By admin 
Abdul El-Sayed’s plan as he left his last polling place stop on Tuesday afternoon was to take the stage at the Majestic Theater on Woodward Avenue as early as 10 p.m. to deliver a speech he knew had to be more about reaching out. But he was also counting on a big win to answer every question about his chances of winning in November and why other Democrats needed to fall in line behind him.
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Instead, El-Sayed had to wait until Wednesday morning to claim a sliver of a victory, by 15,000 votes out of more than 1.5 million votes cast.
“In the words of Muhammad Ali, ‘We shook up the world,’” he told reporters.
But he left many key Democrats in the state unconvinced, now that his promises of transforming the electorate had fallen well short after a primary campaign that became vicious, visceral and deeply personal.
At stake is a Senate seat critical to their party’s chances of winning control of the upper chamber for President Donald Trump’s final two years.
While the microphones are on, political leaders talk confidently about how they know the party can come together behind El-Sayed against Mike Rogers, the former Republican congressman who came close to winning Michigan’s other Senate seat in 2024. Then they often ask to go off the record to say how terrified they are that the wounds are too deep and festering to heal.
El-Sayed achieved a landmark for the Democratic Party’s socialist-aligned wing, which now adds a swing-state victory to its recent run in deep-blue districts, and for his focus on enacting Medicare for All and going after big money in politics. But his detractors saw what his fans loved — his denunciations of the tens of millions spent against him by big-money groups, his calling Stevens an AIPAC puppet unable to form two sentences on her own — as signs of cockiness and hate.
This is part of what leading Democrats had hoped to avoid, with two telling CNN they reached out to El-Sayed repeatedly to ask him not to focus as much on Israel and to lower the temperature.
Stevens called El-Sayed to congratulate him on Wednesday morning not long before he held a victory press conference at the historic Spirit of Detroit monument downtown. Their former challenger Mallory McMorrow was on hand, long planning to join whoever won the race, but Stevens was not invited, which some supporters said they viewed as an early slight because she quickly conceded the race “and did things right.”
“Part of what I’m going to be doing every day from here on out is listening to everybody and figuring out how we bring this party back together,” said McMorrow, who endorsed El-Sayed immediately Wednesday.
“I recognize it may take a few weeks,” McMorrow said hopefully before polls closed Tuesday. “But we’ve got 13 weeks between now and November.”
A unity rally is scheduled for Friday morning in Detroit, headlined by Pete Buttigieg, the Michigan transplant who declined to run for Senate himself ahead of a possible 2028 presidential bid. Already, 45 organizers paid for by the state party have been working across Michigan, Michigan Democratic state chair Curtis Hertel said, with that number scheduled to double by November. Outside money is already set, like the $20 million that the Senate Majority PAC allocated for Michigan no matter who won the primary.
“We’ve done town halls in every Republican district in the state, and we see people who are angry because they feel like they were promised something — that they would be first — and they absolutely have not been. And they cut taxes for billionaires while they cut healthcare for the people here,” Hertel said. “So for Democrats, while I understand that there’s rawness after a primary, I believe that they know and they will know what’s actually at stake for the country about what happens in Michigan. And if none of that’s enough, then how about a Trump supermajority in the Supreme Court?”
The final hours: Streamers and confidence
With just over 48 hours to go until polls closed, streamer Jack Cocchiarella asked El-Sayed how many he owns of the black V-neck T-shirts that have become his deliberately bicep-baring campaign trail uniform.
Twelve, El-Sayed answered, but “I need one more that just says, ‘Most dangerous candidate for the US-Israel relationship.’ I’ll wear it every day.”
El-Sayed dialed into the fundraiser from the passenger seat on his way to a pool party with influencers, where he posed for shots looking over the rims of his sunglasses and gave a handshake-hug to leftist influencer Hasan Piker.
On Monday evening, he arrived with Piker, who was wearing a blue Metro Detroit Democratic Socialists of America cap, to an event at a church converted to a bar. Inside, he gave a practice run of his presumed victory speech, putting himself in what he said was a tradition of correcting the United States’ wrongs that felt appropriate for the country’s 250th birthday year. Outside, mostly out-of-state streamers — including two separate cat-focused podcast hosts — interviewed mostly out-of-state volunteers, all drawn in by El-Sayed.
For El-Sayed, who’s been talking about getting money out of politics since he ran for governor here in 2018, the moment met the message as channeled his frustration of being so wildly outspent by AIPAC into turning them into a catch-all for all outside spending.
Asked after he voted at the Louis Pasteur school in Detroit on Tuesday, Nathan Bruno, a 34-year-old automotive sales manager, said he picked El-Sayed “mainly because of getting money out of politics, and Haley Stevens didn’t have the credentials on that.”
Emily Lopez, a 30-year-old Detroit city employee who works in IT, said she cared about Israel and Gaza, but it was what the spending from big-money groups on Stevens’ behalf that decided her vote. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent more than $30 million through its super PAC against El-Sayed, part of an ad barrage that put him at a 30-to-1 disadvantage on the airwaves.
