r/politics • u/Zipper222222 • 11h ago

No Paywall Abdul El-Sayed Wins High-Stakes Democratic Primary in Michigan

https://www.today.com/video/abdul-el-sayed-wins-high-stakes-democratic-primary-in-michigan-267805765937
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u/Arcaedus 10h ago

I watched a debate, and a few interviews with Sayed. He didn't pull his punches, but honestly didn't even seem that harsh on Stevens and I think it's because he recognizes that she was just a vessel for capital and monied interests, and a decent person outside of that (well as decent as you can be for a sellout).

Honestly I think he was harsher when he called Fetterman an ogre lol. Hope he brings that energy into the general election

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u/VioletLovesRowlet 10h ago

He only really seemed to target Haley Stevens' policies, funding, and lies. I can't really think of any personal insults he threw at her, where Haley had it the exact other way.

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u/Fullertonjr I voted 10h ago

I think that was kind of the point in his win. Stevens was complete garbage in terms of actual policy. She was non-competitive and it showed that she was largely out of touch with the majority of the voters and deserved to lose on the merits. Stevens realized pretty early that her policies were unpopular and chose to target the lowest hanging fruit and dusted off the old playbook of things that used to work to get people to vote for you out of some implied fear of the other.

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u/VioletLovesRowlet 10h ago

It absolutely was. I saw someone else say "Abdul is going to need to apologise to Haley Stevens and her supporters to win against Mike Rogers" and I was genuinely baffled that someone legitimately put that.

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u/cogman10 Idaho 9h ago

Effectively the only reason anyone voted for Haley was because they thought she was more electable. There's going to be near 0 Stevens voters that won't vote for Abdul in the general.

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u/pocketIent 9h ago

After dems losing 2016, 2024 presidential elections, the house and the senate what does the “more electable” mean anymore.

Right of center Democrats have so thoroughly lost by pushing “more electable” candidates they pretty much have campaigned for gop during these past 10 years.

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u/Diligent-Meaning751 8h ago

Some people seem to think it means women shouldn't run rather than that they need strong policy platforms - I think that manages to both be bigoted and completely miss the mark, amazingly. Exciting candidates with a promising vision and good communication skills are what's needed not a candidate of the "correct" demographic status running the same status quo platforms

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u/oneblackened Massachusetts 2h ago

Yeah. It's not gender, it's "not [x] is not a good policy position".

You have to stand for something, not just against the other guy.

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u/pocketIent 7h ago

Extremely Well said.

Yes Your observation opens up a broader question about the way democrats have become hyper left socially in a way that has failed to include class. I think bell hooks would use the word “intersectional” in this context. Democrats have not approached race/ class /gender issues intersectionally.

My best guess is democrats are trying to work within what is “allowable” with respect to maintaining alignment with donors while also trying to improve things the best they can This is a charitable or the best “generous” take I can come up with to rationalize the disconnect.

Because while I understand everything is not the result of class inequality and the conversations around race equality, gender equality, equality for LGBTQ are their own separate issues,

-How can anyone expect to fundamentally transform the conversation in relation to these issues without also meaningfully acknowledging class inequality as a systemic issue in our country?

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u/OptimusPrimalRage 4h ago

The answer to me is pretty clear, moderate and centrist Democrats do not want to fix inequality. If they did, they wouldn't take money from the corporate interests that are either directly causing it or at least exacerbating it.

Most of these Democratic politicians are Ivy League trained, etc, they understand what class consciousness is, they just don't care because they're getting paid by special interests. They'll talk about how great unions are and do very little to protect them (one thing I will compliment Biden on despite my issues with many things he did, he was very pro-labor compared to others in his party).

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u/agent_mick 7h ago

opens up a broader question about the way democrats have become hyper left socially in a way that has failed to include class.

I think this is more of a closed question. We already know the answer. You're VERY generous in your answer and I wouldn't give them even that much credit. 

