A progressive doctor just beat $33 million in foreign-lobby cash and the entire Democratic machine in Michigan — and the press can barely bring itself to say why.
Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan Senate primary over Rep. Haley Stevens, who had Governor Gretchen Whitmer's endorsement and a staggering $33 million in television ads from a group linked to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, according to AdImpact data cited by NBC News. That is not a typo. Thirty-three million dollars to buy a Senate seat in a single primary — and it failed. El-Sayed made Stevens' backing from the AIPAC-linked group and her support for Israel the centerpiece of his campaign, and Michigan voters sided with him.
NBC News framed El-Sayed's win as a story about demographics — younger, higher-educated voters, university counties like Washtenaw and Ingham. That matters, but it buries the lead. The lead is that a candidate ran explicitly against unconditional U.S. military aid to a foreign government, against the lobby that funnels money to enforce it, and he won in a purple battleground state. That is the story. Everything else is window dressing.
Newsweek ran an opinion piece by the head of Democracy Alliance, a Jewish woman from suburban Detroit, arguing Democrats should embrace El-Sayed's coalition. She noted that he attended friends' bar and bat mitzvahs growing up and that he has said, verbatim,
