During a weekend interview with Rev. Al Sharpton, Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Haley Stevens was asked whether she would support her primary opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, if he won Tuesday’s election. Her answer was unequivocal: she would “link arms” with him and campaign on his behalf.
El-Sayed has now won—albeit by a razor-thin margin after wildly underperforming polling expectations—and Stevens’s promise is no longer hypothetical. This morning, she endorsed his candidacy and urged Democrats to unite behind the party’s nominee.
Finally, a reason to check your email.
Sign up for our free newsletter today.
Under ordinary circumstances, there would be nothing remarkable about her honoring it. Political parties cannot function unless candidates are generally willing to accept the results of hard-fought primaries and support the winner. Republicans eventually rallied behind Donald Trump in 2016, despite profound objections from many of his primary opponents. Losing a primary can be humiliating, but party unity often requires swallowing substantial ideological and personal differences.
The question, however, is not whether Stevens should support a Democrat with whom she disagrees. It is whether El-Sayed’s record and judgment place him beyond the ordinary bounds of intra-Democratic disagreement.
Stevens spent months making precisely that case. She warned voters that El-Sayed lacked the judgment and values to represent Michigan in the Senate, accused him of scapegoating Jewish Americans, and condemned his use of a campaign surrogate who said that Jews were “inbred,” praised Mao Zedong, and declared that “America deserved 9/11.” If those arguments were sincere, should they cease to matter simply because the primary is over?
The Michigan primary illustrates a major problem confronting the Democratic Party. Its mainstream has become increasingly reluctant to articulate what distinguishes it from its hardline left. Many establishment Democrats behave as though their own beliefs are now political liabilities.
Stevens had countless opportunities during the campaign to make the affirmative case for the kind of Democrat she claims to be. When Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib attacked her for receiving nominal support from Michigan companies like General Motors and General Mills, Stevens could have said plainly that she belongs to the party’s pro-business wing because prosperous communities require thriving private enterprise. Michigan would not be better off if the government sought to dismantle its health-care and energy industries. Nor would Americans be better off if Washington, as El-Sayed proposes, replaced the private insurance covering most Americans with a government-run alternative likely to perform no better than many of the other services government struggles to administer—from the DMV to the Post Office.
The same reluctance was visible on Israel. Stevens often seemed uncomfortable or unwilling to defend the substantial support she received from AIPAC and other pro-Israel Americans. Yet there is nothing shameful about saying that her campaign enjoyed the support of Jewish, Christian, and secular Americans who value the relationship with one of our closest democratic and technologically advanced allies. She could have criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza and bragged about how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked her on CNN while also unequivocally condemning Hamas’s slaughter and kidnapping of innocent Israelis and Americans on Oct. 7. She could have stated that atrocities and attempts at genocide are wrong regardless of who commits them. More fundamentally, Stevens could have rejected the effort to organize Michigan politics around imported Middle Eastern grievances.
After all, when a jihadist from Dearborn Heights via Lebanon attempted to ram an explosive-laden truck into a West Bloomfield synagogue preschool and murder 140 children because he was enraged by events thousands of miles away, El-Sayed suggested that condemning such an attack carried “a risk,” and then attempted to explain the attempted massacre by saying that “hurt people hurt people.” A more conventional Democrat would have stated plainly that such violence is unacceptable, unjustifiable, and profoundly un-American. And that principle would extend to supporting the elimination of terrorists responsible for the deaths of Americans. Yet after the United States killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, El-Sayed mused that “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad.”
Democrats once championed America as a melting pot and assimilation as a civic ideal. Increasingly, too many appear reluctant to defend those principles lest they offend activist factions determined to refract domestic politics through the ethnic and ideological conflicts of the Middle East.
This hesitation has consequences. Rev. Dr. Wendell Anthony of Detroit’s Fellowship Chapel, president of the local NAACP chapter, summarized the choice Democrats faced Tuesday more directly than Stevens—whom he backed—ever did: “Are you going to be more concerned about the West Bank than the West Side of Detroit?”
Data suggest that important blocs of Democratic voters reached a similar conclusion. Depending on the survey, black Democratic voters supported Stevens over El-Sayed by roughly 33 to 46 points. Yet as the Democratic coalition becomes whiter, richer, and more ideologically progressive, the preferences of these voters are increasingly displaced by an activist class whose moral imagination is organized around Palestine, “decolonization,” and the politics of the Global South. The party is shifting from the politics of the black church to the politics of the campus encampment.
Stevens’s own supporters appear to have taken her warnings about El-Sayed seriously. Preelection polling showed that only 57 percent said that they would support him over Republican Mike Rogers in a general election.
Party loyalty has limits. Stevens could have declined to endorse either candidate. She could have said that, while Democratic voters made their choice, El-Sayed’s conduct and judgment prevented her from campaigning for him, as fellow Michigan Democratic Congresswoman Hillary Scholten has indicated she will do. Stevens could acknowledge that the arguments she made before the primary remain true.
By instead supporting the same candidate whom she warned voters was unfit, Stevens has diminished her own credibility and validated the activist Left’s longstanding critique that establishment Democrats ultimately stand for little beyond holding office.
As for Republicans, they should not become complacent now that El-Sayed is the nominee. I have spoken with Republican strategists who believe that El-Sayed will be an easier opponent in November than Stevens would have been. Their confidence may be misplaced. Candidates aligned with the party’s socialist wing have become adept at packaging their ideas in disciplined, telegenic campaigns—as Zohran Mamdani demonstrated in New York. El-Sayed in Michigan might do the same.
Political parties rarely defeat their radical fringes by conceding the radicals’ moral or political premises. If any Democrats hope to reclaim the political center, they will first have to stop apologizing for occupying it. For now, El-Sayed’s victory says less about the strength of radicalism within the party than about the unwillingness of Democratic moderates to defend their convictions.