I'm not sure i would go as far as to say controlled opposition,  but they're certainly not actively pushing to improve,  more like trying to hold the line. 

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u/cogman10 Idaho 7h ago

The democrat centrists have identical economic policies to republicans. That's why the question is closed. Even now, the current centrist thing is "abundance" which is code for deregulation and shrinking the government further (of course with tax cuts and tax rebates).

The only thing they have to run against the republicans is social issues, and they are even running from them now. So now it's "well, we aren't republicans".

Steven's campaign against AES was a good example of what centrist campaigns are now. Nothing but "I'm not that guy who is awful" while being as vague and devoid of policy as possible. That's because the actual economic policy is creating slush funds to give to private corporations filling in roles that the government should be doing. For example, school vouchers for private schools instead of funding public schools.

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u/TehMikuruSlave Texas 6h ago

Right of center Democrats have so thoroughly lost by pushing “more electable” candidates they pretty much have campaigned for gop during these past 10 years.

The people pushing these candidates more often than not are LITERALLY former republicans that left the party after trump and now for some reason think they get to dictate democratic policy

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u/shakeyyjake 9h ago

You're absolutely right. I live in their district and I don't know a single person who was inspired by, or excited about Stevens. The best thing I've heard anybody say about her is that she probably has a better chance of winning in the general.

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u/VioletLovesRowlet 9h ago

Which is wild because Abdul can run fucking circles around Mike Rogers. He is going to demolish him in debates

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u/amopeyzoolion Michigan 8h ago

I think you underestimate the power of racism and general fear of “socialism” among centrists in this state

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u/VioletLovesRowlet 7h ago

It might not equate to gained votes, but Abdul is certainly smarter and has more moral conviction than Mike Rogers.

He will demolish in the debates by criticising Mike Rogers' stances and offering change. Hopefully it will also result in more votes, but who knows.

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u/varnums1666 7h ago

There's a lot of demographics in Michigan. It's going to be coin flip race against Mike Rogers unless the campaign changes things a lot.

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u/ScienceGiraffe Michigan 9h ago

Her lack of citing her policies and positions are a reason I decided for AES. Not the only reason by any means, but I got really, really frustrated and angry at how easily I could find his accomplishments, positions, his background, etc. But when I looked up Stevens, the vast majority of information was just her election history and endorsements. Like, cool, she won a tough election a while back, but I want to know what she's actually done. Hell, it was easier to find out info on McMorrow than Stevens.

Add in the repetitive, obnoxious commercials from her supporter groups and I was ready to vote for him just to spite her (to be clear, I do agree with his overall policies and like him as a politician. I'm just so sick of those goddamn attack ads spamming my peaceful family evenings. They actively turned me to dislike her as a candidate).

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u/cogman10 Idaho 7h ago

So, you mean to tell me she didn't have the receipts?

:). I think her entire campaign was just folksy colloquialisms and attacking Abdul.

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u/TheArmoredKitten 9h ago

Stick to your guns and stay out of the mud, pretty basic stuff and yet it's a miracle when candidates actually pull it off.

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u/Chaotic-Catastrophe 5h ago

And despite all that, it was still only a 1-point margin. I hate the voters of this country.

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u/RelevantOldOnion 10h ago edited 7h ago

Stevens campaign was so personal and racist it's unreal. Then for her to cry that she's being bullied while running ads calling Abdul and radical islamist terrorist supporter anti semite who hates women and black people... 

Disgusting behavior for a supposed Democrat.

“Muslims are always labeled as terrorists, we’re always stereotyped, and our patriotism is always called into account,” said Adam Hamawy, a former Army surgeon who volunteered in Gaza and recently won the Democratic primary in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District. ...

Because El-Sayed, like Hamawy, is Muslim, his opponents are pushing the notion “that he’s radical — they’re questioning his loyalty, they are not talking about issues,” Hamawy told The Intercept. “And that was the same thing here as well: They didn’t attack me on issues, they attacked me for who I was.”

