Democrats are locked in a three-way primary battle in the race for US Senate. The candidates are Abdul El-Sayed, Congresswoman Haley Stevens and Senator Mallory McMorrow.   

El-Sayed spoke with WDET about how he sees himself reaching key demographics among Democratic voters. He says his experience leading health departments in Wayne County and Detroit steers his views on policy.

El-Sayed: Well, you have to ask Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons about the MD they gave me. I might have have gotten duped. Maybe it was just a fake one, but I did put in the work. And then there was also the matter of the doctorate from Oxford University. But honestly, I don’t really care as much what people think about my education. I care that people in Michigan get a good education. I don’t care if you think I’m a doctor, I want you to be able to see a doctor. And those are the issues that we really ought to be talking about. 

McNamara: Stevens, yourself, McMorrow, you’re all very polite in person. Everybody’s really, really nice. It seems like there’s a lot of dirty work being done in the media right now. Every once in a while, stories will appear in Politico. Are we gonna actually take some of this mudslinging to each other, or are we just going to work through the media? 

El-Sayed: I will tell you this, I’m not here to sling mud, and when you see those stories, they’re not coming from our team. We’re a lot more focused on getting our message out to the people. I’ve been to 96 different cities now. On the way up here, we were in Cheboygan and Gaylord, and I want folks to understand what I’m about. I want to get money out of politics, put money in your pocket, pass Medicare for all. I think part of what people hate about the politics is that too many politicians run with no message at all, so instead their message is about how the other candidate is so much worse. You don’t have to do that when you actually have a message about what you want for people in our state. 

I’ve known exactly what I want for people, because I took the time to listen through my 10 years in public service, leading Detroit’s health department, running for governor back in 2018, leading Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human, and Veteran Services. People tell me it shouldn’t be this hard to afford a second bag of groceries, shouldn’t be this hard to send your kid to a dignified school, should not be this hard to see a doctor in the richest, most powerful country in the world, and I agree.

And so our politics is not about slinging mud at other people, our politics is about trying to bring ease to the 10 million people in this state who have had a bad go of things as a function—frankly, of deals that are being cut right behind us on that porch between corporations and corporate ball politicians. I don’t play that game. I don’t think anybody should. I’d like to make it illegal, and that’s a big reason why I’m running for U.S. Senate. 

McNamara: Your message has been resonating with younger voters, according to polling. What are you doing to reach out to Gen Xers, boomers who are hesitant? 

El-Sayed: Look, we’ve been talking to everyone, going everywhere, and I think what we’re seeing is overwhelming support among young people and very strong support among millennials, Gen X and baby boomers, and I think what’s always interesting to me is when I was in Cheboygan, I had this older woman come up to me. She said “You’re the first candidate about whom my granddaughter has been excited, and she turned me on to you.”

I think the most important thing any of us do every single day is care for our future that gets manifested in the in the bodies of our kids and our grandkids. We spend so much time taking care of them, and I think when young people are inspired by something, by a movement to actually bring politics back to the problems that we want to solve with them, I think what happens is you start to see older folks take note and take heed, and we’ve been seeing that up and down the state. 

McNamara: Black women make up the base of the Democratic Party, the most consistent voting bloc. What are you doing to reach out to them specifically? 

El-Sayed: I think the most important thing you can do is have listened, and as I said, we spend a lot of time in local communities, whether it’s Bible study, whether it is church on Sunday, whether it’s block clubs, whether it’s local democratic groups listening and learning. I think the most important thing is a message that is resonant. You think about the challenges facing Black women in our state, there are many of the same challenges everybody faces—the affordability of housing, the affordability of groceries, whether or not you could see a doctor, but those problems are exacerbated by structural racism in our state. The fact that too often Black women are left to Medicaid, which reimburses at half the rate, which is part and parcel why we continue to have the kind of maternal and child health epidemics that we see in our state, issues that I worked on.

My background is as health director for the city of Detroit, health director for Wayne County. Our work has been about trying to care for Black moms and babies. We led the single biggest expansion of Rx Kids in state history, built a program called Sister Friends back when I was in the City of Detroit that did things like provide free lift rides for prenatal care, so these are communities that I’ve been thinking about, listening to and delivering for for most of my career in public service, and you see that reflected in what we’re running on.

