Abdul El-Sayed Won’t Back Down

A bdul El-Sayed certainly enjoys an argument .

Our first interview, in a kebab restaurant in Dearborn, Michigan, spun out into a wide-ranging discussion of America’s Middle East policy, and ended with me saying, reluctantly, “Well, let’s not relitigate the Six-Day War.” El-Sayed is campaigning to be the next Democratic senator from Michigan, but he has also become one of his party’s leading critics of Israel.

I had observed that Gaza’s Arab neighbors had shown little desire to help Palestinians escape the humanitarian crisis there; he had retorted that without Israel’s bombing campaign, they wouldn’t need sanctuary in the first place.

But we had run out of time.

With a week to go until the primary, his schedule was packed, and his team needed to get him to the next event.

He exited the restaurant, bestowing clouds of back slaps, handshakes, shukran s, and habibi s on the staff.

The former means “thank you” in Arabic; the latter, coming from El-Sayed, is probably best translated as “bro.” The 41-year-old is not one of those hypercautious candidates who acts as though they’re carrying a Ming vase across a slippery floor, and he is not content to let Donald Trump’s unpopularity carry the Democrats to victory in November.

His campaign is a crucial test of what kind of Democrat can prosper in a swing state.

Michigan is deeply purple: It voted for Trump in 2016 and 2024, but its governor and two senators are Democrats.

That makes El-Sayed the great hope for the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party—an anti-establishment economic populist running against, basically, Big Everything.

He is also a Muslim, the child of Egyptian immigrants, at a time when Republicans are more and more comfortable saying that Islam is incompatible with Western values.

During the Democratic primary, which El-Sayed won much more narrowly than polls had predicted, he campaigned alongside the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, known for his admiration of Mao Zedong and the Soviet Union, and for saying that “America deserved 9/11.” [ Read: What El-Sayed does next matters ] Voters on the left and the right regularly say that they want candidates who are fighters: In this environment, El-Sayed’s scrappiness should be an asset.

He is willing to go into hostile territory, such as Jesse Watters’s Fox News show, and to call his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, a “beta” and “Mike Dodger” for refusing to debate him.

But El-Sayed does not always pick his fights carefully.