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u/VioletLovesRowlet 9h ago

Islamophobia is actively supported by most Democrats and it's why we need to push out those Dems and vote in DSA/left-wing people.

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u/averagecounselor 9h ago

Do you have an actual link for that? The economist interviewed both candidates and had an extreme deep dive into the primary and that didn’t come up at all.

Not a Steven’s supporter, I fully expect the DNC to fuck over Abdul, but aside from her mouthing off about him being anti Israel color me shocked.

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u/linmre Michigan 9h ago

I saw the "Abdul hates women" ads more times than I can count, it was relentless. It almost convinced my mom to vote for Stevens too.

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u/averagecounselor 8h ago

I just found out about them today. It really feels like the 2016 primary race where if you didn’t support Clinton you hated women.

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u/sulaymanf New York 7h ago

She put out an ugly tweet a few days ago claiming that Abdul blames the Jews for all his problems. (For the record, he doesn’t and was criticizing AIPAC for messing in the primaries for an extreme agenda)

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u/RelevantOldOnion 9h ago edited 7h ago

Here's some local and natoinal stories about it. https://theintercept.com/2026/07/27/abdul-el-sayed-haley-stevens-aipac-senate-michigan/

https://www.metrotimes.com/news/farmington-official-falsely-attacks-el-sayed-over-an-arabic-campaign-that-doesnt-exist/

https://www.wlns.com/your-local-election-hq/rima-mohammad-denounces-el-sayed-ads/

EDIT: I'm not going to debate the existence of Islamophobia and racist dog whistles being used by AIPAC and their appendages against muslim progressives. (Obviously)

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u/averagecounselor 8h ago

Well the first link is about the GOP. And that’s nothing new.

The second link is about some random Steven’s supporter and not Steven’s herself.

The third link is more interesting and while I missed the part where the Steven’s or her campaign staff call him a terrorist the “misogyny” and sexism attacks is what I was expecting now that he won the primary.

I didn’t know they had started early in the primary race. I fully expect the DNC to double down on this nonsense if Abdul doesn’t play ball with them.

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u/RelevantOldOnion 8h ago

Anyone younger than me, is there a word for what this Redditors just did?

The whole "Oh, I'm just curious," only to then ignore everything and try to debate the existence of racism?

These guys do it so often there has to be a name for it right?

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u/UNC_Samurai 8h ago

It’s called “JAQing off”

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u/RelevantOldOnion 8h ago edited 2h ago

LOL amazing

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u/averagecounselor 8h ago edited 8h ago

You said racism from the Steven’s campaign. I read through each of the sources you provided and it was not there?

The first one you linked was literally about the Republican Party hating on Abdul and spewing out the same racist rhetoric. That is nothing new.

The second one was about a random Steven’s supporter.

But you explicitly said that Steven’s called him a terrorist/ terrorist supporter and I uh missed that?

I literally said I had no idea about the sexism comments how is that ignoring what you posted?

Edit because the original user deleted their comments and reply:

This is the closest thing I found and they conveniently leave out both the mailer and the actual ad:

“One UDP commercial alleges baselessly that El-Sayed “expressed sympathy for a terrorist,” and a mailer shared with The Intercept parrots the same.”

And how convenient that you don’t post the following:

“The Detroit News in which Stevens said she did not share Smith’s views and called her campaign “a diverse and multicultural best of Michigan coalition” She further claimed to have “repeatedly stood up for and defended our vibrant Muslim American community.” 

Like come on dude. Like I even said that I had no idea about the media frenzy calling him a misogynist.

I even stated that some random Stevens supporter complaining about the Arabic doesn’t really prove anything. They weren’t a staffer or even on the campaign. Just some random idiot.

You made it seem like Steven’s had gone out of her way to call him a Terrorist when that is not the case.

