Michigan Senate victory boosts progressives as Democrats wrestle with party’s direction
WASHINGTON — The narrow victory of progressive doctor Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s bitterly fought Democratic Senate primary sets up a defining test of the party’s progressive wing in one of the highest-stakes U.S. Senate contests of the midterms.
Whether El-Sayed, a former public health official, can carry swing voters in a battleground state could both determine the outcome of a Senate seat viewed as crucial to determining control of Congress and have broader ramifications on the Democratic Party’s struggle for its identity.
El-Sayed, a 41-year-old epidemiologist, defeated U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, a moderate Democrat, by a narrow margin Wednesday after a long and intense campaign that was seen as a proxy for the party’s fissures.
The race was far closer than some polls had indicated. El-Sayed was leading Stevens by 15,000 votes, about 1 percentage point, with 99% of votes counted Wednesday, according to the Associated Press.
El-Sayed will face former Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican, in the general election. The winner will succeed retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, whose seat Democrats see as critical to retain for the party to have a chance at flipping the Senate.
“We’ve got an opportunity to bring ourselves back together, to come together around a movement, to take our democracy back,” El-Sayed said Wednesday on MS NOW’s “Morning Joe.”
El-Sayed’s victory will put to the test in a swing state the broader strength of the progressive movement, which has found success in deep-blue places like New York City, where Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor last year, and Los Angeles, where City Councilmember Nithya Raman is locked in a tight race mayoral contest with incumbent Karen Bass. Both Mamdani and Raman are democratic socialists.
As Democrats struggle over the party’s post-2024 identity and grapple with how to win back voters, the divide between the party’s progressive and centrist wings has been on display in primary fights. Both camps have notched victories: Many of the leftist wins have come in intensely blue districts, such as in New York, while more moderate districts have chosen centrists, as in Iowa.
On Tuesday, two progressive congressional candidates in Michigan beat out establishment Democrats in House races — in one case, ousting an incumbent. But in Missouri, democratic socialist and former Rep. Cori Bush lost to incumbent Rep. Wesley Bell, a moderate, for a key House seat.
In California, a handful of progressive candidates are on the November ballot, including the challengers to Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Sacramento) and Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford). In the Aug. 18 runoff to fill the vacant seat of former Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, progressive state Sen. Aisha Wahab is battling it out with fellow Democrat and BART board president Melissa Hernandez.
Progressive leaders celebrated El-Sayed’s win on Wednesday. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who backed El-Sayed, argue that his working-class-centered politics are more likely to have mass appeal.
“If you’re a working-class Republican in Michigan, I think you’re going to listen to what El-Sayed says,” Sanders told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “I think many of them will end up voting for him, independents as well, of course.”
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Throughout the campaign, Stevens argued that El-Sayed would not be able to defeat Rogers, a refrain some moderates repeated Wednesday. El-Sayed vowed to unite Democrats around defeating Rogers, who previously served seven terms in Congress, saying that he and Stevens would be focused on “bringing the party back together.”
Rogers on Wednesday portrayed El-Sayed as an “extremist,” saying in a statement that the election is “about deciding whether Michigan has a future built on common sense — or whether we hand the keys to the most fringe extremists in the nation.”
El-Sayed, a former city and county health official, focused on opposing money in politics and pushing for Medicare for All, among other issues. His opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza and Stevens’ support for Israel became a major issue in the campaign. AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group, spent millions in support of Stevens.
Early in the primary race, El-Sayed sought to temper some of the concerns around his progressive agenda by presenting himself as a Michigan-first, working-class-focused candidate, said John Barry Ryan, a University of Michigan professor of political science.
But as excitement over his campaign began to mount among progressives on a national level, Ryan said, El-Sayed’s public posture swung to a middle ground.
“The signal he’s trying to send is, I’m not a moderate, but I’m also not an extremist,” Ryan said.
Whether El-Sayed can effectively sell his message to undecided voters against Rogers now becomes a key question of the general election, said Corwin Smidt, a politics professor at Michigan State University.
“[Rogers] has experience. He has credentials,” Smidt said. “El-Sayed doesn’t have that. But I do think he’s got the skill and the right language to get him over.”
At least two key Michigan Democrats signaled a desire to move past the primary’s fights. Late Tuesday, Mallory McMorrow, a Michigan state senator who launched her own bid for the seat but suspended her campaign in early July, released an endorsement of El-Sayed.
“Whatever differences there were between the candidates in this race, those differences are nothing compared to the contrast in November,” McMorrow wrote on X. “The only way we get there is together.”
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After conceding, Stevens sent a similar signal in a statement:
“We need to win this Senate race,” she said.
