El Sayed’s victory in Michigan could prove to be a trap for the Democrats

In the end, the victory that the American Democratic establishment feared has arrived. But it was a nail-biting finish. Abdul El Sayed beat Haley Stevens in the Michigan Senate primary by a narrow margin: 48.5 per cent to 47.5 per cent, with the victory declared after many hours of uncertainty. “The strength of the many is worth more than their money,” he said from the stage in Detroit. There was plenty of money, and almost all of it was against El Sayed: around $65 million in external spending, with AIPAC backing his rival and Governor Gretchen Whitmer stepping in at the last minute to stop him. El Sayed has overcome them: he is the face of the new left – the socialist movement represented by Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and New York’s Mayor Mamdani. An Egyptian-American, aged 41, and an epidemiologist with a CV straight out of the American dream, he is campaigning on a platform of Medicare for All, taxes on the rich and a very hard line on Israel. If he wins in November, he will be the first Muslim senator in history.

Michigan mattered because it is one of the four swing seats on which control of the Senate depends during Trump’s final two years in office. And because these primaries were the national litmus test of the party’s shift to the left. The result was ambiguous. The socialist wing won, yes. But the polls had put them fifteen points ahead, and in the end they secured just one. Democratic turnout broke all records, yet that narrow margin speaks of an electorate that is flirting with revolution without being fully convinced by it. The ball is now in their court for November, against the Republican Mike Rogers, who in 2024 lost the Senate race to Elissa Slotkin by fewer than twenty thousand votes. Moderates have been warning him for months: El Sayed is the candidate the Republicans dream of facing. If they are right, the Democrats will fail to hold on to a seat that is crucial to their bid for a Senate majority. If, on the other hand, El Sayed wins, the Democrats will be in trouble for 2028, convinced that the socialist agenda can take them to the White House.