The victory of former Detroit region public health director Abdul El-Sayed in the August 4 Democrat primary to select the party’s candidate for an open U.S. Senate seat from Michigan marked another milestone in the rapid transformation of the Democrat party during the current election cycle from the loyal, center-left half of the traditional American two-party political system into an elitist movement demanding radical changes in the federal system government as we know it under the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

If elected in the November midterm general election, El-Sayed would become the first Muslim American to serve in the U.S. Senate. In 2018, El-Sayed ran and lost as a progressive candidate for governor in the Massachusetts Democrat primary. Campaigning as a progressive Democrat, El-Sayed supports Medicare for All, the elimination of ICE (the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency), radical changes to campaign finance laws, and a promise that as a senator he would vote to end all U.S. military assistance to Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.

In an analysis of the outcome of the Michigan Senate primary published by The Nation, Iman Abid, who is an apologist for Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, and serves as the director for advocacy for a group called United States Campaign for Palestinian Rights, called El-Sayed’s victory “a watershed moment for the Palestine movement in the United States.”

With endorsements from progressive icons such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), this time El-Sayed narrowly defeated four-term Democrat congresswoman Haley Stevens who has been a staunch supporter of Israel. El-Sayed has repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide against the civilian population of Gaza in its war against Hamas.

In the race against El-Sayed, Stevens enjoyed the support of most Michigan state Democrat party officials, Chuck Schumer, who is the leader of Senate Democrats, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), as well as the pro-Israel AIPAC lobbying group. However, El-Sayed was the beneficiary of highly favorable coverage from the liberal mainstream news outlets, which characterized the race as the first real test of the appeal of a progressive candidate to mainstream Democrat voters in a battleground state like Michigan.

El-Sayed Facing A Strong Gop Opponent In November

However, the primary vote, which El-Sayed won by less than one percentage point, was much closer than the double-digit victory that the polls had predicted. Exit polls also indicated that El-Sayed may have difficulty getting many of the Democrats who voted for Congresswoman Stevens in the primary to come out for him in the November general election against the formidable GOP senatorial candidate running against him, former seven-term congressman Mike Rogers.

Rogers has a long track record as a strong political candidate who can appeal to Democrat voters by calling upon his genuine working-class roots as a one-time auto assembly-line worker. Leaving the factory floor, Rogers went on to serve as a U.S. Army lieutenant, and then became an FBI special agent who investigated organized crime in Chicago before he entered electoral politics.

During the 14 years that he represented his Michigan district in Congress, Rogers served as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He was also known for speaking out strongly against the economic and national security threats posed by China to the United States, and exposing the prominent role that China has played in hollowing out Michigan’s middle class by undermining its former role as a key part of America’s industrial heartland.

The open Senate seat from Michigan that Rogers and El-Sayed will be fighting for had been held by Democrat Gary Peters, who chose to step down rather than run for a third term in November. Democrats had been counting on holding that seat in their bid to recapture majority control of the Senate. To achieve that goal, they will need to pick up at least four current GOP Senate seats, while losing none of those they now hold. Because Trump carried Michigan in the 2024 election, national Democrat party leaders supported Congresswoman Stevens instead of El-Sayed in the belief that, as a more moderate candidate, she would be more likely than El Sayed to appeal to those swing voters who supported Trump the last time.

But Democrat primary voters in Michigan chose instead to follow the example that was set last year when a former political unknown, Zohran Mamdani, running as a member of the Democrat Socialists of America, twice beat the Democrat establishment’s favorite, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, to become the first Muslim mayor of New York City.

El-Sayed Found Success By Following Nyc Mayor Mamdani’s Lead

Mamdani’s campaign, based upon the issue of affordability, established a political pattern that helped three other progressive insurgent candidates to win Democrat primary elections in New York state, as well as in Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Washington state, Wisconsin, Washington, D.C., and now in Michigan.

These progressive Democrat primary candidates also campaigned against continued U.S. support for Israel, whose support among Democrat voters has fallen, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling, from 59% in 2018 to just 22% in May, 2026. This was a particularly valuable asset for El-Sayed in Michigan, which has the highest percentage of Arab-Americans relative to the population of any state in the country.

Throughout his primary campaign, El-Sayed continued to accuse Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and to demand the end of unconditional U.S. military support for Israel in its fight against the enemies in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Iran, who have continued to attack it at every opportunity since October 7, 2023. In sharp contrast to El-Sayed, during the primary campaign Congresswoman Stevens vigorously continued to defend the U.S.-Israel alliance. That is why she benefited from $30 million in campaign contributions from AIPAC, which, given the closeness of the final vote count, was almost enough to tip the scales in her favor.

