Abdul El-Sayed speaks during a news conference at the Spirit of Detroit shortly after winning the Democratic nomination for US Senate in Michigan, Wednesday, August 5, 2026, in Detroit.
(Julia Demaree Nikhinson / AP)
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed beat the power of big money in Michigan’s tightly contested Democratic Senate primary. That wasn’t easy. El-Sayed was dramatically outspent and relentlessly attacked by his opponents. Yet the candidate who ran with the endorsements of US Senator Bernie Sanders, US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the United Auto Workers union prevailed Tuesday over US Representative Haley Stevens, who benefited from as much as $70 million in spending—in support of Stevens and against El-Sayed—by corporate donors and groups aligned with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
“In the words of Muhammad Ali, ‘We shook up the world,’” El-Sayed declared on Wednesday morning, after winning a close primary fight in which his campaign said he was outspent by as much as 11 to 1. “What we showed is that the power of our many is greater than the power of their money.”
El-Sayed’s win came on a big night for progressives in Michigan, where democratic socialist Donavan McKinney, who was backed by Sanders, Democratic Socialists of America, Justice Democrats, and the Working Families Party, beat Democratic US Representative Shri Thanedar in the Detroit area; and where progressive Will Lawrence, a Sunrise Movement cofounder who assembled a similar coalition of backers, won a three-way contest to take on a vulnerable Republican incumbent in central Michigan’s seventh district. All of the winners are supporters of Medicare for All, taxing the rich, building strong unions, and strengthening Palestinian rights.
But El-Sayed’s win stands above the rest, given that it was considered by many to be the highest-profile Democratic contest of the summer. Now that he’s prevailed in the primary, El-Sayed faces two immediate tasks.
First, he has to unite a Michigan Democratic Party that is far more energized than the GOP, which is plagued by both the growing unpopularity of President Donald Trump and internal divisions over how to appeal to voters who have soured on so much of the Republican agenda. Second, El-Sayed must take his populist challenge to corporate interests—and their influence on our governing—into a general election where he knows he will be outspent but not outworked.
Uniting Democrats is essential. The primary turnout numbers in Michigan—a state where both parties had top-of-the-ballot contests (Democrats for the Senate, Republicans for governor) and extensive down-ballot competition—diverged dramatically. Democrats drew roughly 1.5 million voters to the polls on Tuesday, while Republicans drew around 930,000. “We have not seen this kind of split before,” noted veteran Michigan pollster Richard Czuba. That’s another reminder that the enthusiasm gap favors Democrats this year—if they can stay focused on their opponents and not one another.
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The Michigan primary was often bitter. But on Wednesday morning, key players made major moves to pull the party together behind El-Sayed. “I’m proud to give Abdul my full endorsement and support as we head to November together as a unified party,” declared Michigan state Senator Mallory McMorrow, whose name remained on the Senate ballot after she dropped her own bid last month. “Take it from me—this was a brutal primary. But whatever differences there were between the candidates in this race, those differences are nothing compared to the contrast in November.”
And Michigan Democratic US Senator Elissa Slotkin, a much more centrist figure than El-Sayed, was quick to announce that she’d be working to help beat Republican nominee Mike Rogers because “there is nothing more important than the mission of the next 90 days: uniting, keeping this seat blue, flipping the House and Senate, and providing a real check on President Trump.”
But uniting the party is just one part of the equation.
The other part involves what has emerged as one of El-Sayed’s great political strengths: his development of a dynamic populist message that links the corporate and special-interest money on which the Rogers campaign will rely to federal policies that harm the working families of Michigan. Speaking on Wednesday, El-Sayed mocked Rogers for once attacking Donald Trump and then falling in behind the president: “Is he MAGA? Is he Neocon? No, man, he’s just a corporate sellout.”
That’s precisely the right message for this moment.
Rogers will offer voters a rerun of the attacks that have already been made on El-Sayed. The Republican will have plenty of resources to do this—very probably with funding from the same sources that spent so much money attacking El-Sayed in the primary.
But El-Sayed’s takeaway from the primary is a smart one. He plans to keep running a high-energy campaign that places an emphasis on meeting voters where they live—especially in rural regions, small cities, and the Upper Peninsula, where he showed considerable strength in Tuesday’s results. Yes, he’ll be outspent. But he has learned a pair of confidence-building and strategy-influencing lessons from the primary—both of which can be used against Rogers in November.
First:
“We took on a machine. You’re not supposed to be able to beat $70 million dollars of outside spending—a record amount of money spent in a campaign against a Democrat in a primary in any campaign. You’re not supposed to be able to beat that. And what we showed is that the power of our many is greater than the power of their money. What we showed is that if you are willing to build a movement, brick by brick; if you’re willing to travel your state and have a conversation in rooms big and small, starting in a moment where people aren’t even paying attention to an election—but are paying attention to the price of gas, and the price of groceries, and the price of housing, and the price of health care—that you can build a conversation that builds into a movement that defeats the liar. This is what you all showed me. And my hope is that our democracy will never to the same. So when Big Pharma and Big Tech, when DTE and Blue Cross come a-knocking and say, ‘You know what, this is our democracy and we’re going to own it,’ from here on out, we can always point [to this election] and say, ‘No, this is the people’s democracy, and we will always own it.’”
Second, when faced with an onslaught of negative attack ads, there is reassurance in the fact that “it turns out the commercials are the part of the television show most people don’t want to watch.”
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