The Progressives Propelling Abdul El-Sayed Forward in Michigan

“It just shouldn’t be this hard,” Abdul El-Sayed, the insurgent candidate for Michigan’s open Senate seat, says to a packed Mumford High School auditorium in Detroit’s northwestern corner.

“Shouldn’t be this hard to afford a second bag of groceries,” “to get your kid to a doctor,” or “to pay your taxes and know that that money’s gonna be spent on you and your kids instead of dropping bombs on other people and their kids.”

El-Sayed is here with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who’s passing through town on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, and state Rep. Donavan McKinney. El-Sayed is locked in a tight three-way race with establishment picks for Michigan’s open seat, a must-win for Democrats hoping to reclaim the chamber, while McKinney is running to unseat incumbent Democratic Congressman Shri Thanedar (MI-13), one of the body’s richest members, whom McKinney has called a “cardboard cutout of a congressman.” Sanders has endorsed both.

But instead of each of us enjoying the “long, healthy life” we deserve, the physician and former head of Detroit’s and then Wayne County’s Health Department goes on, our system is captured by billionaires and corporations that buy politicians “to do their bidding instead of ours. We pay more for all the stuff we gotta buy, get paid less for the work we do, and spend our tax dollars dropping bombs on other people when they should be spent on our own.”

All three hammer this message relentlessly: Your life is far more grueling than it needs to be because our political system is owned by billionaire bandits who’ve fixed it to rob us blind.

Dire times like this—another illegal and hideously immoral war, gas prices that make your eyes water, the decimation of the Voting Rights Act, and the fading chances for young people to do better than their parents—call for fighters “with the guts to take on the political establishment of both parties” as well as “the oligarchs and the economic establishment,” Sanders tells the audience.

Following Sen. Gary Peters’s announced retirement, Michigan’s open seat has become the most hotly contested race in the country. On the heels of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s victory and Graham Platner’s meteoric rise in Maine, the race gives progressive populists a chance to prove that their message can win in Midwestern swing states, where national Democrats have fallen short in so many high-stakes moments recently, including, of course, the 2024 presidential race.

The likely Republican nominee and favorite of the opioid-pushing pharmaceutical industry, former Congressman Mike Rogers, narrowly lost in 2024 to Michigan’s current centrist junior senator, Democrat Elissa Slotkin. Michiganders have three Democratic options to choose from, almost perfectly representing the various factions in the party’s ongoing fight over its future.

Congresswoman Haley Stevens is the corporate and establishment pick, and was once seen as the safest bet after she flipped a Republican seat in 2018. But her deep ties to politically toxic organizations like AIPAC, which is projected to spend tens of millions to defeat El-Sayed, have become a massive liability at a time when vast majorities are repulsed by Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza, a horror show Stevens has repeatedly stuck her neck out for by supporting unconditional weapons sales to the side blowing innocent men, women, and children to pieces. She is currently polling at 13 percent.

On that: It should be constantly repeated that the Democratic Party conducted its own examination of the 2024 loss. They’ve refused to release it, but reportedly found that the campaigns of President Joe Biden and eventually Vice President Kamala Harris blew that very winnable race in part because of their role in funding, lying to justify, and eventually covering up for Israel’s genocide, predictably alienating voters in places like Michigan and swinging the election to Trump.

Then there’s state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who’s been endorsed by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and has positioned herself as the pragmatic moderate in the race ready to take on Big Tech. McMorrow has sworn off AIPAC and corporate PAC money, despite taking PAC money earlier in her career, and has reluctantly called Israel’s war on Palestinian civilians a genocide. However, reporting by Drop Site News and The Lever’s founder David Sirota makes the case that these commitments are fairly new and thin on action.

And lastly there’s El-Sayed, the anti-war economic populist, who also ran an insurgent campaign for Michigan’s governor in 2018, ultimately coming up short to sitting Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. This time, he was supposed to be hobbled by his vocal support for Palestinian rights and ties to new-media figures like Hasan Piker. Instead, he’s being rewarded in polls while sticking to his core message that the real conflict in this country is the war being waged by those at the top against those at the bottom. Recent polls have El-Sayed and McMorrow, who leads fundraising, tied for first at 24 percent.

Michigan’s Progressive Populist Insurgents

In order to turn that slight edge into something real that can change lives, Michigan’s progressive populists need two things: a simple, persuasive message, and to build a political home that gives people a way to channel their scattered outrage into a unified majority that can win seats and ultimately do the unthinkable—place the base’s popular opinions on Palestine, health care, housing, and other basic human rights on the agenda.

El-Sayed and his supporters give a preview in a back-and-forth chant that starts every rally:

He runs through the rest of the hits: finally ending the illegal and immoral forever wars pursued by both parties. Passing Medicare for All and free higher education. A living wage that keeps up with inflation. Unions strong enough to enforce workers’ rights against predatory bosses.