But despite how narrow El-Sayed’s victory turned out to be, coupled with primary wins for progressive Democrats Will Lawrence and Donavan McKinney in two Michigan congressional races, progressive leaders claimed that the Michigan results had proven that fears by party leaders that leftwing populist candidates could not win elections outside deep blue liberal Democrat strongholds were unfounded.

The emergence of successful progressive Democrat candidates in a Midwest swing state such as Michigan marks the next stage in a grassroots revolt within the party which can be traced back to the 2016 presidential primary race. The supporters of Bernie Sanders showed surprising strength against the establishment candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose supporters within the party leadership changed the rules of the game to deny Sanders a fair chance to win the nomination.

The past decade of U.S. politics has been dominated by the right-wing populism of Donald Trump. But left-wing populism, driven in large part by a pathological resentment of Trump and his unexpected political success, has been growing among Democrats on a parallel track ever since Sanders’ outsider 2016 campaign for the presidential nomination was derailed by the dirty tricks used by Hillary Clinton’s supporters who controlled the Democrat party’s presidential nominating process.

How Progressives Seized Control Of The Democrat Party

Sanders’ progressive supporters, with some justification, not only felt cheated of the opportunity to compete fairly for the nomination. They also blamed Mrs. Clinton for the incompetent and overconfident general election campaign she subsequently ran, which led to Trump’s upset victory in 2016, a defeat from which the Democrats have not yet fully recovered.

The current rise of the Democrat left got its start with the election to Congress of a political unknown, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). She began in politics as a lowly community organizer for Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign in New York City, and just two years later pulled off a stunning upset by defeating Joe Crowley, the incumbent Democrat congressman in New York’s 14th district, who was the chair of the House Democratic Caucus at the time.

As a result, at the age of 29, AOC became the youngest woman ever to serve in the House of Representatives. She then started on the path to power in Washington by organizing a small but vocal group of progressives known as “the Squad,” which immediately began to challenge the authority of the Democrat establishment under the iron rule of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

During the 2020 presidential election cycle, Democrat party leaders, desperate to field a relatively moderate candidate like Joe Biden because they believed he was most likely to defeat Donald Trump, again rigged the party’s primary process to make it impossible for Sanders to win the presidential nomination. However, to gain the support of Sanders’ voters in the general election, the Biden team promised that, as president, he would adopt Sanders’ progressive policy agenda as his own.

Biden’s Disastrous Progressive Policy Legacy

The fulfillment of that promise by the Biden administration led to four years of: open border chaos admitting more than 10 million illegal immigrants; an explosion of unnecessary federal spending, cash giveaways and increases in social welfare programs which triggered runaway inflation; disrespect for law and order which led to riots in the streets and a nationwide spike in violent crimes; the imposition of DEI and reverse racial discriminatory policies on all levels of government and society; a failed forced conversion to green energy which led to sharply higher utility bills; as well as higher taxes coupled with excessive government regulation.

The turning point for the Democrats was the disastrous decision by party leaders to support Joe Biden’s 2024 bid for re-election, when they could all see that he was clearly unfit to serve for a second term as president. Biden’s meltdown in his televised debate with Donald Trump that June finally revealed the massive cover-up. But instead of apologizing to the American people for keeping the president’s incapacity a secret, party leaders followed up with the equally disastrous unilateral decision to appoint an incompetent vice president, Kamala Harris, to head the ticket as Biden’s replacement. It made Donald Trump’s unlikely return to power in the White House inevitable, and further widened the credibility and trust gap between the Democrat party’s aging leadership in Washington and the young Bernie Sanders-inspired progressive activists who had already started to take control of the party’s apparatus, from the grassroots level and up.

Democrat Party Leaders Have Lost Their Ability To Lead

It is because of this recent record of failures and betrayals that Democrat party leaders in Washington, including both Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, now lack the minimum necessary level of credibility with mainstream Democrat voters to push back against the rising challenge from progressives, led by Senator Sanders, Congresswoman AOC, and Mayor Mamdani. The progressives have already won the hearts of the college-educated elitists who have replaced the working class as the party’s main grassroots constituency, and they are now demanding control of the national and state party apparatus, as well as the political patronage and power that goes with it.