When I talk about Medicare for all, everybody focuses on the “all” part, because I want everyone in, nobody out. But ask yourself, for whom that Medicare for all is going to be the most important. Yes, it’s going to be in rural communities, very close to here, but it’s also going to be in urban communities, where too often, even if you are covered on Medicaid, your Medicaid reimbursement is so low that you can’t actually find a primary care doc, and you know that you’re going to be discriminated against at the point of care. These are all issues that come up when I’m in communities, and issues that we’re talking about and bringing to the fore in this campaign. 

McNamara: Do you have TV ads? Because the only ones I’m getting are for Haley Stevens and for Shri Thanedar. Those make up most of my TV watching experience right now. 

El-Sayed: I’m sorry to hear that, and I’ve seen those ads. They are very boring, but I will also tell you this: I don’t have AIPAC behind me, and AIPAC moves its money through a whole system of shell PACs, and those are the ads you’re seeing. So, we’ve seen what $7 (million), $8 million are spending already on behalf of Congresswoman Stevens by AIPAC–not telling you about her record on sending your tax dollars to a foreign government, but instead talking about, I don’t know what they’re talking about now, but, but that’s exactly how they work.

They flood the airwaves with ads, disinforming you about a particular record, because what they really care about is making sure that our foreign policy is driven by the interests of a foreign government, rather than for you. And I am going to be the biggest opponent that they have in the 2026 cycle, and they’ve already said I’m the single biggest danger to the U.S.-Israel relationship, and it has nothing to do with my position on any one group of people, because frankly, I don’t think we should be sending foreign military aid to Egypt either, where my family came from.

It has everything to do with the fact that I was the health director in a city, Detroit, watching kids try to go to school in classrooms with icicles hanging off of them, trying to provide kids glasses, trying to make sure that people didn’t fall into medical debt, and I happen to think 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 there. That should not be a difficult opinion to hold, but that kind of money is what gets spent on you when you say things like I just said. 

Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin is one of the most closely watched politicians in her party right now.

A former CIA analyst, she took three tours in Iraq alongside the military, and spent years in national security under both Republican and Democratic administrations before she ran for office. Then she won a House seat in a Trump-led district, followed by a Senate seat in a state President Trump carried. When her party needed someone to deliver the Democratic response to President Trump’s address to Congress, they picked her.

She’s been called a centrist. A pragmatist. A rising star. She’s also been called too cautious — not progressive enough, not tough enough — at a moment when many Democrats argue the party must get louder. The Metro‘s Robyn Vincent spoke with her at the Mackinac Policy Conference.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand.

Subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or NPR or wherever you get your podcasts.

More stories from The Metro

How much has politics changed in the last 20 years?

That was a different time — a time before President Trump and MAGA, before the wealth gap continued to expand, before the country became as polarized as it is today, and before algorithm-driven media took hold.

But how different were things, really? What can we learn from that era of politics? And what should we be glad we’ve left behind?

Jennifer Granholm was Michigan’s governor from 2003 to 2011. She also served as energy secretary under the Biden administration. Granholm is on Mackinac Island for this year’s Mackinac Policy Conference, where she spoke with The Metro’s Robyn Vincent.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand.

Subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or NPR or wherever you get your podcasts.

More stories from The Metro

Perceived failures by the Trump Administration regarding affordability and immigration enforcement—plus the ongoing war with Iran—has led to very low approval ratings for the president. Yet, approval ratings for the Democratic Party are somehow still worse.

The Michigan Democratic Party recently held its nominating convention in Detroit and it wasn’t without controversy.

WDET’s Russ McNamara recently caught up with Party Chair Curtis Hertel, who took over leadership following the disastrous 2024 campaign cycle. He says he’s excited by most of what he saw at the convention.  

