\n<\/p>\n
Michigan\u2019s 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 \u2014 between moderate Congresswoman Haley Stevens, progressive state senator Mallory McMorrow, and far-left podcaster-physician Abdul El-Sayed \u2014 has emerged as a proxy war over the soul of the Democratic Party. As Politico noted<\/span><\/a> last month, the race is a \u201ccatch-all for every question and problem plaguing Democrats politically and tactically.\u201d Democrats need to flip four Republican-held seats to win a Senate majority. Michigan is not optional.<\/p>\n 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<\/span><\/a> \u2014 the nation\u2019s largest Reform synagogue in the heart of Michigan\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s brother was a commander in the Hezbollah terrorist organization, killed in a recent Israel Defense Forces airstrike. But Ghazali\u2019s desire to sow terror could\u2019ve also been incubated in Michigan. He lived next to \u201cAmerica\u2019s jihad capital<\/span><\/a>,\u201d a community where, in the days after October 7th, 2023, thousands marched through the streets celebrating Hamas\u2019s slaughter of more than 1,200 innocent men, women, and children \u2014 including 46 Americans.<\/p>\n 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<\/span><\/a> a smiling photo of himself appealing to fans of Hasan Piker. Shortly thereafter, his campaign announced<\/span><\/a> joint appearances with Piker at rallies on the trail.<\/p>\n For those unfamiliar: Piker is a Twitch streamer<\/span><\/a> and self-described Marxist<\/span><\/a> with three million followers who has built his brand on antisemitism, terror apologia, misogyny, and anti-Americanism. He has called Jews \u201cinbred\u201d and declared that property owners who don\u2019t rent out their homes should be killed<\/span><\/a> while letting \u201cthe streets soak in their red capitalist blood.\u201d He has compared supporters of Israel\u2019s existence to being a \u201crabid neo-Nazi\u201d and said<\/span><\/a> he doesn\u2019t \u201chave an issue with\u201d the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah. He has offered justifications for Hamas\u2019s October 7th massacre and stated that \u201cit doesn\u2019t matter if rapes happened on October 7th.\u201d He has claimed \u201cAmerica deserved 9\/11,\u201d praised the Chinese Communist Party, and gleefully shared Houthi terrorist recruitment videos with his audience.<\/p>\n El-Sayed is only a slightly more polished version of the same thing<\/span><\/a>. He has appeared at Islamist conferences alongside speakers who praised the October 7th<\/sup><\/span> attackers. He has raised money from an Arab-American PAC whose leader called for Israeli Jews to be sent \u201cback to Poland.\u201d And while speaking before a chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations \u2014 which has been designated a terrorist organization by both Florida<\/span><\/a> and Texas<\/span><\/a> \u2014 he once compared an Oklahoma ballot measure restricting the application of Sharia law to the Trail of Tears.<\/p>\n 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<\/span><\/a> of nearly 2,600 Democratic voters found that most Democrats affirm Israel\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n So why does the radical left seem to continue gaining traction? As I\u2019ve written previously in City Journal<\/span><\/a>, 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\u2019 ecosystem itself.<\/p>\n Look at El-Sayed\u2019s relationship with the Pod Save America network. Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Ben Rhodes \u2014 the former Obama aides turned podcast hosts \u2014 organized a fundraiser<\/span><\/a> for El-Sayed. Rhodes, notably, earned the nickname<\/span><\/a> \u201cHamas\u201d 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\u2019s campaign as part of a broader attempt to nationalize the lesson they took from Zohran Mamdani\u2019s mayoral victory in New York City: that the path forward for Democrats is to move left, not toward the center.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t stop a large group of well-paid consultants coasting on Mamdani\u2019s win from trying to sell that blueprint everywhere. And it won\u2019t stop left-wing donors eager to believe it from buying it.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the polling<\/span><\/a> 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 \u2014 a former longtime congressman and well-known Michigan political figure who has run statewide before \u2014 in every publicly available general election survey to date.<\/p>\n Republican voters tempted to root for El-Sayed\u2019s nomination \u2014 or operatives considering meddling on his behalf, as Democrats did<\/span><\/a> in Michigan\u2019s 3rd Congressional District Republican primary in 2022 when the DCCC spent big bucks boosting election-denier John Gibbs against moderate GOP incumbent Peter Meijer \u2014 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 especially in the weeks following the resurgence of jihadist violence, not just in Michigan, but in Virginia<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0Texas<\/span><\/a>, and\u00a0New York<\/span><\/a> as well.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n