Stevens is “fake” and “seems like an undercover Republican,” Lopez said.
“If I took money from somebody, I’d feel like I’d need to give them something back,” she added.
El-Sayed repeatedly tore into AIPAC at debates and online. Even Abbas Alawieh, a co-founder of the Uncommitted movement in Michigan started to protest Joe Biden’s actions on Israel, said he’d been surprised at how widely the spending has resonated.
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“I’ve been working in progressive politics for a very long time. I’ve never seen the issue of wanting to get big money out of politics so top of mind for voters as I’ve seen it this year,” Alawieh told CNN outside a school in Dearborn, where he’d just voted for himself in a winning primary race for a state Senate seat. “People are furious about our politics. After seven months of knocking doors, all I can think about is all the pain that was expressed to me at every door and all of the urging from one voter after another saying, ‘Promise you won’t forget about us.’ They feel like our national parties have forgotten about them.”
Many Michigan Democrats need to be won over
Kelly Garrett, the mayor of Lathrup Village who attended a Stevens rally at a plumbers union building in Madison Heights, said she’s a committed Democrat, but grimaced at the prospect of backing El-Sayed.
“It’s going to be tough,” Garrett said. “It’s going be a tough pill to swallow, but I’m going to do it. Because that’s how much I want us to win.”
And waiting to cheer for Stevens at the plumbers’ union hall on Sunday, Rabbi Asher Lopatin said that while he is a proud Democrat on many issues, El-Sayed’s focus on Israel and blaming funding to the country for many of Michigan’s problems could be insurmountable for him.
“I’m heavily considering voting for Mike Rogers. I want to re-examine my understanding on Abdul El-Sayed,” Lopatin said. “Because to a great extent, I’ve been very disturbed by what I’ve seen, but I will reexamine things and also reexamining what Mike Rogers is all about. I would be scared if he’s all totally whatever Trump says.”
Rep. Hillary Scholten, a Stevens backer who was on stage at her election-night party, frequently criticized El-Sayed and linked him to several of Piker’s controversial statements, including the streamer’s comment that the US “deserved” the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. Scholten declined to say before Tuesday whether she would endorse El-Sayed if he won. She posted a statement about the results that didn’t mention him.
El-Sayed supporters may rage about that reluctance to seek unity now. But going into Tuesday night, some were signaling that’s exactly how they would have reacted had Stevens won.
Melat Kiros, the democratic socialist who beat an incumbent House Democrat in Colorado, campaigned with El-Sayed as she travels the country to boost like-minded candidates. She said was looking forward to being back in state to help him in the general election since “we have to be standing tall and strong against fascism.”
Asked if she’d do the same for Stevens, she said, “You know, I might support from afar, probably — actually, you know what? No, I wouldn’t.”
As support for Israel has plummeted in polling, El-Sayed’s argument that the Jewish state is incompatible with progressivism helped him with his base.
“It’s just like the first time in a while I’ve heard answers to problems that people I know have dealt with and that I will be dealing with soon,” Jarrett Maki, a 26-year-old in a Red Wings shirt who test-drives vehicles from Ford. He’d driven in from Troy in on short notice to be one of the few actual voters at Monday night’s event with Piker and other influencers.
The cost of healthcare and groceries was on his mind, Maki said, but so was being disappointed in Biden for not being as progressive as he believed the former president had promised to be while running in 2020. Asked to identify what wasn’t progressive enough, Maki said, “being complicit in a lot of the Israel-Gaza stuff.”
Had Stevens won, Maki said, he wouldn’t have been able to support her.
Is there enough time for Democrats?
People close to El-Sayed told CNN he sometimes would look at the readouts of the weekly spending against him in panic, though he channeled that into digging in on Israel and AIPAC specifically. AIPAC has already vowed to stay involved in the general election, saying its members “remain determined to ensure that voters reject Dr. El-Sayed and his radical anti-Israel agenda in November.”
Multiple Democratic leaders told CNN they hope El-Sayed comes out of the primary doing better listening to those who are opposed to him on a variety of issues, but especially to people like Lopatin who feel like their own pain and concerns have been brushed aside.
“Being a good leader requires being humble and having humility and being a great listener. And that’s what’s going to be the most important thing that someone can do to bring this party back together,” said Mari Manoogian, a former state representative, as she spent part of primary day working at an outdoor café in Birmingham.
On Wednesday, El-Sayed sought to reassure Jewish Americans of his support for them.
“I want you to know that my commitment to your safety, my commitment to Jewish safety, is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters,” he said, addressing reporters Wednesday morning.
But outside of his hotel that morning, he rejected a CNN question about whether appearing with Piker was a mistake.
“I think people get real worried about him, but you think about who Mike Rogers has been palling around with, right?” he said, referencing Trump. “I think it’s important for us to just remember what Mike Rogers is and what we’re up against.”
The one thing most Michigan Democrats can agree on, at least for now: if they can pull off enough unity to at least win back full control of the legislature, they’re moving future primaries from August to the spring, so they can have more time to recover.
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CNN’s Jeff Zeleny contributed to this report.