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Curtis Hertel: I think some of the best moments were people cheering for their candidates, and the energy in the room was, was really great. You know, some of the booing that happened and other things you know, were not my favorite part, and certainly are things that violate our code of conduct and everything else. But I think if you look at it as a whole, we walk out of convention with the united slate of candidates that I think are poised to win in November.

You have Eli Savit, who has a record of being a prosecutor… and was an environmental lawyer taking on corporations. And when you think about what’s the most important thing for the attorney general’s office, it’s a People’s Lawyer.

The powerful, the rich, the corporations—they all have access to lawyers. What we need is people that can actually fight for the people of Michigan, the People’s Lawyer, like Frank Kelly and Dana Nessel—

Russ McNamara, WDET: I wanted to ask you about that booing real quick. Where does that come from?

CH: There’s always going to be people who disagree. You know, we’re a big tent, and it’s important that there’s a place in the party for people that have differing views. I think we can differ respectfully. I think that’s the way it should be.

I think that Republicans behave in a way where they eat their own. We shouldn’t be doing that but, but I don’t think it’s the the few hundred people that were at convention that were doing that we’re not the representative of the 7,250 people who were there who were cheering the people on. And I think we’re united. So, you know, I understand it’s interesting to focus on things where but, but I think it was a small part of it was the noise, not the frequency of what actually happened at convention.

Primaries vs. conventions

RM: There’s been talk by some at the convention about changing to primaries and away from convention endorsements. Is that something you can get behind?

CH: So I’ve always supported that. When I was in the Michigan legislature, I supported that. Primaries are good. Discussions are good. We want people to be able to be part of the choices. A primary would be a better system, but you have to change the Michigan Constitution to do that. I don’t think it’s happening tomorrow.

RM: Why do you think there’s the push right now to get it done? Because there weren’t whispers of this eight years ago…

CH: I can’t speak for those that are talking about it now. I mean, you you might want to have them on the show, but, but I will say that I I’ve always supported the exact same position that more people should be involved in the decision making process and any decisions. I think the more people that you allow in your decision making process, the better that is, because they feel connected to it.

Right now, (Republican candidates) are in a game of ‘who can stand with Donald Trump the most’. Trump is the most unpopular president in the history of this country, who has raised the health care cost on everybody and cut taxes for billionaires that has used a war of choice and tariffs of choice to actually increase the cost for every single American.

I paid $4.20 for gas this morning in East Lansing, before I drove here. They promised people that tax that their lives would be better, that there would be America First, so they’d be sick of winning, that the cost of groceries would go down, that the cost of gas would go down, that they wouldn’t be focused on foreign wars, all of that’s going to lie and whether it’s the Epstein files that they haven’t released, or the foreign wars of choice that they continue to go into, or the focus on billionaires and their bottom line instead of the American people’s, they have lied to the people of Michigan, and I think we got a good story to tell.

How can Democrats work for working people?

RM: Affordability is set to be the big story for the midterm elections, but if Democrats win, what happens after? What’s the plan?

CH: The Democratic Party has to remember that we are the party of working people. And when you look at when Democrats had the trifecta in Michigan, we did things to lower the cost for people. We passed the largest tax cut for working families, brought 30,000 kids out of poverty and gave free breakfast and lunch for every kid. The largest investment in affordable housing in our history, the largest investment in lowering the cost of childcare, we have the record to do that.

We didn’t run on it.

So Democrats have a responsibility to both provide solutions, but also to talk about them to the electorate.

There’s a line Maya Angelou has. “It’s not what you do for people, it’s how you make them feel.” (Ed. Note: This quote in many paraphrased forms is often attributed to Angelou, but there’s no evidence she ever wrote or said it.) We didn’t have the conversation about the things that we had accomplished for people.

This generation right now is the slowest generation in American history to buy a house, to buy a car, to start a family. That is a long systemic problem that we have not fully solved, and I think it’s important to acknowledge that, but they’re only making it worse.

On the other side, there’s a line in the movie “The American President” that if you don’t give people water, they’ll drink sand. Trump is to blame. He is trying to pit people against each other in order to maintain power, but we got to give people water. That’s the history and the soul of who the Democratic Party is, and that’s what we have to do as we’re heading into after the elections.

