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Political and sports commentator Clay Travis recently\u00a0suggested<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that Michigan Republicans should cross over and vote for Abdul El-Sayed in the Democratic Senate primary. His reasoning: El-Sayed is a far-left radical who can\u2019t win in November, and his securing the nomination would help Republican Mike Rogers win the all-important seat.<\/p>\n This is seriously bad advice \u2014 not just because it\u2019s tactically risky, but because it asks Republicans to do something they should be unwilling to do: lend their votes, even instrumentally, to a candidate who represents a newly imported and genuinely dangerous ideological project.<\/p>\n Primary meddling is a stupid game that typically produces stupid prizes. Anticipating that some conservatives might start floating this ill-advised idea, I\u00a0wrote<\/span><\/a>\u00a0about it recently for this site.<\/p>\n Democrats were\u00a0eager<\/span><\/a>\u00a0to see Donald Trump win the 2016 Republican presidential primary, convinced he would be a gift to Hillary Clinton in November. That failed calculation reshaped American politics. Closer to home, primary meddling has occasionally \u201cworked\u201d in narrow tactical terms, elevating weaker nominees who go on to lose. But those cases are the exception that seduces people into ignoring the far more dangerous reality: sometimes the candidate you boost actually wins.<\/p>\n But the bigger issue here is that the Michigan Senate race is not just another contest between interchangeable Democrats. It is a referendum on what kind of Democratic Party emerges in one of the country\u2019s most\u00a0crucial\u00a0swing states. Republicans ignore that meaningful difference between the candidates at their peril.<\/p>\n Congresswoman Haley Stevens, who began this race as the\u00a0polling<\/span><\/a>\u00a0frontrunner but now lags in prediction markets<\/span><\/a> as a distant third, is a conventional Democrat with a frequently (and somewhat\u00a0unfairly<\/span><\/a>) mocked Midwestern twang. She ran as a moderate and has governed as something less than that \u2014 hardly a surprise in modern politics. As the election of Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger illustrates, Democrats who campaign toward the center often govern further to the Left once in power, pursuing policies they never fully advertised on the trail.<\/p>\n That\u00a0bait-and-switch<\/span><\/a>\u00a0dynamic is real. Republicans are right to be frustrated by it. But frustration is not an excuse for abandoning basic judgment.<\/p>\n Because whatever one thinks of Stevens\u2019s voting record on taxes, regulation, or abortion, she does not represent a fundamental threat to the American political order. She operates within it. She is recognizably part of the long-standing Democratic coalition that, for all its many faults, accepts the basic premises of American life: liberal democracy, civil society, and the legitimacy of the United States as a nation. The same can be said of the third major candidate in the race: progressive state legislator, MS NOW fixture, and\u00a0Middle America-critic<\/span><\/a>\u00a0Mallory McMorrow.<\/p>\n Abdul El-Sayed, on the other hand, represents something different:\u00a0Islamoleftism<\/span><\/a>. This is the uneasy fusion of the radical political Left with the ideology of political Islam \u2014 not a religion, but a political radicalization that has found in the far-left Democratic coalition a vehicle for its ambitions. It is what happened to Jeremy Corbyn\u2019s Labor Party in the United Kingdom, where radical Muslims became culture carriers inside a major political party, importing eliminationist antisemitism into the mainstream of left-wing politics until the rot became undeniable and the party paid a historic price.<\/p>\n Michigan is that\u00a0story<\/span><\/a>\u00a0in its American infancy. Dearborn \u2014 which one Wall Street Journal\u00a0essay<\/span><\/a>\u00a0called \u201cAmerica\u2019s jihad capital\u201d \u2014 has developed an Islamist political infrastructure whose leaders curry favor from ambitious Democrats. El-Sayed has obliged them. A leaked\u00a0recording<\/span><\/a> of him speaking with campaign staff revealed he didn\u2019t want to say anything about the U.S.-Israeli elimination of Ayatollah Khamenei earlier this year because, he explained, too many people in Dearborn would be sad about the death of the theocratic butcher who led the world\u2019s top state sponsor of terrorism.<\/p>\n El-Sayed has appeared at Islamist conferences with speakers who praised Hamas terrorism, addressed groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations, raised money from antisemitic PAC leaders, and\u00a0fought<\/span><\/a>\u00a0efforts to keep Islamic law out of American government. His response in the days following a Hezbollah-inspired terrorist attack that attempted to murder 140 children by driving an explosive-laden truck into the preschool at Temple Israel \u2014 the largest Reform synagogue in my hometown of West Bloomfield \u2014 was to post a smiling photo appealing to fans of Hasan Piker, announce joint campaign appearances with him, and minimize and rationalize the near-massacre by declaring: \u201cHurt people hurt people.\u201d<\/p>\n Piker, for the uninitiated, is a self-described Marxist who has called Jews \u201cinbred,\u201d declared America deserved 9\/11, and recently used a filmed New York Times\u00a0roundtable<\/span><\/a>\u00a0to explain his moral framework for the various scenarios in which carjacking, shoplifting, and murder are excusable. His approval is increasingly a litmus test for Democratic office-seekers.<\/p>\n The broader picture in Michigan confirms this isn\u2019t just about one candidate. At the state\u2019s Democratic Party convention earlier this month, organized labor \u2014 long the kingmaker of Michigan Democratic politics \u2014 was\u00a0routed<\/span><\/a> by the coalition El-Sayed represents. The attorney general candidate who held every major union endorsement, including the United Auto Workers and the Michigan Education Association, lost to an opponent with a single local endorsement. Jordan Acker, the Jewish incumbent University of Michigan Democratic regent whose home and car were repeatedly vandalized with antisemitic graffiti by fanatical-left Palestine obsessives, was denied renomination and replaced by a Dearborn attorney who has praised Hezbollah and the Iranian terror regime. Twenty-four union locals and a former Michigan AFL-CIO president have already defected to endorse an independent candidate running for governor rather than follow where the party is heading.<\/p>\n My Manhattan Institute colleague Charles Lehman recently\u00a0wrote<\/span><\/a> about the growing disease of anti-Americanism and the expanding patriotism gap between our two parties. In 2001, Democrats and Republicans were a mere three points apart in their pride in being American. Today, the gap is vastly larger \u2014 92% of Republicans call themselves very or extremely proud; among Democrats, that number is just 36%.<\/p>\n The Democratic Party once feared being seen as unpatriotic, but it now rewards politicians for the viciousness of their America-criticism and punishes those who hesitate to go along. El-Sayed is the natural endpoint of that trajectory. Stevens and McMorrow are much less of an accelerant on this front.<\/p>\n