Michigan Voters, Don’t Let Radicals Fool You Into Thinking They’re Normal

Michigan’s U.S. Senate race is viewed as one of the most consequential and contentious elections of the 2026 cycle. The three-way Democratic primary contest to replace retiring incumbent Gary Peters — between moderate Congresswoman Haley Stevens, progressive state senator Mallory McMorrow, and far-left podcaster-physician Abdul El-Sayed — has emerged as a proxy war over the soul of the Democratic Party. As Politico noted last month, the race is a “catch-all for every question and problem plaguing Democrats politically and tactically.” Democrats need to flip four Republican-held seats to win a Senate majority. Michigan is not optional.

But two weeks ago, the national spotlight on the Great Lakes state got a little brighter. Ayman Ghazali, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Lebanon living in Dearborn Heights, collected arms and drove an explosive-laden truck into the preschool at Temple Israel in my hometown of West Bloomfield — the nation’s largest Reform synagogue in the heart of Michigan’s Jewish community. By some miracle, security guards engaged him and stopped the violent rampage before he could kill the nearly 140 children and their caretakers inside.

The attack was an act of Islamic terrorism, possibly carried out as revenge for a conflict between combatants on the other side of the globe. Ghazali’s brother was a commander in the Hezbollah terrorist organization, killed in a recent Israel Defense Forces airstrike. But Ghazali’s desire to sow terror could’ve also been incubated in Michigan. He lived next to “America’s jihad capital,” a community where, in the days after October 7th, 2023, thousands marched through the streets celebrating Hamas’s slaughter of more than 1,200 innocent men, women, and children — including 46 Americans.

In the week following the West Bloomfield attack, one might expect a Michigan Senate candidate to take pains to lower the temperature. El-Sayed chose differently. Six days after the near-massacre at Temple Israel, he posted a smiling photo of himself appealing to fans of Hasan Piker. Shortly thereafter, his campaign announced joint appearances with Piker at rallies on the trail.

For those unfamiliar: Piker is a Twitch streamer and self-described Marxist with three million followers who has built his brand on antisemitism, terror apologia, misogyny, and anti-Americanism. He has called Jews “inbred” and declared that property owners who don’t rent out their homes should be killed while letting “the streets soak in their red capitalist blood.” He has compared supporters of Israel’s existence to being a “rabid neo-Nazi” and said he doesn’t “have an issue with” the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah. He has offered justifications for Hamas’s October 7th massacre and stated that “it doesn’t matter if rapes happened on October 7th.” He has claimed “America deserved 9/11,” praised the Chinese Communist Party, and gleefully shared Houthi terrorist recruitment videos with his audience.

El-Sayed is only a slightly more polished version of the same thing. He has appeared at Islamist conferences alongside speakers who praised the October 7^th attackers. He has raised money from an Arab-American PAC whose leader called for Israeli Jews to be sent “back to Poland.” And while speaking before a chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations — which has been designated a terrorist organization by both Florida and Texas — he once compared an Oklahoma ballot measure restricting the application of Sharia law to the Trail of Tears.

What makes much of this increasingly normalized radicalism especially maddening is how unrepresentative it all is, even of most Democratic voters. The median Michigander who tends to vote Democrat is not any sort of Hasan Piker acolyte. New Manhattan Institute polling of nearly 2,600 Democratic voters found that most Democrats affirm Israel’s right to exist, that a plurality want their party to move toward the ideological center, and that an overwhelming majority believe political violence is never justified. The faction demanding maximalist anti-Western positioning as the price of progressive authenticity represents a small, loud, hyper-online minority.

So why does the radical left seem to continue gaining traction? As I’ve written previously in City Journal, the answer lies in examining who controls the actual machinery of Democratic politics. Over the past two decades, a network of progressive advocacy groups, ideological nonprofits, activist donors, and aligned unions has accumulated enormous influence over candidate recruitment, messaging, and policy prioritization. In election cycles without a presidential contest and thus lower voter turnout, that influence is magnified. Hit the right notes on all the crazy woke stuff, and the George Soros-types will make it worth your while. If not, it will go to your primary challenger. Many of these entities are deploying resources to achieve total ideological fealty to their extreme ideas, rather than to help Democrats win elections. After all, were ideological moderation to prove consistently successful at the ballot box, it would be economically threatening to the progressive groups’ ecosystem itself.

Look at El-Sayed’s relationship with the Pod Save America network. Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Ben Rhodes — the former Obama aides turned podcast hosts — organized a fundraiser for El-Sayed. Rhodes, notably, earned the nickname “Hamas” during his White House years, bestowed by senior White House staffers for his relentlessly hostile stance toward Israel even then. That same crew has now attached itself to El-Sayed’s campaign as part of a broader attempt to nationalize the lesson they took from Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York City: that the path forward for Democrats is to move left, not toward the center.

Mamdani won a Democratic primary in one of the bluest cities in America, under highly unique circumstances and against a uniquely unpalatable field. Attempting to run that same play in a dark purple Midwestern state and expecting the same result is what you do if you are chiefly focused on advancing a radical agenda and only secondarily on optimizing for victory. But all that won’t stop a large group of well-paid consultants coasting on Mamdani’s win from trying to sell that blueprint everywhere. And it won’t stop left-wing donors eager to believe it from buying it.

Meanwhile, the polling is clear. Stevens held an early lead in the primary. While the race has tightened considerably, she has consistently posted the strongest numbers against expected Republican nominee Mike Rogers — a former longtime congressman and well-known Michigan political figure who has run statewide before — in every publicly available general election survey to date.

Republican voters tempted to root for El-Sayed’s nomination — or operatives considering meddling on his behalf, as Democrats did in Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District Republican primary in 2022 when the DCCC spent big bucks boosting election-denier John Gibbs against moderate GOP incumbent Peter Meijer — should think carefully. Democrats successfully flipped that seat after helping Gibbs win his primary. But primary meddling remains a highly risky and unreliable instrument, especially in an election cycle where the fundamentals do favor the Democrats. In this case, the downside risk is particularly severe: Abdul El-Sayed in the United States Senate.

We already have a pair of bigoted, America-hostile Islamic terror sympathizers in the House in Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. That is two too many. Patriotic Americans of all political persuasions should be unified in their desire to ensure that a third does not join them in the Senate — especially in the weeks following the resurgence of jihadist violence, not just in Michigan, but in Virginia, Texas, and New York as well.

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Jesse Arm is the vice president of external affairs at the Manhattan Institute, where he oversees communications, government relations, and polling.