The extent of the surrender by Democrat moderates to the extreme policy demands of the progressives was indicated by a Senate vote on April 16, 2026, in which 40 out of 47 Democrat senators voted for a Bernie Sanders-sponsored resolution to block the sale of specific American weapons and military equipment to Israel. Of the seven Democrats who voted against the resolution that would have denied Israel the means to defend itself from ongoing attacks by its Iran-supported enemies on several fronts, three of them, including Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, and Chuck Schumer of New York, are of Jewish descent.

Progressives Trying To Match Trump’s Political Accomplishments

The progressives are now trying to emulate Trump’s now near-total takeover of the national Republican party. They argue that if Trump was able to replace the tired conservative political orthodoxies that dominated Republican party politics for decades and replace them with a much more populist agenda of policy goals, why can’t today’s young Democrat activists on the left do the same thing? In fact, they have largely succeeded by adopting an openly socialist agenda that strongly appeals to two generations of American voters who are too young to remember why and how the socialist economic system of the Soviet Union collapsed, which led to the peaceful end of the Cold War with a clear-cut victory by America’s free market economy.

Even among today’s more moderate Democrats, there is little appetite for a return to the broken and often gridlocked Washington, D.C. political system that enabled Trump’s rise to power in the first place. The moderate Democrats also have no viable domestic policy alternatives to offer to the socialist-inspired progressive agenda. Their demands were recently published by the national office of the Democrat Socialists of America. They include calls for open borders, universal free medical care (Medicare for All), as well as government subsidies for food and housing. All of these ideas have been tried in other Western countries, where they have consistently led to unsatisfactory results.

The elitist progressives who live in the safety of gated communities and under the protection of private security guards are still calling for doing away with the police, the elimination of cash bail for arrested criminals, and an end to jail sentences that protect society from those convicted of violent crimes. Instead, the permissive laws and policies enacted by the progressive elected officials in Democrat-controlled blue states and cities have seen to it that these criminals remain free to prey upon helpless minority residents living in poor urban neighborhoods, while making sure that the local police these same officials have defunded are powerless to protect them.

Progressives Want To Rewrite The U.S. Constitution

Many of today’s younger Democrats have been so brainwashed by liberal ideology during their time on American college campuses that they have lost all respect for the American form of democratic government. Many are openly calling for a major rewrite of the U.S. Constitution that would eliminate the time-tested system of federal government checks and balances, and do away with the Senate, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court as we know them. They would also end the absolute legal protections for individuals under the Bill of Rights against the potential for abuse by an intolerant and tyrannical socialist/progressive cabal that is no longer trying to hide its attempts to seize control of the federal government.

Progressives like Mayor Mamdani and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren are calling upon the government to punish individuals who have been successful by confiscating their wealth for redistribution, while rewarding those who have failed with reparation payments and other preferences for non-whites and members of other allegedly “victimized” identity groups.

Trying To Put An End To The American Dream

Under the false banners of socialism and equity, progressives are calling for a government takeover of the entire American free market economy. They would stifle private enterprise, putting an end to the profit incentives which enabled the American Dream of success through personal accomplishment to come true for so many of this country’s citizens who have been able to work their way out of poverty over the past 250 years.

The progressive wish list includes government intrusion into virtually every aspect of our private lives, including the abrogation of the right of every individual to live in accordance with their religious beliefs.

Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, is one of many political analysts who believe that the party’s progressive young grassroots activists have lost all respect for their congressional leaders, Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House, who are too willing to make compromises with the Trump administration in order to permit the federal government to continue functioning.

“There’s a sense that the Democrats have been patsies in the face of Donald Trump. When Democrats say they want to fight back, they mean it,” Jacobs told a reporter for the British Guardian newspaper. The young activists also believe that the current party leaders are totally out of step with the party’s woke agenda as indicated by their continued support for U.S. military aid to Israel. “Gaza and Israel have become a lightning rod for all the other issues,” Jacobs added.

“[Opposition to] Donald Trump has radicalized the Democratic party,” Jacobs further explained. “This revolt within the party would not have happened without Donald Trump. He is provoking a kind of earthquake, raising lots of unsettling questions within the Democratic party — its direction, its leadership, its policy priorities, [and] its beholdenness to big [corporate] donors.”

The Extreme Left Has Become Well-Organized

Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of Our Revolution, a progressive organization that emerged from Bernie Sanders’ failed 2016 presidential run, told the Guardian’s reporter: “You’re seeing a maturation of the progressive movement. You’re seeing the infrastructure that’s been built over a decade come into play. There’s a resonance of the message in reaction to the failed populism of the right, but you’re also seeing increased sophistication in the organization of the left.”

