Progressive populist Abdul El-Sayed narrowly defeated his establishment-backed opponent Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday, becoming the latest Democratic insurgent to channel left-wing disillusionment with politics as usual — and outrage over Israel’s actions in Gaza — to win his party’s nomination in a place where more moderate candidates typically prevail.
The Associated Press called the race for El-Sayed on Wednesday morning. He will now try to prove in November a point he made throughout his primary campaign: that even in so-called purple states such as Michigan, Democrats have a better shot at success when they pick buzzy, big-swing progressives over safe, “electable” incrementalists. It’s a claim that challenges conventional wisdom and the preferences of party leaders, but seems to have clicked again and again with 2026 Democratic primary voters: in New York, in Maine, in Colorado.
Michigan will be the left’s toughest test yet, however. President Trump twice won the state, in 2016 and 2024. Republican nominee Mike Rogers is a well-known, well-funded former congressman who nearly won Michigan’s other Senate seat in 2024. To regain control of the Senate, Democrats have to flip four Republican-held seats without losing any of their own — and Michigan is the blue seat most at risk of going red. (Democratic Sen. Gary Peters is retiring.) Finally, no other Muslim has ever been elected to the U.S. Senate. “I’m running because I have a perfect name for U.S. politics,” El-Sayed likes to joke.
Here’s everything you need to know about one of the key figures of the 2026 midterms.
Who is El-Sayed?
El-Sayed, 41, was born on Halloween 1984 in Rochester Hills, Mich. — a northern suburb of Detroit. His parents were immigrants from Egypt, and his first language was Arabic. He captained his high school’s wrestling, football and lacrosse teams, then continued to play club lacrosse at the University of Michigan, where he majored in biology and political science.
El-Sayed went on to study medicine at Michigan, Oxford University (as a Rhodes Scholar) and Columbia University, where he received his M.D. Before politics, he pursued a career in public health epidemiology as a tenure-track professor, and later led the Detroit health department.
In 2018, El-Sayed, then just 32, resigned as Detroit’s health director to run for governor. He said at the time he was inspired by his work on the Flint water crisis. He was endorsed by prominent progressives — Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — but lost the Democratic primary to Gretchen Whitmer by more than 20 points. “It was just like, ‘Everything’s moving really fast. I don’t know what to pay attention to,'” El-Sayed recently recalled, likening his rookie bid to playing up an age level in lacrosse for the first time.
After a stint as Wayne County health director, El-Sayed decided to try again in 2026. At first, the Democratic primary pitted El-Sayed and Stevens against Michigan State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, and polls showed the three candidates splitting the vote fairly evenly. But after El-Sayed started to gain momentum over the spring and summer, McMorrow announced in early July that she was suspending her campaign.
According to CNN, McMorrow’s decision reflected “an emphasis among many Democrats to stop El-Sayed, out of fear he would be a weaker general election candidate.” Nonetheless, El-Sayed surged to a double-digit lead over Stevens in surveys conducted after McMorrow’s exit. His margin of victory on Tuesday was smaller than the polls predicted.
What does he stand for?
El-Sayed has made headlines for his outspoken criticism of Israel; the leading pro-Israel lobbying group, AIPAC; and U.S. political candidates who accept AIPAC money.
While El-Sayed has insisted that “the question of Israel’s existence is not a question,” he has also said he doesn’t “believe in ethno-states.” He has called the war in Gaza a “genocide” and accused Democrats who refuse to do the same of lacking the courage necessary “to stand up to Donald Trump.”
“Killing tens of thousands of people makes you pretty damn evil,” El-Sayed told CNN in April. “It’s not how evil is this one versus that one. Hamas: evil. Israeli government: evil. We can say both.”
El-Sayed has also called for ending all unconditional U.S. aid to Israel. His argument is that “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.” During the primary, he frequently dismissed Stevens — who does not believe there has been a genocide in Gaza and who has received a record $30 million from AIPAC — as “a suit with a large AIPAC bank account.”
Beyond Israel and Gaza, El-Sayed has aligned himself with the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. He has endorsed Medicare for All, promised to end Citizens United, backed targeted tariffs and bemoaned corporate monopolies. El-Sayed also wants to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and replace it with something like the former Immigration and Naturalization Service.
El-Sayed does not identify as a democratic socialist, even though many of his supporters do. The Democratic Socialists of America have not endorsed him.
Why is he getting so much buzz?
Some of the buzz surrounding El-Sayed is just straightforward controversy; he has campaigned, for instance, with Hasan Piker, a Marxist streamer whom other Democrats have called antisemitic and even anti-American.
“If perfectly inoffensive won elections, then Donald Trump would never have been president,” El-Sayed said in April when reporters questioned his choice of allies.
Democratic anxiety is also a factor. El-Sayed has clearly benefited from rising anger on the left toward Israel; nearly 60% of Democrats now believe their party is too supportive of the Jewish state, according to a June AP-NORC survey — a 15-point increase over the last two years.
But some Democrats also worry about alienating the broader electorate, especially in a swing state like Michigan. As a result, El-Sayed’s primary battle against Stevens morphed into a proxy war between “progressives pushing the party to rethink its relationship with Israel,” as the New York Times recently put it, and “establishment Democrats feeling queasy about El-Sayed’s electability” — as well as “some Jews fearing where he could take the party.”
The biggest reason El-Sayed is attracting so much national attention, however, is the same reason he won Tuesday’s primary: charisma. After El-Sayed delivered the student speech at his 2007 Michigan commencement ceremony, the other speaker, former President Bill Clinton, told him he had “a natural gift.”
“Dear Abdul,” Clinton wrote to El-Sayed three days later. “Your commencement speech was terrific — I wish you well and will try to live long enough to need you as my doctor.”
Today, dressed in his signature fitted black T-shirt and jeans, El-Sayed kicks off each stump speech with the same boisterous call-and-response chant:
“Money out of…”
“Politics!”
“Money in your…”
“Pocket!”
“Medicare for…”
“All!”
In general, El-Sayed has been less focused on Israel than on economic populism. “He has identified an approach that Democrats should be using up and down the ballot in November,” Notus’s Dana Milbank recently reported. “He leaves aside the ‘woke’ talk about cultural issues and gives the voters the two things they want: a candidate who’s a fighter, and a candidate who offers a message beyond being anti-Trump.”
To gin up enthusiasm among disaffected progressives, El-Sayed directs some of that “fighter” energy at the Democratic establishment. But most of it he directs upward, at the corporate elite.
“So when they tell us that we cannot have health care?” he asks his supporters at the end of his speeches.
“We don’t back down!”
“When they tell us that their money is unbeatable?”
“We don’t back down!”
“When they tell us we can’t have a union in our workplace?”
“We don’t back down!”
How could he perform in the midterms?
Recent general election polling showed Stevens roughly tied with Rogers, on average. El-Sayed tends to trail Rogers by a few percentage points.
In a private call with supporters earlier this summer, Rogers said that “if [El-Sayed] wins, I think we’re in good shape,” according to CNN.
“I mean, I think he’s so radical,” Rogers continued. “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.”
El-Sayed argues, however, that Rogers — who he derides on the stump as “Temu Trump” — is a “weak candidate” for the general election.
“He’s never met a corporation he didn’t want to take a check from and do a favor for,” El-Sayed recently told New York Magazine. “They have no clue what I’m going to do to him. So part of me is just like, ‘Welcome to 2026, my guy.’ In 2026, I am going to literally, by the time I’m done, I’m going to put a figurative tattoo on your forehead. And every time people see your face, they’re going to say ‘corporatist shill.'”
