Abdul El-Sayed has won Michigan’s Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate (Photo: TEDxUofM 2017 / Flickr)
Billionaires, big business and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) lobbyists threw $70 million at trying to stop Abdul El-Sayed being the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan.
They failed because there is a mood for change against Donald Trump—and also the Democratic politicians who’ve shafted working class people.
El-Sayed, who supports Palestine, public healthcare for all and wants corporate money out of politics, narrowly won the primary election on Wednesday.
His opponent, Haley Stevens, is a mainstream Democrat who supports corporations, US wars and Israel’s genocide. She was backed by big business, Aipac and Democratic Party figures such as its leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer.
Stevens accused El-Sayed of antisemitism because he opposed Israel’s genocide.
She played up her Michigan accent in order to paint El-Sayed, whose parents are Egyptian immigrants, as an outsider backed by “east coast elites”. El-Sayed and Stevens are both from the Rochester Hills.
But the impact of the Palestine movement means their lies don’t cut through like they used to.
Even the bosses’ Financial Times newspaper warned this week, “Any Democrat associated with Aipac has a vanishing chance of becoming their party’s 2028 nominee”.
El-Sayed’s victory comes amid successes for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in primaries.
DSA member Scott told Socialist Worker, “Detroit DSA were basically lowkey campaigning for him alongside their own candidates.”
Scott argued that “it gives an opportunity for the left populist movement in the Democratic Party to prove that it can win outside of ‘deep-blue’ areas that always vote for it”.
El-Sayed has been compared to Zohran Mamdani, a DSA member and the mayor of New York City.
They both gained high-profile endorsement from Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who revitalised the US left under Trump’s first presidency.
But El-Sayed has made clear that he is not a socialist—but rather a progressive liberal.
“I am simply not a socialist,” he told the media. El-Sayed described himself as “a capitalist who understands capitalism”.
The Democrats are a thoroughly neoliberal party. Time and again, the left and movements have been corralled behind the Democrats and demobilised. But there is potential for so much more.
Trump is in trouble as he heads into the midterm elections in November.
The task for the left is using the mood that El-Sayed reflects to deepen the movements against Ice terror, genocide and war and the billionaires—outside of the Democrats.
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