Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan says his party must "win by massive numbers" in November because Donald Trump is guaranteed to challenge the results — a preemptive declaration that any close outcome is inherently suspect from the party that spent four years insisting election denial was a threat to the republic.
The stakes are plain: if Democrats set the bar at "massive" margins, any election that falls short — even a legitimate Republican win — gets framed as stolen. That's not safeguarding democracy. That's rigging the narrative in advance.
El-Sayed made the comments Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," where Kristen Welker asked whether Democrats needed to turn out in numbers sufficient to make the election "too big to rig" — language borrowed from Kamala Harris's 2024 campaign. "Donald Trump has already threatened to do what he did in 2020, which is deny the outcomes of an election," El-Sayed said. "So, yes, we have to win by massive numbers."
The Guardian framed El-Sayed's remarks as a straightforward defense against Republican bad faith, noting Trump's history of questioning the 2020 result, his July primetime speech alleging Chinese interference, his firing of members of an independent federal election commission, and his ominous reply when asked about declaring a national security emergency around the midterms: "Let me just say, stranger things have happened, OK?" The New York Times has counted 440 days of Trump casting doubt on elections during his second term.
But here's what the cheerleaders omit: election denial isn't a Republican monopoly. El-Sayed himself noted that his opponent, Republican Mike Rogers, claimed a single van carrying fraudulent ballots in Detroit cost him the 2024 Senate race against Democrat Elissa Slotkin — after initially conceding. "The guy I'm running against insinuates that he didn't actually lose," El-Sayed said. Both sides question results when they lose. Only one side gets called a threat to democracy for it.
Meanwhile, the Cook Political Report now says a Senate majority is "squarely in Democrats' sights," and a New York Times/Siena poll shows Democratic Senate candidates leading in Alaska, Ohio, and Texas — states Trump won by double digits in 2024. El-Sayed leads Rogers by five points in Michigan.
The New Yorker, for its part, published a sprawling anti-Trump essay calling the president "fascist to the core" and comparing the White House to the Corleone family — standard fare from the outlet that has never met a Democratic narrative it wouldn't launder.
Separately, Trump told reporters Saturday he'd "love" to see Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman switch parties, calling him a "great guy" with "great common sense." Fetterman has broken with Democrats on the Iran war and immigration, and his party-line voting has dropped from nearly 90% to under 81% this session, according to Fox News Digital. He recently introduced Republican Dave McCormick at the Republican Midterm Convention and accidentally called himself a "lifelong Republican" at a Texas Tribune event. The New York Post reported Fetterman has also used Republican fundraising platforms.
The question nobody in the establishment press wants to ask: if the only legitimate outcome is a Democratic landslide, what exactly are the American people voting for?