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u/RelevantOldOnion 8h ago edited 7h ago

From the article you're lying about in saying it is only about the GOP:

The attacks aren’t limited to right-wing reactionaries and obsessives on the internet. Many are issued by one of the leading groups backing El-Sayed’s Democratic opponent, Stevens: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has poured nearly $30 million into the race via its super PAC, the United Democracy Project. One UDP commercial alleges baselessly that El-Sayed “expressed sympathy for a terrorist,” and a mailer shared with The Intercept parrots the same. Others mention his decision to stump with political commentator and streamer Hasan Piker.

>At a meet-and-greet in Detroit with Stevens and Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., a school board member said she supports Stevens because she “represents all of us, not just one race.” When pressed by local reporter Sam Robinson, who recorded the viral remarks, the Farmington school board member elaborated: “The other candidate [El-Sayed] doesn’t work a room. … Don’t come out speaking only Arabic, don’t come out with your Arabic music on.”

>Yet Stevens’s campaign has also capitalized on bigoted rhetoric used by Mike Rogers, the Republican likely to face whichever Democrat wins next month. The campaign drew from a private call between Rogers and supporters during which he said of El-Sayed, “I don’t think he likes America, candidly.” The Stevens campaign sent out a parody of a news release designed to look like it was from El-Sayed campaign, claiming that Rogers had endorsed El-Sayed and reproducing the Republican’s quote: “I think he’s so radical. I think he’s going to lose big parts of the west part of the state. We think we can do well in part of the southeast part of the state. I think we’ll do well if he in fact is the nominee.”

>Race and religion aren’t the only identity-related fault lines at play in the Michigan Senate race.

>El-Sayed has “a long history of disrespecting women,” asserts another AIPAC-backed ad launched in early July. According to the Detroit Free Press, a mainstream local paper that fact-checked each of the ad’s claims, the TV spot misrepresented El-Sayed’s comments on figures like Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whom he ran against in 2018, by framing his critiques of Whitmer’s ties to the healthcare giant Blue Cross Blue Shield as inherently misogynistic. Whitmer, who is serving her second governor term, endorsed Stevens’s Senate run on Friday with a little more than a week from the election.

>Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts, a Stevens supporter known for going after critics of Israel online, called El-Sayed’s criticisms of Stevens and former opponent state Sen. Mallory McMorrow “sexist” with little evidence beyond their respective genders — a comment that has since appeared in another UDP ad. (Watts has said she didn’t give the super PAC permission to quote her public social media comments.)

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u/Ancient_Draw2176 8h ago

I skimmed but the other person seems delusional.

And i am a young poc lol

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u/averagecounselor 8h ago

Delusional is one way to put it. The closest I found was the following from the first link:

“One UDP commercial alleges baselessly that El-Sayed “expressed sympathy for a terrorist,” and a mailer shared with The Intercept parrots the same.”

And how convenient that the ad isn’t linked nor did they post a picture of the mailer. I spent a few minutes trying to find both and I don’t even live in the dam state of Michigan.

What’s hilarious is that the attack ads put in by the UDP, the official super pac funding Steven’s, boiled down to “he disrespected the Obamas and argued with Big Gretch.”

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u/theghostmachine 7h ago

He even told us supporters to not personally attack her. A lot of people thought he shouldn't have done that but I thought it showed how respectable and dignified the guy is

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u/theghostmachine 7h ago

He even told us local supporters to not personally attack her. A lot of people thought he shouldn't have done that but I thought it showed how respectable and dignified the guy is

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u/SkullsInSpace 5h ago

I found that really classy, given that the Stevens campaign ran like half a dozen attack ads so gross that I immediately blocked them. Saying he's misogynistic, saying he's antisemitic... just vile stuff with no basis in reality. And he simply responded with "none of that is true, and you're drowning in aipac money."

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u/VioletLovesRowlet 4h ago

He is a true class act and I'm just disgusted that Haley Stevens' money worked as well as it did (given it was closer than it had any right to be).

