What Abdul El-sayed’s Election In Michigan Would Prove

Abdul El-Sayed is running for Senate as a Democrat in Michigan, where he is waging a close and bitter contest against Representative Haley Stevens in a primary that will be held on Tuesday. Were he to win, and then go on to defeat Mike Rogers, the presumed Republican candidate, El-Sayed would become the most fervently anti-Zionist senator. “If you want your politics dictated to you by AIPAC or Chuck Schumer, then I’m not your guy,” he said during a debate with Stevens.

El-Sayed depicts Israel and its American supporters as the primary authors of Donald Trump’s foreign policy. He also blames Israel and AIPAC for a wide array of domestic social problems. “We should be using our tax dollars here to invest in health care here and education here, rather than sending it over there to buy bombs and tanks that get used to drive apartheid and genocide there,” he said to WDET, Detroit’s public-radio station. El-Sayed has barely acknowledged the possibility that Stevens is a sentient being with individual agency, describing her as “a suit with a large AIPAC bank account.”

Asked recently on CNN if he thought there were any reasons other than money that someone might have a different view on Israel, he said, “Not if you’re a Democrat and you believe in human rights.” Asked if a progressive could also be a Zionist, he replied, “Every definition of a Jewish state ends up in some articulation of illiberal values, every single one.”

The magnitude of the shift in Democratic politics that El-Sayed’s election would create has not quite registered with the party’s voters. In part this is because New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, also a fervent anti-Zionist, attracted so much attention and controversy in his campaign last year that El-Sayed’s run feels like a tamer sequel. In reality, however, not only was Mamdani running in a far different locale (an overwhelmingly Democratic city rather than a purple state), but he also, with rare exceptions, focused on affordability, not on Israel. It was his opponents who sounded obsessed with Israel.

[Listen: A battle for the future of the Democratic Party]

El-Sayed’s campaign is currently the left’s preeminent cause, held up as key proof that an obsessively anti-Zionist left-wing politics can win outside of blue enclaves. Michigan voted twice for Donald Trump. Should El-Sayed prevail, he would immediately open the door for a new wave of like-minded candidates to follow behind him. “You put one ogre on a pike,” El-Sayed told donors in a Zoom call, according to Politico, apparently referring to Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, “and then everyone else gets the message, and all of a sudden starts to sound a lot different.”

But if El-Sayed’s anti-Zionism is obsessive, it is not a singular obsession. He talks about the Israel lobby the way he talks on the stump about nearly any other political issue. 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. The villains in his stories are motivated by pure greed, and trade-offs do not exist.

This is a rhetorical style that has long existed on the populist left. The trouble is that, when you apply it to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and especially to the question of why some Americans do not share El-Sayed’s position on it, his approach grows paranoid and menacing.

Populists believe, almost as an article of faith, that Democrats can win working-class voters by moving left on economic policy. El-Sayed has aligned himself with the Democratic Party’s Bernie Sanders–and–Elizabeth Warren wing, endorsing Medicare for All, promising to end Citizens United, supporting targeted tariffs, emphasizing the evils of corporate monopolies, and generally making the answer to every political question a blunt attack on billionaire greed. When applied to ordinary problems, this rhetorical mode yields oversimplistic but crowd-pleasing answers. “Why don’t our schools get the funding that they deserve? Well, because there’s not a lobby for schools. Kids don’t have a corporate PAC,” El-Sayed says, in a typical piece of campaign rhetoric. In truth, there is a powerful lobby for school funding: teachers’ unions. The main barrier to more spending on schools is not the absence of lobbying; it’s that people don’t like paying taxes.

After Gretchen Whitmer, the state’s popular Democratic governor, endorsed Stevens last week, El-Sayed explained the choice as the inevitable product of the two women’s benefactors. “Those who have taken corporate money for most of their careers tend to stick together,” he said.