He also explained that: “Because some of their [campaign] funding depends on corporate donors, moderate [Democrats] have to pull [their leftist political] punches. They are not able to articulate the causes of people’s problems.”

But now, because of the rise of groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), financially independent progressive candidates, such as Mamdani and El-Sayed, “are able to call out the corporate class and the corruption of our politics and how that affects people’s standard of living.”

Centrist Democrats Experiencing A Crisis Of Confidence

According to Geevarghese, this has created a serious crisis of confidence and self-identity within the centrist wing of the Democrat party. At a moment when President Trump is vigorously pursuing his second-term political agenda, Democrat voters increasingly see their more moderate elected officials and candidates as too timid to stand up and block Trump’s ability to govern, and too afraid of being labeled communists to propose socialist policies such as Medicare for All and confiscatory wealth taxes. Today’s moderate Democrats also mostly lack the personal charisma and considerable political skills of the newly emerging progressive superstars, such as Mamdani and El-Sayed.

The rapid rise of the DSA to national prominence today roughly parallels a similar revolution within the Democrat party which took place at the end of a 12-year run of Republicans in the White House that began with Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory over Jimmy Carter, an unpopular liberal Democrat president who was widely seen as weak and indecisive. During that period, any Democrat candidate who dared to publicly identify himself as a “liberal” would face an uphill battle to win the confidence of voters.

Bill Clinton And The Rise Of The Moderate Democrats

To address that problem, in 1989 a Democrat activist named Al From founded a more ideologically centrist political organization he called the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). From then handpicked the relatively unknown young Democrat governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, to lead a so-called “Third Way” national Democrat political movement. It succeeded by borrowing popular Republican political issues, such as balancing the federal budget and reviving the sluggish American economy, and suggesting relatively moderate liberal solutions to those problems.

In the 1992 national election, that strategy enabled these relatively moderate Democrat candidates, in races across the country, to beat their GOP opponents at their own game. That included Bill Clinton himself, who defeated the re-election bid of President George H.W. Bush using the memorable slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid!” coined by his political advisor, James Carville.

The result was two terms of successful presidential leadership by Clinton, who found a way to govern effectively in cooperation with House GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich. But that era of bipartisan cooperation in Washington came to a sudden conclusion with the bitter dispute over the outcome of the 2000 presidential Democrat election in Florida, and the controversial decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that awarded the Florida vote, and with it, a majority in the Electoral College and the presidency to Texas Republican governor George W. Bush instead of Clinton’s Democrat vice president, Al Gore.

The Democrat “Resistance” Was Born In The Wake Of The 2000 Election

Even though Gore reluctantly accepted the Supreme Court’s decision, many other Democrats refused to accept the legitimacy of Bush’s presidency and began to develop the tactics of political resistance to and defiance of presidential authority, which would become an all-consuming Democrat obsession during both terms of Donald Trump’s presidency.

But in the meantime, Bill Clinton’s relatively moderate Democrat political operatives had seized firm control over the Democrat party’s political apparatus at the local, state, and national levels. That led to repeated efforts by Democrat party officials to award their presidential nomination to the former president’s wife, Hillary Clinton, first in 2008, and then again in 2016. But by that point, the young activists in the Democrat party were abandoning Clinton’s relatively moderate approach to national politics in favor of the increasingly liberal positions adopted first, in 2008, by Barack Obama and then, in 2016, by Bernie Sanders.

Joe Biden’s successful 2020 presidential run was the last major political victory for the Clinton-era moderate Democrats who were still running the party’s national organization. The sudden collapse of Biden’s 2024 re-election candidacy and the party’s disastrous response to that challenge have resulted in the current crisis of confidence in the Democrat party’s national leadership by both progressives and moderates.

How Much Further To The Left With The Democrats Go?

As a result of this moderate Democrat leadership collapse, there are now serious questions being raised about how much further to the left the party’s ideological positions will go both in the upcoming midterm election in November and the presidential election in 2028.

Al From, the founder of the DLC and the originator of the Clintonian moderate Democrat approach, was asked by a Guardian reporter for his reaction to the current progressive takeover of his party as symbolized by El-Sayed’s Michigan primary victory. From responded by admitting that, “We’ve been focusing on beating Republicans [while] the Democratic Socialists have been focused on beating us. We’ve got to fight back. We’ve got to make it harder for them.”

But he also conceded that the liberals have been gaining strength among Democrat party ranks at the expense of moderates, while, in recent years, the once powerful so-called “Blue Dog” faction of relatively conservative Democrats has become a virtually extinct political species.