McKinney is right to call these policies commonsense. Polling data shows that strong majorities of Americans support them. And looking beyond our shores, we can see that many of our everyday hardships are solved problems elsewhere. Welfare programs like free universal health care, child care, and higher education, when they’re well funded, are administered smartly and work perfectly fine in other parts of the world.

A Party of Working Families

“We’ve got to transform the Democratic Party into a party of working families who are going to stand up and fight for ordinary Americans,” Sanders says toward the end of his turn in Detroit.

He’s referring to Democrats’ total abandonment of the working class, and nodding toward organizations like the Working Families Party, which just released its national platform and plans to establish chapters across the country, as a vehicle for taking the party back. As Thomas Frank explains in his book Listen, Liberal, the Democratic Party of the 1970s made a calculated choice to run away from labor and civil rights groups and into the arms of high-earning professionals and corporations. At the same time, the labor movement and other grassroots organizations were clobbered by the party’s new masters, giving highly organized corporate interests a clear path to dominating political life. The working class was left politically stranded.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party, for decades and now under Trump and his oil and tech ghouls, “understand that if they can divide people up, they always win,” Sanders says. They’ll blame “the Chinese, Iranians, or trans people, or undocumented people” to distract from their role in carrying out a “$79 trillion redistribution of wealth from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent” over the last 50 years—an extraordinary heist of working families’ money.

We see the results. Experts keep concluding that the United States is basically an oligarchy where the wealthiest interests control decision-making while the general public has almost no influence whatsoever.

The antidote is “a people-first agenda, centered in fairness and opportunity” that “has broad support and can motivate people to engage,” Arika Lycan, co-founder of The People’s Coalition, tells the Prospect.

Two weeks before Sanders’s Detroit stop, progressive Democrats led by The People’s Coalition won important nominating contests for secretary of state, attorney general, and the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents at the state party convention, offering a perfect example of the type of bottom-up organizing Sanders is calling for.

The most colorful part of the day came when the three Senate candidates addressed the full auditorium of 7,000 delegates.

As the Michigan Advance reports, Congresswoman Stevens ran into a wall of boos. Sen. McMorrow, with supporters and a marching band in tow, faced a much friendlier crowd, along with a soft ripple of chants for El-Sayed, who was then met with a roar from supporters once he took the stage. The party’s Senate candidate, unlike down-ballot races, will be decided by primary voters on August 4th.

There are at least two reasons things went like this. First, the Democratic Party base, as we’ve seen, is far more progressive than its leadership. And more progressive than El-Sayed’s opponents, whose preference for the status quo on things ranging from Palestinian rights to health care is paid for in the tens of thousands of lives.

Rima Mohammad, also a co-founder of The People’s Coalition, calls it “a direct response to a political culture that has too often prioritized corporate donors, closed-door decision-making, and top-down strategies over the needs of everyday people.”

Lycan says the coalition worked with partners “to host our People’s Power Tour in nearly every congressional district” and prepared delegates before the convention to “ensure people understood both what was at stake and how they could make their voices heard in these races.” In the end, they “mobilized thousands of people from across Michigan” and had more than 70 volunteers still doing outreach throughout the convention.

“This moment is bigger than a single convention or a single slate of candidates,” Mohammad adds. “It reflects a growing movement across Michigan that is committed to long-term change: not just winning elections, but reshaping how political power is built and exercised.”

For the Greater Good

At a Southwest Detroit meet-and-greet for El-Sayed later in the week, I run into Tristan Layfield, a 37-year-old résumé and career consultant who lives in the area. “One of the biggest waves I had in clients last year was government employees,” he says, following DOGE’s elimination of over 300,000 jobs. “I tell people all the time, it’s really fucked up.”

Asked what draws him to El-Sayed when the supposed laws of self-interest should drive him away from an agenda that could cost him a little business, he has two answers.

“Well, I think of it like this. If Abdul or politicians like him can come in and make the system better for people, that includes me.”

This is an underappreciated point about calls for attacking inequality. The upward redistribution of wealth and the privatization of things like health care that could be run as public goods, similar to education or the fire department, turn people’s lives into a slog. Instead of pursuing random passions or enjoying time with loved ones, we spend hours filling out paperwork and arguing over the phone with an endless chain of corporate bureaucrats over insurance claims they’ve been hired to deny us.

“If we can elect leaders who actually care about the people, then there will be plenty of opportunities for me as an individual,” Layfield adds. Eliminating the inequality that warps our politics and human potential, strengthening unions, and replacing the extraordinarily wasteful private health insurance system with Medicare for All is a plan to make life a little more pleasant for everyone. And as the Nordic socialist countries show, it can also come with higher levels of employment, more leisure, and greater innovation.

It’s the kind of genuinely democratic spirit every progressive populist, democratic socialist, or labor and community organizer believes can be tapped to draw more and more people into a movement that can actually win things.