RM: But there’s always that sense that Democrats are going to get into power and they’re going to raise taxes.

CH: I just told you—

RM: Yeah, but what’s the plan you’re talking about making people ‘feel’ alright…

CH: It’s important to acknowledge the fact that in Michigan, we actually lowered the taxes for most working families and brought 30,000 kids out of poverty. We’re the ones that ended the retirement tax. (Former GOP Gov.) Rick Snyder is the one that put it on. So I do think that there are good examples of that. At the end of the day, I don’t want to raise the taxes on any Americans, except for those that are in the top 1% that I think can afford to pay them in order to provide what is guaranteed to all of us, which is the life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

“We’ve got to stop giving up on places.” 

RM: So Democrats are reconnecting with the working class in Michigan. But you know, nationally, that seems like it’s a lesson from 2024. What else can you glean from that election?

CH: Here’s the thing, it’s not just a lesson from 2024 I want to be perfectly clear. We need to build a party that is not just survive on one election alone. Like, like, that’s part of the problem is that we didn’t learn the actual lessons in 2018 because we won. And to me, there’s, there are really important lessons that the Democratic Party has to learn.

Part of it is, we’ve got to stop giving up on places. I was in 32 counties last year working to do the work of a Democratic Party.

It’s hard to sell a Democrat from California in Kalkaska, but it is easy to sell people that are actually from that community. And so we’ve got to rebuild.

So it’s not just about redoing one election and trying to win one election, this is about the structural problem that we have got to refocus back and try to win everywhere. It’s why we have an office in Detroit, because a lot of times, people in Detroit felt like we had abandoned them, that we were showing up in September and asking for their vote. We’re in as part of the community now, because it’s important to do that work.

Trying to bring people together after losing trust

RM: There was a major rift within the Democratic Party about Israel’s war in Gaza. A lot of that affected Dearborn, Hamtramck—metro Detroit’s Muslim and Arab communities. How do you rebuild that trust? Because a lot of them either stayed home or ended up voting for Donald Trump because he was the “peace candidate.”

CH: So I was endorsed for chair by both the Jewish Caucus and the Arab caucus, because there is a real want and need to build spaces where people communicate together.

There’s not going to be a Democratic party where everyone agrees on every single issue that that that that is out there, but there has got to be room for people to have conversation and be able to find places they agree with.

So for example, on ICE and the changing of what ‘America’ means when we have immigrants actually carrying their own papers because they’re afraid… I met with an American citizen who carries his passport every single day because he’s terrified of being stopped in the street.

That’s something the Jewish Caucus and the Arab caucus agree on, and they work together on. I think that’s what’s really powerful, is actually finding the spaces of agreement between people. My job is not to decide where the Democratic party goes. That’s the people’s job. Like the idea that the chair of the Democratic Party is supposed to set the position for all these people is just nonsense.

RM: I’m talking about outreach, really. There was a lot of trust broken. I talked with a ton of people, and we had 100,000 people vote uncommitted in a primary that took place in Michigan.

CH: We actively avoided conversations. And that does not work. I’m spending a lot of time in the Arab community and the Jewish community right now, actually, because I think it’s really important that we actually provide a space.

And I think that really the biggest thing that I am trying to solve is that people have felt forgotten by the Democratic Party. And I can tell you that that’s why I was in 32 counties last year. It’s why I was at more iftars than I’ve ever been in my entire life last year. It’s why finding that space between people is so important, and showing up and being part of the conversation and listening, which I think is probably the most important part politicians and party people have a tendency to talk a lot, but not to listen a lot. So that’s what I’m I’m doing as chair of this party, trying to bring people together.

Democrats need to fight back

RM: You talked about Eli Savit and Garlin Gilchrist being fighters for Michigan.

CH: Yes.

RM: Is that in response to the perception nationally of Democrats not being fighters for what they want? Because there’s a reason why the Democratic Party has a very, very low favorability rating right now. From the people I’ve talked to, especially at protests, they don’t feel like the Democratic Party or Democratic candidates are doing enough to fight for what they want.