According to the most recent Gallup poll, conservatives make up about 37% of the general public (compared to 36% in 1992), including 77% of Republicans, 27% of independents, and a very small number of self-described Democrats. Moderates make up about 34% of the general public (compared to 43% in 1992), including 47% of independents, 30% of Democrats, and 20% of Republicans. Liberals today make up about 25% of the general public, compared to 17% in 1992. But the current liberal 25% includes a growing share of around 60% of Democrats, 24% of independents, and only 2% of Republicans, made up mostly of the GOP’s few surviving “never Trumpers.”

Nevertheless, From insisted that moderation is still the “right formula” for today’s Democrats, especially on the national political level.

“Obviously,” he admitted, “we’re in a different [political] world [today], and you have to communicate with it differently, and you’ll need ideas that further the same underlying values, as we did [in 1992], but they’ve got to be modern ideas, maybe different ideas because circumstances have changed. Our platform was for the 1990s, not for the 2030s, but the principles are the same.”

Democrat Socialists Want To Tear Down America’s Political System

However, From observed, “The Democratic Socialists want a different [political] system. They don’t want to further democratic values. You look at their platform: they want to get rid of the Senate, the presidency, the Supreme Court; they want [government] ownership of business; they want to get rid of police; they don’t want to fund the military.”

“That isn’t the historic Democratic Party,” From lamented. “It’s not the party of [Franklin] Roosevelt that saved capitalism [from the Depression] and saved democracy in World War II. It’s a different ideology, it’s a different party.”

While Democrat moderate and progressive candidates continue to struggle with each other over the future political alignment of their party, they do seem to be willing to set aside their differences over the next three months to achieve their more immediate shared goal of winning back majority control over the House and Senate in November’s midterm election, in order to make it much more difficult for Trump to govern the country effectively during his final two years as president.

According to CNN political panelist Donna Brazile, who has served as an interim chairwoman for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), said after the results of the Michigan primary were in: “The question is, can two different wings of the same party function, unify and function as a governing majority if the Democrats win [control of the House and Senate]? I contend that the answer is yes. We’ll agree on very important matters like the economy, improving the lives of the American people, making things more affordable again and not focusing on vanity projects, so [to] the extent that we’re all running on the same message of affordability, the answer is yes.”

Divided Democrats Trying To Reunite In Time For November’s Election

The post-primary effort to re-unite the warring wings of the Michigan Democrat Party has already begun. At a post-election rally of his supporters held last Friday night, El-Sayed was careful to avoid further bruising the feelings of his defeated opponents and their supporters whose votes he will need in November to defeat former GOP congressman Mike Rogers, who is sure to get plenty of support from the national Republican Party in the general election because his win would make it almost certain that they would retain control of the U.S. Senate.

At his victory rally, El-Sayed entertained the crowd made up of 1,300 of his supporters by reiterating several of the most popular talking points from his primary campaign, including Medicare for All, removing the influence of corporate money on political races, and increasing taxes on the rich to make them pay their “fair share” of government expenses.

El-Sayed was generous in his praise of other candidates who will run alongside him in Michigan statewide races in November. After trading barbs with them for months, El-Sayed adopted a gentler tone when he called his former primary opponents, Congresswoman Haley Stevens and state lawmaker Mallory McMorrow, “incredible public servants.” It was an apparent effort by El-Sayed to help heal the wounds he inflicted upon them and those Democrats who voted for Stevens on primary day. He also had kind words for an unofficial representative of the national Democrat party, former Biden transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, who was greeted as an honored guest at the rally.

Other national Democrat party leaders who have pledged to provide support for El-Sayed’s November midterm election campaign, even though they supported Stevens during the primary, include Senate Democrat Leader Schumer and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

Former vice president Kamala Harris has already sent out a fundraising letter on behalf of El-Sayed’s general election campaign.

In addition, El-Sayed’s main primary opponent, Congresswoman Stevens, who had been harshly critical of him during his campaign, said during the days immediately after he defeated her that she would give him her full support in the November midterm, and that she also planned to be active in support of the other Michigan Democrats running in the general election.

Michigan Jewish Democrats Weighing Their November Options

But notably absent from El-Sayed’s post-primary rhetoric at the rally was any mention of his outspoken opposition to continued U.S. military aid to Israel, in an apparent effort not to further antagonize the pro-Israel AIPAC lobby and Michigan’s Jewish voters who are sure to support his Republican opponent for the Senate seat, Mike Rogers.

The Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus said in a statement released soon after the primary said that El-Sayed needs to “address the harm [he] caused during this campaign” by harshly criticizing Israel and its supporters, and that he also must “commit to engaging directly with Michigan’s Jewish community” and its concerns about his candidacy.

As a result, El-Sayed is likely to have trouble attracting votes in the November election from Michigan’s Jewish community, which has historically strongly backed Democrat candidates, and makes up 1.4 percent of the Michigan electorate. This is relatively small but still large enough to decide the outcome in a very close election, which is likely in a swing state like Michigan.

Dennis Bernard, a past president of the secular Jewish Federation of Detroit and the national chair of government relations for the Jewish Federations of North America, predicted that many of Michigan’s traditionally Democrat Jewish voters will cross party lines to support Rogers, the Republican candidate in the November election, or simply decide to stay home as a silent protest against El-Sayed’s Senate candidacy.

Bernard, who claims that he voted for Stevens in the Democrat primary, has also said that he intends to support Rogers in the November general election, and has described El-Sayed as “a threat to our community” due to his criticisms of Israel.

Many other Jewish voters in Michigan who do not necessarily support the policies of Israel’s current government are still strongly opposed to El-Sayed because he has falsely and repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide against the civilian population of Gaza. El-Sayed also publicly challenged the right of AIPAC and other supporters of Israel to donate to Congresswoman Stevens’ primary campaign.

El-Sayed’s Insensitive Reaction To An Antisemitic Attack In Detroit

Several Michigan Jewish community members have also criticized El-Sayed for his insensitive comments in reaction to a March 12 attack on a Reform synagogue pre-school in the Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield, Michigan, by a Hezbollah-inspired Islamic terrorist. Lebanese-born Ayman Mohamed Ghazali drove a pickup truck loaded with 35 gallons of gasoline and commercial fireworks into the building and then used an assault rifle to exchange fire with security personnel and first responders before ending the shootout by committing suicide.

El-Sayed’s initial response was to call the attack on the synagogue “heinous,” but then noted that some of the attacker’s family members in Lebanon had been killed in an Israeli air strike. He seemed to be suggesting that “circumstances happening 6,000 miles away” could somehow justify an attempt to commit the mass murder of pre-school age Jewish children here in the United States.

Much like Mamdani did when he ran for mayor in New York City, during his primary campaign El-Sayed tried to soften the implications of his repeated public attacks on Israel by claiming, unconvincingly, that he also condemns antisemitism. In his post-primary victory speech, El-Sayed even said that his “commitment to Jewish safety is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.”

But since Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, American Jews have learned through hard experience that any public criticism of Israel’s national security policies and antisemitism are two sides of the same debased coin of blind Jew-hatred.

El-Sayed’s Underlying Antisemitic Messaging

President Donald Trump also recognized the underlying antisemitic nature of El-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric last week at a rally in Las Vegas last week by calling him a “man of hate” and then added that as a progressive Democrat El-Sayed “hates” Jewish people “with a passion that burns in his heart.”

El-Sayed’s Close Ties To A Notorious Antisemitic Influencer

El-Sayed was also criticized for campaigning with Hasan Piker, the openly antisemitic far-left internet influencer. When asked, he has refused to condemn Piker for his notorious remark to his large online following in August 2019 that America deserved to be attacked on 9/11. But while Piker has since then tried to walk back that offensive 9/11 remark, he has doubled down on other, clearly antisemitic and intentionally provocative statements, such as his January comment calling Hamas “a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state [Israel].”

Earlier this month, in an interview with CNN, Piker sought to justify the atrocities that Hamas committed against Israeli civilians during its October 7 attack by claiming that “the Palestinian resistance largely does have an internationally recognized right to resist. . . militarily” even when it results in the commitment of “war crimes.” Yet when questioned about such outrageous statements by Piker, El-Sayed’s reacted by saying that Piker “is welcome to his perspective” on Israel and Hamas, which El-Sayed declared is not one that he shares, but neither did El-Sayed see Piker’s antisemitic statements as an adequate reason to stop campaigning alongside him.

El-Sayed’s Weak Support From Michigan’s Black Voters

One of the main reasons why El-Sayed’s victory in the primary was so narrow was his relatively weak support from Michigan’s Black voters, who make up about 13 percent of the state’s total electorate. In media interviews, more than a dozen Black voters across Detroit said that El-Sayed needed to do much more outreach to their communities to win their support. As a result, Congresswoman Stevens had an eight-point edge over El-Sayed in those Michigan counties with the highest Black populations.