When this populist analysis is extended to Israel, it takes on an even more conspiratorial edge. El-Sayed’s efforts to weave a seamless narrative connecting AIPAC to his struggle against wealthy interests has built the Israel lobby into an almost-supernatural force controlling American politics behind the scenes.

Graham Platner—who was running competitively in polls against Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine, before scandals overtook him—preceded El-Sayed as the movement’s cause célèbre. He similarly depicted himself as the tribune of the people fighting a twilight struggle against oligarchs. When reporters began to unearth evidence of questionable behavior, his supporters quickly concluded that his twin struggles against oligarchy and Zionism—perhaps it was a single struggle—had made him a target.

“The thing about this smear campaign is that it’s obvious,” wrote the American Economic Liberties Project researcher Matt Stoller on X. “Graham Platner wants to eliminate the power of billionaires, and wants to end our alliance with Israel. That’s all these slurs are about, not what he did or who he is.” The podcaster Krystal Ball posited a “clear double standard at play with Platner reporting because he is anti-zionist and anti-oligarch.” Sam Haselby, a historian and an author, wrote on X, “Let’s be serious. They don’t like Platner because he’s an economic populist. They have no trouble with vastly worse sexual ethics as long as one is pro-billionaire and pro Israel.”

The basis for these charges is a bit cracked. But it follows logically from the populist analysis of the situation. If all resistance that left-wing candidates face is the work of a shadowy moneyed interest, and fighting Israel is the left’s most deeply felt cause, then it stands to reason that Israel, or its lobbyists, are behind every setback the movement encounters. Earlier this month, El-Sayed casually dismissed a poll showing Stevens leading him by a point by telling MS NOW, “That poll seems to be funded by AIPAC,” which is not true.

Pro-Israel lobbying does play an important role in domestic politics, and it does often include spurious charges of anti-Semitism to discredit legitimate critiques of Israel. Aid to Israel is not, however, a meaningful constraint on American domestic spending, given that aid to Israel accounts for less than one tenth of 1 percent of the federal budget. The populists are not imagining that they are fighting a well-funded lobby. What they are imagining is that this lobby is the hidden force behind all of the opposition they face.

I received a small taste of this political style earlier this spring, when I wrote an article criticizing El-Sayed’s claim that he can adopt unpopular left-wing positions without jeopardizing his ability to win a general election. The small left-wing magazine Current Affairs asked him to respond the next month, and he said, “I really appreciate the question, because I really want us to step back and ask a couple of very basic points about how politics actually work, not from the Atlantic desk where you have a vested interest in sustaining a system that whitewashes neoliberal ideas and continues to tell us the best use of our money is to subsidize big corporations or a foreign government.”

[Jonathan Chait: What Abdul El-Sayed doesn’t get about Trump]

The “foreign government” he refers to is presumably Israel. El-Sayed was not merely disputing the merits of my beliefs (which he mischaracterized—I have argued against aid to Israel, and I have no idea which big corporations he thinks I wish to subsidize). He accused me of representing a “vested interest” in these policies. His campaign declined to respond to multiple emails requesting clarification as to the nature of this alleged vested interest.

The combination of populism and anti-Zionism has introduced a strain of political rhetoric that heretofore has had little place within the Democratic Party. Anybody who has observed the Republican Party in the Trump era, however, would recognize the combination of populist demagoguery and edgelord bullying. Informing your supporters that their problems are the result of a shadowy cabal of billionaire conspirators tends to unleash passions that can be difficult to control. El-Sayed and Trump share a gleeful lack of concern for the consequences.

Although the comparison may sound like an insult, it’s one El-Sayed has invited himself. Earlier this year, he held a campaign event with Hasan Piker, a popular streamer and enthusiast for left-wing authoritarian regimes. When reporters questioned his choice of allies, El-Sayed replied, “If perfectly inoffensive won elections, then Donald Trump would never have been President.” Democrats now have to decide whether they think they can win elections this way, and whether they want to.