker, the late irreverent gossip website. She was there when the CEO installed a big traffic board in the office where you could see which items were going viral in real time, an experience that transformed how she thought.

“I was such a fan before I worked there,” McMorrow told me. “I learned that you can write about any topic, no matter how complicated, just like you would talk to your friend at a bar, and you can make it accessible, and you can make it fun and funny.”

Now, McMorrow and her allies are in a race to boost her name ID statewide: Yes MI Action Committee, a McMorrow-aligned outside group, is set to spend at least $7 million on her behalf through the end of the month.

But McMorrow’s Internet-first fluency hasn’t always served her. “McMorrow has one of the hardest jobs in any senate race out there,” Flaherty told me. “She has to run up the middle in a really tough primary. It's a long primary, like it's, it's really hard. You kind of have to thread a really tight needle to get it right—you need voters who basically think Stevens is too old school and Abdul is too extreme.” Running up the middle on X leaves you exposed: “I think there are more people trying to take out Mallory McMorrow on the internet,” Flaherty said. Earlier this spring, CNN unearthed deleted tweets from the 2010s in which she disparaged Middle America and Michigan itself.

“I had a dream that the U.S. amicably broke off into The Ring (coasts + Can + Mex + parts Mich/Tex) and Middle America,” she postedin December 2016. “Oh and The Ring nominated Obama as Prime Minister and everyone was given $1,000 and six months to pick a side.”

Perhaps even more damaging, she complained about the state’s weather in another deleted post: “Yesterday it was nearly 50 and now the sky is just shitting ice on everything. I don’t like you, Michigan.” Stevens jumped on the story. “So what actually ticks me off? Someone who wants that job — representing Michiganders — talking crap about us and our state,” she tweeted.

Stevens is content to stay out of El-Sayed and McMorrow’s brawl for attention. In a post-Election Day memo last November, her advisers quipped that Stevens’s opponents were focused “on punditry and going viral.” When I first met her on Mackinac at this same conference a year ago and introduced myself as a reporter, she explained she was eating and scurried away. The most interesting thing I got out of her on this visit to the island was about her car dealer, Casey Boom Boom. “It was Boom Boom because she lost two fingers,” Stevens explained. “And it was a firecracker.”

Where El-Sayed and McMorrow pine for attention, Stevens practically avoids it. Stevens has a traditional political background, having come up through student government at American University before becoming the first millennial member of Congress to represent Michigan, flipping a traditionally Republican congressional district. The video announcing the theme of her campaign as a “love letter to Michigan” has a mere 40,000 views, a fraction of McMorrow’s and El-Sayed’s. Her own videos don’t tend to go viral on social media; when she does go viral, it’s usually in videos that paint her in an unflattering light. There she was getting booed at the Michigan Democratic Party’s April convention, for example, over her stance on AIPAC and Israel. “Democrats, I love you, even when we disagree,” Stevens replied. Her events around the state are captured in the subject lines from her campaign emails: Haley Stevens Spends Weekend Stumping Across Michigan. Haley Stevens Joins Picket Line Alongside UAW Local 2093 Members at American Axle. Haley Stevens Spends Memorial Day Weekend Meeting With Michiganders Across Metro Detroit. 

But if Stevens seems relatively unconcerned with streamers and internet lurkers compared to McMorrow and El-Sayed, she’s attracted plenty of attention from politicians. In recent weeks, perhaps because of their fear of El-Sayed winning the nomination, the Michigan political establishment has begun to coalesce around her. That week on the island, Stevens posted a conspicuously chummy photowith Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who has said she will remain neutral in the primary. Schumer announced earlier this month that he’s backing Stevens. And at the island’s Grand Hotel, as they served beer, wine and cocktails on the porch, Stevens had former Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, who endorsed her, in tow to tell me about “Haley’s incredible strength of understanding manufacturing suppliers, small businesses, and so on,” she told me.

I asked Stevens about her campaign’s criticism of McMorrow and El-Sayed being too online.

“I don’t know — I’m not really online,” she said. As evidence, she offered the more than 4,000 unread text messages on her phone. “Everyone knows it’s a freaking luxury to spend time doing all that stuff,” she said.

Republicans are taking up that luxury too. The NRSC routinely posts awkward videos of her, and conservatives have memeified a video of Stevens talking about her childhood best friend’s dog, Poochie, that some online found cringeworthy.

An account called @BeshearStan, an anonymous progressive account that appears to be based in Kentucky and is likely to have no say at the ballot box, said she “looks like she’s sagging while standing up.” One McMorrow stan account called her “a walking meme.” But Stevens is betting that doesn’t matter so much, that “real life” — like, apparently, knowing the name of her auto dealer — will come out on top.

I brought up the NRSC’s posts mocking her. Had they gone too far?

“They’re bullying me?” she asked. “Is it my face? It’s my clothes.” She added: “I’m just getting bullied,” she said. “Like I was in middle school.”

Perhaps the clearest example of Stevens’ approach to the attention economy came after the debate at the end of the week. It had been rather uneventful: McMorrow struck a middle ground between El-Sayed’s progressivism and Stevens’ centrism, saying that “people can’t afford to wait for a revolution that may never come.” A perhaps over-caffeinated El-Sayed said that “revolution is definitely not coming if we’re not fighting for it.” Maybe the biggest headline out of the debate was Stevens’ failure to answer a question about accepting AIPAC contributions; The New York Times wrote that she spoke 160 words without coming remotely close to answering the question.”

After the debate, Stevens ducked into the spin room, where reporters were waiting to ask her questions. She looked around, but then darted out, leaving her campaign manager and adviser standing there, helpless. An adviser suggested she went back to her hotel room — and also needed to catch a ferry.

Meanwhile, a mob of other reporters surrounded El-Sayed and McMorrow, giving them all the attention they could want.