In Detroit, a majority-Black city that Stevens won by 28 percentage points, several Black voters told interviewers from the Washington Post that they had not heard or seen enough of El-Sayed in their community during the primary campaign to believe that he cared about their issues, and therefore they did not give him their support.

In addition, some of El-Sayed’s fiercest Democrat critics during the primary campaign, such as Congresswoman Hillary Scholten, whose district includes Grand Rapids, Michigan, were notable by their absence from last Friday’s rally. Those who have endorsed El-Sayed’s candidacy in the November general election have done so only tepidly or indirectly, without even mentioning him by name.

El-Sayed also refrained from criticizing the Michigan State Democrat establishment that worked against him during the primary campaign, because he will need their support as well to win the November election.

El-Sayed’s Gop Opponent Rogers Reaching Out To Michigan Democrats

Meanwhile, El-Sayed’s November GOP opponent, Mike Rogers, has already begun reaching out directly to the Democrats who voted for Stevens in the primary and were disappointed by her loss. In a video message on X, he told them that “the fight is far greater than just left versus right.”

“If you’re among the majority of Democratic voters that woke up on Wednesday feeling, well, hopeless, because the person who won does not represent your values, well, just know there is still hope,” said Rogers, who narrowly lost a 2024 bid for the other U.S. Senate seat for Michigan.

However, regardless of which party emerges from the midterms in majority control of the Senate and the House over the next two years, the internal battle that will decide the future of the Democrat party will not start for real until the day after this November’s election, as the process begins for the selection of the Democrat presidential candidate for 2028. According to a New York Times report, preparations for that battle have already begun, with the centrist Democrat group known as Third Way planning to launch a $15 million advertising effort to discredit the DSA and its candidates in the eyes of voters before the 2028 presidential election.

How Significant Is Al-Sayed’s Michigan Primary Victory?

In the meantime, Democrat political analysts are arguing among themselves about the true significance of the recent flurry of progressive victories in what is still only a handful of high-profile races, mostly in deep-blue liberal Democrat strongholds. Does that mean that El-Sayed’s narrow Democrat primary victory in a competitive swing state like Michigan was a fluke, due primarily to his superior political skills and Michigan’s relatively large Muslim voter population? Or does it mean that, 35 years after the collapse of America’s Cold War archenemy, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), socialism has lost its character as a dirty word in American electoral politics?

Progressive activists like Geevarghese believe that their candidates are now riding a historic leftward shift in national voter sentiment which will lead to a complete takeover of the Democrat Party, much like the transformation of the Republican Party that President Trump has achieved since winning the 2016 GOP nomination.

“All of the electoral energy and enthusiasm is on the left and, at the end of the day, for a candidate to be viable in the 2028 presidential [campaign], they’re going to have to articulate a full-throated economic populism,” Geevarghese told the Guardian’s reporter. “That’s what’s needed to make it through the primary [process] and ultimately that’s what’s going to be needed to be the antidote to Donald Trump.”

Speculation is already swirling over which progressive candidate will take the baton from Bernie Sanders in the race for the Democrats’ 2028 presidential nomination. Will it be AOC, who would become, if elected, the first woman president at the age of 39, a more conventional and respected liberal Democrat, like California Congressman Ro Khanna, or a charismatic newcomer like El-Sayid after only two years in the Senate, assuming that he wins in this November’s election? New York City Mayor Mamdani is constitutionally disqualified from running for president because he was not born in the United States.

As the more moderate wing of the Democrat party labors to recover from the embarrassing way in which it lost the 2024 presidential election, the question is whether it will saddle itself again in 2028 with another weak presidential candidate chosen primarily on the basis of race and gender, like Kamala Harris, or President Biden’s ineffective Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, or term-limited California Governor Gavin Newsom, who seems like he has been auditioning for a presidential run ever since the Covid pandemic struck in 2020. The Democrat moderates could opt for one of their governors with proven bipartisan voter appeal, most notably Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, but the fact that Shapiro is proudly Jewish and a supporter of Israel could disqualify him, as it apparently did when he was briefly considered to serve as Kamala Harris’ Democrat running mate in the 2024 election cycle.

The Democrat selection of a 2028 presidential candidate could also be influenced by the identity of the Republican opponent. An extremely liberal Democrat progressive candidate like AOC would likely be more competitive running against an equally controversial Republican conservative, such as Vice President JD Vance. However, an openly socialist Democrat candidate like AOC would face a more difficult task running against a widely respected mainstream Republican, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, or Florida’s popular governor, Ron DeSantis.

