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Fifty members of the Democratic Socialists of America flew from New York to Michigan before the primaries. They came to support DSA candidates, but they also canvassed for a Senate candidate their own organization had never endorsed. Abdul el Sayed doesn’t call himself a socialist, and the DSA never put its name behind him. Its members showed up anyway.
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One volunteer explained to City & State New York, without much subtlety, why: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee had spent $30 million against el Sayed, “and that must mean he’s doing something right.” That line deserves one caveat its author didn’t offer: Heavy outside spending often reflects concerns about a candidate across multiple issues, not just one. The DSA wasn’t mobilizing around a detailed governing program. It was mobilizing around a common opponent.
A parallel machine
That distinction matters because it explains something larger unfolding inside Democratic Party politics. The fastest-growing alliances are increasingly built less on shared ideology than on shared grievances. Organizations with very different long-term ambitions can become effective partners if they agree about today’s obstacles.
Muslim political organizations provide a useful example. This cycle, the Council on American-Islamic Relations’s political arm launched Muslims.Vote, targeting a dozen states it considers decisive for congressional control, including Michigan and Wisconsin. Arab American and Muslim political activism, energized by the Gaza war, has moved well beyond protest into candidate recruitment, fundraising, and primary elections.
The electoral results are becoming harder to ignore. CAIR Action’s exit polling found that 97% of Muslim voters in New York backed DSA member Zohran Mamdani for mayor. The morning after el Sayed’s Senate primary victory, Mamdani publicly congratulated him, drawing an explicit comparison to the outside spending directed against both campaigns. These movements do not need identical worldviews to recognize the same political battlefield.
The “uncommitted” movement illustrates the same pattern. Born in Michigan during the 2024 Democratic presidential primaries, it urged Democratic voters to cast “uncommitted” ballots rather than support then-President Joe Biden, protesting his administration’s handling of the war in Gaza while remaining inside the Democratic coalition. What began as a primary protest quickly became an organized electoral network. Its co-founder, Abbas Alawieh, is now running for the Michigan state Senate, while dozens of Muslim candidates now hold office or are seeking election across the country.
Different destinations
Israel is the highest-profile issue drawing these coalitions together, but it is not the only one. Economic populism, skepticism toward the foreign-policy establishment, and progressive urban political networks reinforce the partnership. Plenty of Democrats who disagree with Israeli policy belong to neither movement, and reducing the coalition to Gaza alone would oversimplify what is becoming a broader electoral alignment.
Yet the two movements are not pursuing the same destination, and that difference is easy to overlook because, for now, they are walking the same road. The DSA’s own national co-chairwoman, Megan Romer, has confirmed on camera that the platform includes abolishing institutions such as the Senate, the presidency, the Supreme Court, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, borders, and prisons outright. Whether one supports or opposes those objectives, they represent a fundamentally transformative vision of American government, described by the DSA’s own leadership rather than inferred by critics.
Muslim political organizations are pursuing something different. Their documented strategy has centered on electing candidates, mobilizing voters, and increasing representation within existing democratic institutions. They seek greater influence inside the political system, not its replacement. One movement wants to redesign the building — the other wants a larger office inside it.
That distinction makes the current alliance more interesting, not less. Coalitions rarely require agreement about where everyone ultimately wants to end up. They require agreement only about what stands in the way today.
Political alliances also seldom remain confined to the issue that created them. Success generates new expectations, and organizations that accumulate volunteers, donors, elected officials, and political influence naturally pursue additional priorities. What begins as cooperation over one foreign-policy question often expands into debates over education, immigration, religious liberty, and policing. Many Muslim communities hold more socially conservative views than the progressive activists with whom they currently share electoral coalitions, creating another possible fault line as influence grows.
The British precedent
Britain offers a recent illustration of how quickly that kind of coalition can reshape a major political party. Following the outbreak of the Gaza war, The Muslim Vote organized to challenge Labour Party members of Parliament who had opposed a ceasefire. It endorsed more than 150 candidates during the 2024 general elections.
The effort produced mixed national results but significant local consequences. Five pro-Palestinian independents, including former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, won seats outright, while several Labour incumbents narrowly survived or were defeated in heavily Muslim constituencies. Labour still won a national landslide, but important parts of its parliamentary coalition changed in remarkably little time.
America is not Britain. The electoral systems differ, the parties differ, and demographic patterns differ. History never repeats itself precisely, though it often demonstrates mechanisms that travel well, and coalition politics is one of them.
The immediate obstacle drawing DSA and Muslim political organizing together is the Democratic establishment’s relationship with Israel. Nearly every major DSA controversy chronicled throughout this series has run through that same issue: former Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s expulsion threat over an Iron Dome vote; Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman’s censure for seeking a pro-Israel endorsement; the party’s Oct. 7, 2023, statements; Resolution 22. Many of the most prominent victories celebrated by Muslim political organizations have involved candidates willing to challenge the party’s traditional position on that same question.
None of this makes the coalition unusual. Business organizations, pro-Israel groups, labor unions, environmental organizations, and conservative advocacy groups all build temporary alliances when their interests overlap. Coalition politics is how democratic parties function.
Timing is the risk
What makes this coalition distinctive is the distance separating its long-term objectives. Shared opposition is holding together movements that ultimately imagine very different futures for American politics. A movement built to abolish the Senate and a movement built to win a seat in it aren’t quietly disagreeing about method. They’re aimed at different endpoints entirely, and the only thing currently obscuring that is a shared opponent neither has defeated yet.
ISRAEL DIDN’T COST HARRIS THE PRESIDENCY. THAT’S DEMOCRATIC REVISIONISM
That gap probably won’t stay hidden forever, but it doesn’t need to surface soon to do its damage. Political parties can be reshaped long before coalitions begin to fracture. Candidates get nominated, incumbents get defeated, committee chairs change hands, and donor networks reorganize, all while partners stay focused on today’s opponent rather than tomorrow’s disagreement.
The DSA’s own membership more than doubled in 18 months. Britain’s Muslim Vote campaign went from founding to unseating sitting members of Parliament in seven. Whatever tension exists between rebuilding the American government and winning a bigger seat inside it has had very little time to matter so far. Alliances don’t have to endure to leave lasting consequences — they only have to last long enough to change the institutions they set out to capture.
