Posted on 08/05/2026 5:18:20 AM PDT by Red Badger
The Democratic Socialists of America just won their biggest prize yet, and the man who delivered it insists he has nothing to do with them. Abdul El-Sayed has won the Democratic nomination for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat, prevailing over establishment favorite Haley Stevens in the most expensive Democratic Senate primary in American history.
Within hours, the entire socialist apparatus of the American left was celebrating. Bernie Sanders’ machine, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ad money, every single member of the Squad, and the ground troops of the DSA itself all poured themselves into this race. They know exactly what they won on Tuesday, even if their candidate keeps telling everyone it isn’t what it looks like.
That contradiction is not a footnote to this story. It is the story. The socialist movement inside the Democrat Party has learned something important since Zohran Mamdani took City Hall in New York, and Michigan is where they are testing the lesson.
The label wins in Manhattan. The label loses in Macomb County. So in purple states, the label gets left at the door while everything else, the money, the organizers, the agenda, and the endorsements, walks right in. Most importantly, the DSA’s policies are alive and well in El-Sayed’s platform.
The Socialist Who Says He Isn’t One Ask El-Sayed directly and he will tell you, as he told the Wall Street Journal last month, “I’m not technically or practically DSA.” Pressed by CNN, he went further. “I am not somebody who is a socialist. I believe in capitalism, I just believe that capitalism has to be regulated.”
Now ask the record. Fox News documented that El-Sayed attended and spoke at six Democratic Socialists of America events between 2017 and 2020. He headlined a fundraiser that raised roughly $10,000 for the Detroit DSA chapter. At that event he was photographed alongside Rep. Rashida Tlaib behind a table displaying a poster of a hand labeled “DSA” strangling a snake labeled “capitalism.”
Detroit DSA organizers have described him warmly as “a longtime friend of Detroit DSA.” In the final stretch of this primary, DSA organizers worked flat out to turn out his vote, and he campaigned alongside Hasan Piker, the streamer whose commentary about America and its enemies would have ended any political career a decade ago.
Days before the vote, every member of the Squad lined up behind him, joining Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ro Khanna, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Pramila Jayapal, and Summer Lee. Several of those endorsers hold current or former DSA affiliations themselves. A man is entitled to declare his own label. He is not entitled to have the rest of us ignore his fruit.
Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
The question answers itself. When the fruit is six years of DSA platforms, DSA fundraisers, DSA foot soldiers, and a policy slate of Medicare for All and a previously expressed sympathy for defunding police that his campaign has spent months trying to memory-hole, the tree is not a mystery.
The denial is not evidence against the movement’s advance. The denial is the movement’s advance. Socialism in America has stopped introducing itself.
From Manhattan to the Mitten Consider the sequence. Mamdani, a proud DSA member, wins the mayoralty of the nation’s largest city. This June, his backing helps propel three left-wing insurgents to victory in New York House primaries, two of them card-carrying DSA members, two of them toppling sitting Democratic incumbents.
In Texas, James Talarico rides record primary turnout past Jasmine Crockett for the Senate nomination. Next Tuesday, Wisconsin Democrats may hand their gubernatorial nomination to Francesca Hong, an open democratic socialist who has voiced support for abolishing the police.
And now Michigan, a state Donald Trump carried in 2024, has nominated the DSA’s longtime friend for the United States Senate on turnout that shattered a record standing since 2020.
This is not a series of coincidences. It is a strategy executing on schedule. Recent polling found that roughly a third of Democratic primary voters now identify as democratic socialists, and they are the most motivated bloc in the party. The activists supply the energy, the Squad supplies the star power, and candidates like El-Sayed supply the deniability. In deep blue cities the movement runs under its own flag. In swing states it runs under camouflage. Different uniforms, same army.
Why Both Parties Need This Seat The general election math makes Michigan the hinge of the entire cycle. Democrats have almost no path to retaking the Senate without holding Gary Peters’ open seat. Republicans have not won a Michigan Senate race since 1994, but Mike Rogers came within a whisker in 2024 and now draws the one Democrat the polling suggests he can beat.