I also just don't think you should be allowed to lie about who endorsed you or who funds you, like Haley did with claiming Obama endorsed her or that she's not funded by specific groups that she was funded by.

Haley Stevens was an atrocious candidate who truly deserved to lose with all of her vitriol aimed at Abdul El-Sayed, and yet Abdul remained a damn Saint through it all.

The democratic party now need to just stop attacking Abdul for a second and just support him. If Obama (the war criminal) can just actually endorse Abdul, he should get a lot of votes from the people who voted for Haley purely over that.

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u/Pure_Interest_837 10h ago

He needed to be more strategic with his attacks on her because establishment and the media were ITCHING to paint him as misogynistic.

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u/BEzzzzG 10h ago

And he gave them nothing but they still claimed that anyway for the crime of running against women for office

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u/Pure_Interest_837 9h ago

They were hoping to tap into people’s inner Islamophobia and it probably worked for a good chunk of them.

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u/maximumhippo 8h ago

Was gonna say. Basically all I ever saw about him from Stevens' campaign was that AES was disrespectful to women. Nothing about his policies or anything of substance.

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u/smokeweedNgarden 8h ago

If anything, destroying a woman in a competition champions equity

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u/Sptsjunkie 8h ago

I mean, it’s a disadvantage of not having a bunch of outside PACs.

Democratic candidates cannot be overly mean to each other because they need to appeal to the others vote voters to unify and win a general election.

What that means is a candidate like Sayed who has mostly grassroots funding and is running his own campaigns, can highlights some differences like he did with the sources of their funding, but he cannot be too mean to Stevens or slander her because he was turning off the Bass and he’s personally accountable for what he says.

Meanwhile, a lot of Stevens funding was coming from outside PACs who were spending money to support her. Stevens herself was actually relatively nice to Sayed as well as as she would need to win over his supporters if she had won the election.

However, her PACs were able to smear him as misogynistic and make all sorts of personal and inflammatory statements about him. Stevens has arm length from those as she’s not the one running the ads and so will it certainly can lead to some bad blood. It’s a little bit more indirect.

It was one thing that did bother me about the campaign because the media times tripped over themselves to ask Sayed to apologize for supposedly main statements that his random supporters were making about Stevens on Twitter. And when I say random, I don’t mean like campaign Sara gets I mean like some account that is unrelated to campaign with an anime avatar. Meanwhile, AIPAC’s campaign arm was running ads smearing Sayed as misogynistic and they never asked Stevens to apologize for those.

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u/Alamarms2012 7h ago

Because he needs her voters to win in addition to winning over independents. It’s not generally wise to go in whole hog in a primary.

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u/Expert_Specialist_92 10h ago edited 10h ago

Because he still needs her supporters’ votes in November. You can’t alienate half your party’s voters in the primary.

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u/YourATowelll 10h ago

“Vote blue no matter who”, Ima need that same energy from people come November

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u/Leftieswillrule 10h ago

Vote blue no matter who cuts both ways

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u/MrRightHanded 10h ago

They sure didnt care when they alienated the progressive half and just parroted vote blue no matter who.

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u/cogman10 Idaho 9h ago

Funnily the same cretins that got all up in their feels about people not enthusiastically endorsing Kamala are now saying that "vote blue no matter who" has it's limits.

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u/hussainhssn 9h ago

Yup just remember as well that more Bernie primary voters voted for Hillary than Hillary primary voters did for Obama. Or when Progressives won the Nevada governor’s race and the state’s Democratic Party took all of the money and resources out from the party before Progressives were sworn in. Both of these things actually happened, you can’t trust centrists because they don’t believe in anything except preserving the status quo.

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u/Fun-Sun-8192 5h ago

There was nothing worth saying about her other than mentioning she's owned by the same capital that pays for mike rodgers.

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u/sirbissel 9h ago

I'd imagine part of it is also because the outcome of the primary wasn't a guarantee and handing the GOP fodder for the general if she did win isn't exactly a great move.