CH: I will say that my best days are when Democrats are fighting back. I think we had the most progressive six months in the history of Michigan, when Democrats had the trifecta. But I get it like people are frustrated and they’re angry, and I would say two things about that.

One, we should always push our leaders to do more, and I’m all for that, and that’s important. But I will also say that for each of us, we’re waiting for the calvary to come, and we have to realize that we are the cavalry.

We have got to do the work to change and take the Republicans out of power.

We do these things called “People’s Town Halls.” It’s my favorite thing that I do as chair. We go into Republican districts and we actually bring people in because they refuse to meet with their own constituents, and we listen to people and what they’re feeling and the anger and the frustration.

And I get that people want that to change, but I will say this: right now, unfortunately, Democrats are in minority in the house by three seats, and in the Senate. We can change at this election. Democrats do have to prove they’re willing to fight back, absolutely, but we got to get to the place where in the power to actually change that first. And I have full faith that, when I’m going around the state, that we have Democrats that are ready to go out and do that work.

The progressive wing of the Michigan Democratic Party made its voice heard over the weekend during the party’s endorsement convention.

Democrats gathered in Huntington Place in Detroit Sunday to endorse party candidates for some statewide offices, like attorney general and secretary of state. Party leadership said the convention hit record numbers, and nearly every candidate backed by the party’s progressive wing won their endorsement races.

Campaigns brought drums, photo backdrops, and people in orange jumpsuits and sunglasses to carry billboards, all to stand out from the field.

But the delegates seemed to care most about substance and the issues. Often, those issues involved progressive themes like limiting corporate and outside political spending, providing universal healthcare, and ending U.S. involvement in foreign wars.

Many delegates, like Dearborn Public Schools Board member Adel Mozip, wanted candidates who inspire them.

“We’re looking forward to electing people who are going to be working for the people and not paid for by corporations and interests groups,” Mozip said outside a meeting of the Michigan Democratic Party’s Yemeni Caucus Sunday.

Campaign spending

Around the convention, canvassers gathered petition signatures for a ban on some corporate political spending. Candidates bragged about not taking money from corporate political action committees while speaking to the main crowd and in smaller meetings.

Still, attendees worried party leadership hadn’t gotten the message.

Jessie Hishon and Susan Sylvester, first-time delegates from metro Detroit who attended the party’s Progressive Caucus meeting — which spilled out of a crowded room — said they felt the party didn’t trust progressive candidates enough to win against Republicans.

“I think there are too many people who don’t believe that it can happen,” Hishon said.

Sylvester said her top issue was the influence of outside spending on Michigan campaigns.

“All of the issues are important to me but we have to take the money out of politics so we can have representation in our so-called democracy,” Sylvester said.

Who takes the blame?

Democrats lost in 2024 because of splits within their traditional coalition of moderates, progressives, and racial and ethnic minorities. With Michigan possibly deciding control of Congress this November, party leaders want to change that story.

A few 2028 presidential maybes spoke at a pre-convention event on Saturday, including former Vice President Kamala Harris, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, and New Jersey Senator Corey Booker. He warned Democrats that not voting is what let President Donald Trump retake the White House.

“You let somebody get in office who is locking up our children. You let somebody in office who is taking away our healthcare. You let somebody in office who’s taking away workers’ rights. You let somebody in office who got rid of the Department of Education,” Booker said to a cheering crowd at the Women’s Caucus luncheon.

At the convention, some delegates echoed calls for unity and engagement, even though that often requires listening to dissenters.

Detroiter Michelle Broughton said she’s been coming to Democratic Party conventions for over four decades.

“Our message needs to come across to all of us, whether we’re a young Dem or an old Dem,” Broughton said. “They need to talk about tabletop issues: food, gas, education, affordability, housing.”

But old battle lines remained visible on the convention floor.

Tensions over Palestine-Israel conflict

Progressive U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed received massive applause during his speech that criticized outside spending in Michigan races from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. Congresswoman Haley Stevens (D-MI 11), who is running against El-Sayed on a more traditional Democratic platform of affordability and re-shoring American manufacturing, followed and received boos.

