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We hear the ominous proclamation every four years: “This is the most important election of our lifetime.”
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Rarely is this a hyperbole applied to Senate races. But there are exceptions to everything, and the Michigan Senate race is deserving of it.
Its importance isn’t just about which party controls the Senate after the midterm elections, though this race could end up being the decider. Instead, it’s because of the candidate on the Democrats’ side: “Dr.” Abdul el Sayed.
OK, so maybe he isn’t a doctor — he never earned a medical license — despite insisting he is.
“I’ve been a doctor my whole career,” he has repeatedly said in interviews, while he labels himself on his LinkedIn profile a “physician.” In reality, el Sayed’s only hands-on experience treating patients was a sub-internship at a small hospital for four weeks.
El Sayed has called for defunding the police in the past. He wants to dismantle Immigration and Customs Enforcement now. He believes private health insurance should cease to exist and that the government should run the entire healthcare system.
If this were el Sayed’s platform while running in New York City or Seattle or Denver or Washington, D.C., he’d have an excellent chance of winning. But this is Michigan, a state President Donald Trump won twice and narrowly lost in 2020. It’s the perfect test case for socialism succeeding statewide in a purple state.
Polls currently have el Sayed trailing former Obama administration official Haley Stevens by four points in the RealClearPolitics average. But he is favored to win the nomination on the betting market Kalshi by a 66% to 34% margin. Polymarket also has el Sayed as the favorite. The primary is Aug. 4.
We have seen the Democratic Socialists of America emboldened by its recent victories, and it’s certainly not attempting to mask its extreme positions, including abolishing the U.S. Senate, the presidency, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, ICE, and providing amnesty to all illegal immigrants.
“It’s been said that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism,” the DSA manifesto reads. “But just because it isn’t easy to imagine now doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make it happen.”
This is madness, but a madness that is growing increasingly popular within the Democratic Party, especially among younger voters.
Per Gallup, only 42% of Democrats viewed capitalism favorably, while 66% had a positive view of socialism. For context, in 2010, 50% of Democrats viewed socialism favorably, or 16 percentage points lower. By contrast, 71% of Republicans viewed capitalism favorably in 2010, and that number has only increased to 74% in 2026.
If el Sayed advances to the general, he will face Republican Mike Rogers, who barely lost to Elissa Slotkin in a Senate race in 2024.
Would el Sayed campaign again with Hasan Piker? The provocative podcaster has said that America deserved 9/11 and called for the murder of Republican lawmakers including Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) while lamenting the fall of the Soviet Union. He has also said he supports Hamas 10,000 more times than Israel, which he has called an apartheid state guilty of genocide.
When el Sayed was asked about campaigning with such a dangerous, divisive figure, he refused to disavow his past comments.
“I’m not here to disavow people’s views,” el Sayed said. “This whole gotcha game, platform policing, cancel culture — I thought we were over it.”
El Sayed’s non-answer can easily be interpreted as a tacit agreement. The visual and verbal association will surely be used in a general election campaign against him.
An el Sayed victory against Rogers would be a seismic development in American politics. Establishment Democrats would quickly become an endangered species — at least the ones who don’t “evolve” and become socialists themselves in the name of holding on to power.
As for 2028, socialist momentum on a statewide level would be a huge opening for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who has always argued that the party lost in 2024 because it didn’t go far enough to the left.
“Capitalism is not a redeemable system,” Ocasio-Cortez once said.
“The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border,” she also declared in 2019.
“Billionaires … shouldn’t exist,” she declared just this year.
The U.S. Senate “was founded on, uh, you know, Jim Crow,” she said this past Friday.
More and more Democrats are increasingly falling in love with socialism. They see it as a way back to power. Make big promises, offer up free stuff, and hopefully, the electorate will be too ignorant to understand the system has failed time and again.
The 2028 election may well come down to a binary choice one would never imagine we would see in this country.
“One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism is that it ‘sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice.’ That’s actually not true,” potential 2028 nominee Marco Rubio explained. “Communism does not sound good in theory. The world that envisions for all of us is small, flat, gray, leveled of all exceptions, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul.
“The world that envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity, or ambition, a world without heroes, or glory, or great causes to strive towards, without a world without miracles, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things,” he added. “And the world communism envisions is a world without God.”
IN FOCUS — ‘THE DIRTY STAY’: THE DSA’S TEA PARTY STRATEGY
Powerful stuff.
So keep an eye on a guy named el Sayed. A victory in Michigan would mean Democrats embracing the “democratic socialist” brand far and wide.