Jewish Democrat Gottheimer Sounds An Alarm Against El-Sayed

But while most mainstream Democrats are willing to give El-Sayed a pass for his virulently antisemitic and anti-Israel statements and tendencies, in the hope that he can deliver control of the Senate to their party, moderate New Jersey Jewish Democrat Congressman Josh Gottheimer has spoken out in protest, In an op-ed published on the website of The Free Press, Gottheimer openly condemned El-Sayed for “making the U.S.-Israel relationship the villain of his campaign, repeatedly questioning Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state [and for spending] his last days on the campaign trail with Hasan Piker.”

But that is not the worst of it. Even Gottheimer didn’t dare to mention the fact reported by the New York Post’s Miranda Devine that El-Sayed’s father-in-law, who helped to finance his Senate campaign, is a known supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the parent organization of Hamas. His father-in-law is also a former president of the Michigan chapter of the terrorist-supporting Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

In addition, investigative reporter Devine has suggested that El-Sayed’s ties through his father-in-law to the Muslim Brotherhood may have been one of the reasons why Democrat senators last week boycotted a Republican-led Judiciary Committee hearing that looked into the subversive activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in America. The Democrat senators also condemned the hearing as an exercise in “Islamophobia.”

Devine also noted that during his successful Senate primary campaign, El-Sayed, “slyly distanced himself from his early roots in the Democratic Socialists of America faction of the [Democrat] party, and declared himself [to be] a “scientist” and not a socialist, but nobody [was] fooled, least of all the DSA.”

In his Free Press op-ed, Gottheimer also observed that Jew hatred “is being normalized in plain sight, and not just online. It has now manifested not only in elections, but also outside synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses. . .

Jew Hatred Is Now A Litmus Test For Democrats In Congress

“What’s most worrisome is not just the ignorance underlying so much of the heated, abusive, and violent anti-Jewish sentiment. It’s also the cowardly amplification and kowtowing by the political class. As a Democratic member of Congress, I can attest that for a growing number of my colleagues, being anti-Israel has now become a nonnegotiable moral litmus test. We’ve come a long way from Democratic president Harry Truman’s 1948 decision to recognize Israel just 11 minutes after the Jewish state declared independence. On the far right, meanwhile, we see virulent antisemitic energy in likes, comments, and posts on Reddit and X, and in podcast episodes that have accumulated tens of millions of views. . .

“From Piker on the socialist left to Tucker Carlson on the native-populist right, influencers with millions of followers now repackage age-old antisemitic conspiracies and tropes as edgy commentary. Add to that a Democratic Senate nominee in Maine with a Nazi tattoo [Graham Platner], who dropped out of his race for other reasons, and it’s clear we have a crisis on our hands,” the New Jersey congressman notes with alarm.

In his op-ed, Gottheimer also cited another outrageous antisemitic statement made this summer by New York City’s Mayor Mamdani, a proud member of the DSA, who called AIPAC and its supporters “monsters” who move “millions in dark money” to “turn us against one another.”

Gottheimer also noted that DSA member Melat Kiros will run as the Democrat candidate for a congressional seat in Colorado this November “on an anti-Israel platform, calling Hamas’ devastating October 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel ‘inevitable.’” Kiros also refused to call an attack on Jewish protesters in Boulder [Colorado] in which a Holocaust survivor was injured an antisemitic incident.”

Congressman Gottheimer concludes that, “the takeaway from these races across the country is this: The socialist fringe is trying to hijack the Democratic Party, undermining its values, ideals, and leadership.

“We must not let them. The stakes couldn’t be higher.”

Gottheimer’s warning was echoed by U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who agreed that “antisemitism is becoming an increasingly dangerous force in American politics.”

U.S Ambassador Huckabee Calls Democrats “The Party Of The Insane”

In an interview with the Newsmax channel, Ambassador Huckabee cited the recent decision by Michigan’s Jewish Attorney General, Dana Nessel, to skip her party’s nominating convention because of concerns about antisemitism and her personal safety.

While acknowledging that he is still “a pretty partisan Republican,” Huckabee also said he believes that a healthy American political system requires two strong and responsible political parties.

“I wish there would be a competitive and a sane Democrat Party. It frankly makes both parties better to have a competitive environment.”

But Huckabee lamented the fact that today’s Democrats are “moving so far to the left with socialism on the economic side, and with Jew-hatred on the social side, that they are rapidly becoming the party of the insane.

“And it’s not healthy. Not just for the Democrats. This isn’t healthy for America,” Huckabee concluded sadly.