In the University of Michigan regents race, incumbent Jordan Acker lost his reelection bid. Acker had faced criticism for his handling of pro-Palestine student protests — a fault line that’s grown increasingly fraught for Democrats in recent years. Amir Makled, a lawyer who represented one of those protestors, beat him.

During parts of the program, some attendees said they noticed some fellow delegates causing a disruption when a proposed resolution in support of Palestinians wasn’t taken up. Videos of the crowd appear to show a handful of convention members yelling at presenters.

Kalamazoo delegates Michelle Zukowski-Serlin and her husband Troy said they felt the jeering and booing of candidates crossed a line.

Both attended the party’s Jewish Caucus meeting. They said delegates at that meeting showed more respect to candidates that opposed support for Israel than supporters of those opponents showed pro-Israel candidates on stage.

“This is a bigger issue and that is mutual respect and acting with diplomacy, I would never boo one of their candidates,” Michelle Zukowski-Serlin said.

Could a primary fix the problems?

While many agreed the Democrats should learn from 2024, not everyone agreed on the lesson. Some want a wholesale change to how the party chooses nominees for statewide office, calling for a switch from party conventions to primary elections.

Oakland University political science professor David Dulio said Michigan is a rarity: most other states do use primaries for those down-ballot races — but there is no cure-all for messy nomination fights.

“I think there’s a temptation to think the grass is always greener and that isn’t always the case,” Dulio said.

States started moving toward primaries in the early 20th century to take power away from party insiders and test candidates’ ability to win elections, Dulio said.

“That has become the dominant form of candidate selection from within a political party, but that doesn’t mean the other options aren’t legitimate or that they can’t work,” said Dulio.

Michigan Democratic Party Chair Curtis Hertel said he believes a primary would be better because it would be open to all voters who choose a Democratic Party ballot.

Making that change would require voters to approve a constitutional amendment.

Michigan Republican Party Chair Jim Runestad said there’s little interest in the idea on his side of the aisle, arguing that convention nominations are less susceptible than primaries to big-money spending by outside interest groups.

Progressive surge

For some convention attendees, the lesson was to work within the current framework: support the Democratic nominees that they mostly agree with, even if the nominee is not their top choice. For others, it was that party leadership needs to get behind candidates who inspire, so voters want to support their nominee.

University of Michigan graduate student Nathan Kim said it’s not enough for the party to choose a “status quo” candidate.

“I think the Michigan Democratic Party and the party in general needs to face consequences. They need to know that they can’t get away with failing over, and over, and over again,” Kim said.

Likewise, Katarina Keating, another Michigan graduate student, said some candidates just aren’t worth supporting, even against Republicans.

“You need to draw the line somewhere. Right? If you’re going to vote for anybody if they’re in the right party, no matter what they’ve done or what they’ve said, what are you doing, what are you really voting for, what are you really trying to change?” Keating said.

At the end of the day, nearly every progressive-backed candidate won a party endorsement.

Both the upcoming August primary election, in which the U.S. Senate race remains close, and the November general election could show whether that support extends broadly outside of the convention walls — or if it’s a sign of progressive strength, just within the party’s base.

Originally posted by Michigan Public Radio.

The Michigan Democratic Senate Primary is heating up a bit. Polls largely show the trio of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Congresswoman Haley Stevens, and State Senator Mallory McMorrow all within the margin of error of each other.

Stevens and McMorrow have been trading off the lead.

The race has simmered with the candidates not really taking shots at each other. That’s now changed.

Yesterday, El-Sayed rallied at the University of Michigan and Michigan State with left-wing influencer Hasan Piker.

Piker’s livestreams – and political commentary – have drawn over three million followers on Twitch.

In 2024, Piker was invited to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but was kicked out over his criticism of Democrats and candidate Kamala Harris – for their failure to stop or criticize Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The 34-year-old Piker has made some controversial statements and his inclusion by the progressive El-Sayed has drawn sharp criticism by centrist Democrats.

When the campaign stops were announced, McMorrow was quick to compare Piker to Nick Fuentes—a far-right white supremacist holocaust denier. Stevens and current Michigan U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin also criticized the move.

