Depending who you ask, he’s the party’s future—or its demise. I went to see why.
By Aymann Ismail

Not long ago, Abdul El-Sayed was polling third place in the three-way race for the Democratic nomination for Michigan’s wide-open Senate seat, set to be decided by voters on Aug. 4. The race is critical to both Democrats’ and Republicans’ hopes of taking the chamber. If the 41-year-old doctor and former health official had a profile, it was local, not national. Then recently, that all changed.

First, El-Sayed campaigned with Hasan Piker, the leftist streamer and antagonist of many moderate and pro-Israel Democrats. Some Democrats have debated in recent weeks whether the party should associate with Piker at all, given his past comment that “America deserved 9/11” (which he’s said he regrets) and others about Israel and the war in Gaza that have been labeled antisemitic (which he strongly denies). The pair appeared together at college campuses in Michigan in fairly straightforward rallies aimed at reaching younger voters, who are Piker’s audience. It was when El-Sayed refused to condemn past comments from Piker—he said it wasn’t up to him to address all of Piker’s statements—that suddenly everyone wanted a piece of him.

“The Mamdani of the Midwest,” declared Bari Weiss’ Free Press, disapprovingly. El-Sayed became worthy of Fox News headlines but also more centrist criticism in the Atlantic. Leaks suggested that Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, would be fine with the nomination of either of El-Sayed’s two opponents—the moderate Democrat Haley Stevens or the more mainstream liberal Mallory McMorrow—but not El-Sayed himself. A boogeyman for both Republicans and establishment Democrats was born.

At the same time, something else happened. Recent polls in Michigan show El-Sayed surging. One showed him with a gain of 8 points since January, tied with McMorrow with 24 percent support. (More than a third of voters remained undecided.) That rise has helped turn him into a proxy for fights that extend well beyond the state: how Democrats talk about Israel and Gaza, how much risk a progressive candidate can take without becoming “unelectable,” what the party’s future actually looks like. Enter that Atlantic article: “If successful, he would turn a very likely Democratic win into a jump ball,” Jonathan Chait wrote.