Emerson’s independent survey found Stevens and Mallory McMorrow both defeating Rogers in hypothetical matchups while El-Sayed managed only a tie. Democratic primary voters saw those numbers and chose the tie.
El-Sayed understands what is coming. On election night he told supporters that “whatever happens tonight, we have a responsibility to make sure that Mike Rogers never sees the inside of the US Senate,” and his standard answer to the socialism question is to change the subject, dismissing Rogers as “the worst kind of corporatist.”
That is not a rebuttal. It is an evasion, and Michigan’s general electorate, unlike its primary electorate, tends to notice evasions.
Democrats now face an uncomfortable November. Their establishment spent record millions warning that this nominee could not win purple Michigan, and their own voters overruled them. If the party rallies behind him anyway, it ratifies the leftward capture its centrists claim to resist. If it holds back and he loses, the socialist wing will spend 2027 arguing betrayal. Either way, the mask question follows the party into every swing state in the country.
More Than One Seat This is why defeating El-Sayed in November matters far beyond one line on the Senate map. A Rogers victory would do something no cable segment or think tank paper can do. It would prove, in the industrial heartland, that the camouflage strategy fails the moment it leaves the coastal metropolis. It would tell every DSA-adjacent candidate eyeing a 2028 statewide run that shedding the label does not shed the record, and that voters in places where people build things and attend church can still tell a grape from a thorn.
An El-Sayed victory would prove the opposite. It would certify that a candidate can headline socialist fundraisers, pose behind posters of socialism strangling capitalism, absorb the movement’s money and manpower, deny all of it with a straight face, and win statewide in a Trump state. That playbook would be photocopied in all fifty states before Thanksgiving.
Michigan voters will not merely be choosing a senator this fall. They will be deciding whether socialism in America must still say its name to gain power. The movement has already answered for itself. In November, the rest of Michigan gets to answer back.
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Jim
He won - cue the sad trombone!
They may well have assured the Republicans of retaining control over the Senate.
Mike Rogers better get to work.
Yeah, you would hope that the DSA is a very hard sell in the Midwest.
H.L. Mencken said it best:
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Lol.
Not if voter fraud kicks in. The billionaires can control elections in some states by paying the vote counters.
Thanks to Henry Ford, Michigan has a rather large Arab, and therefore mostly Muslim, population who will likely vote en masse for this member of their tribe.
This is only a primary win, but it has ominous portent. Will Michiganders wake up or will they let the rabble of Dearborn stick a knife in America for them.
“Every nation gets the government it deserves.” - Joseph de Maistre, a Savoyard diplomat and philosopher, 1811
This guy is good and he’s scary. He’s a louder Obama. He needs to be squished like a bug. I don’t know if we’re up to it.
If he loses he won’t go away. He’ll run for a house seat and stay in public view while moving upward. He’s young and the sheeple-let’s hope they get wiser as we go.
I looked at the results. Stevens and El-Sayed were about 1% apart. Another D candidate (Mallory) got 4% and likely acted as a spoiler for Stevens. So a very narrow primary victory for El-Sayed. Again, I would say this “victory” does not bode well for the Dems in November, but its not November yet.
> Thanks to Henry Ford… <
And also thanks to George W. Bush. 9/11 woke us up. Bush put us back to sleep with his “Islam is peace” nonsense.
Could also be.......
now that he’s “a winner,” Abdul is trying to run away from the Socialist label.....
not that his comrades will let him.........chuckle
If you have info about that, please share it. I've not heard that before now.
AIPAC spent over 60 million dollars on Stevens. Buyer’s Remorse?
The real winners are the little soviets of the Workers’ Unions.
Just nuke Dearborn from outer space. It’s the only way to be sure.
I hope he figures out what he needs to do to win this race. Another Jihadist communist winning would be a huge set back.
Thanks for the numbers.
This may be a case where the administration anti voting fraud focus may have backfired on us.
In the Biden years the Democrat establishment would have just stolen this race for their candidate with blatant voter fraud and ballot stuffing.
https://ctmirror.org/2025/07/23/ct-bridgeport-ballot-fraud-guilty-plea/
https://portal.ct.gov/dcj/press-releases/division-of-criminal-justice/11202025electionarrests
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