Detroit-based reporter Tom Perkins looked at the controversy for The Guardian.

He tells WDET’s Russ McNamara that this fight is indicative of an internal struggle within the Democratic Party.

A party divided

Tom Perkins: I think this is really part of the ongoing civil war between the sort of Hillary Clinton wing of the party and the more progressive Bernie Sanders / AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) / Zohran Mamdani wing of the party.

You have El-Sayed and Piker, who are very progressive, and Piker has campaigned or interviewed AOC, Sanders, Zohran Mamdani, etc. And while McMorrow is a little bit younger and more progressive than somebody like Hillary Clinton, a lot of her surrogates, her aides, etc., come from that camp. And so that’s sort of the broader dynamic here and worth keeping in mind.

Accusations of anti-semitism

TP: Piker has been highly critical of Israel. He’s criticized it over its genocide, its rampaging through the Middle East, its war crimes, its atrocities, and he speaks about it in very strong terms. So that’s that alone has drawn some criticism, but he’s also said some pretty controversial things.

[Piker] said Hamas is lesser of the two evils with the Israeli government. Hamas is 1000 times better than the Israeli government. And he said this in the context of looking at who causes more death in the Middle East. And while it’s a controversial statement, people have said, “Oh, well, that’s antisemitic.” But he’s defended himself and said, “No, that’s a criticism of the Israeli government. That’s not a criticism of all Jewish people.”

[Piker] called a sect of Orthodox Jews in Israel who are ethno-supremacists, “inbred.” And that ignited a huge controversy, and that’s been used against him. People have said, “Oh, well, he called all Jews inbred.” He’s, defended that, and said, “No, I use that term to describe Nazis. I use that term to describe ethno-supremacists and racial supremacists of all kinds.”

When I talked with him about it, he said, “Look, there’s a super cut out there of an hour long of me calling different groups inbred, and it has nothing to do with with Jewish people or Jews. It’s just a term that I use to describe supremacists.”

Arab American views

Russ McNamara: What do Arab American leaders say here in Michigan?

TP: For my story, I spoke with seven local and national Arab American and Lebanese American leaders. They all said some variation of the same thing, which is that these attacks on El-Sayed and Piker show that the establishment Democrats are making the same moral and strategic blunders that they made in 2024 that led to Dems electoral demise in Michigan and nationally.

They say this is an attempt to censor criticism of Israel, and they say that it shows the anti-Arab bias that imbues the political establishment. McMorrow in her criticism of El-Sayed and Piker said, “Well, you know, Piker shouldn’t be here, because this happened in the wake of the Temple Israel Synagogue attacks,” which she said that Jewish people are suffering from that. Which is true that Jewish people are suffering from that, and that should be acknowledged, but she doesn’t acknowledge the suffering of the 120,000 Lebanese American people in Michigan.

Their families are from southern Lebanon. Israel has invaded Lebanon, virtually every one of these 120,000 people, either have a family member, a loved one, a friend who has been killed by Israel, or displaced by Israel. A million people are displaced right now in southern Lebanon. Many, many people from Michigan have family members who are suffering. That suffering is reverberating across Southeast Michigan, and that is not being acknowledged by McMorrow or centrist Democrats or establishment Democrats.

RM: How much impact will this actually have on the Democratic Primary?

TP: One of the one of the folks I spoke with for the story was Abed Ayoub, who’s the spokesperson for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), an Arab American civil rights group in Dearborn.

He said to me: “Look, Republicans are making inroads here. If there’s somebody like McMorrow, if there’s a Democratic candidate who’s not considering us, who’s not thinking about our suffering, who’s telling us to be quiet about Israel, then the same things that happened in 2024 are going to happen again. People are going to vote for a Republican. They’re going to stay home, they’re going to vote third party. So yes, if you want to win in Michigan, you might want to acknowledge this suffering. You might want to acknowledge that this is happening.”

I should stress that everybody I spoke with said some variation the same thing, which is the suffering of both people can be acknowledged at the same time. We don’t have to exclude one or the other.