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Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic primary for US Senate in Michigan, becoming the latest leftwing candidate to capture the party’s nomination ahead of November’s midterm elections.
El-Sayed, a progressive, beat Haley Stevens, a moderate US representative backed by the party’s establishment. He will now face Republican Mike Rogers in the race to represent the midwestern purple state in the Senate. The Associated Press called the race on Wednesday morning, moments after Stevens’s campaign said she had called El-Sayed to concede.
El-Sayed succeeded by a relatively close margin, in a sign that battleground state voters are still grappling over the direction of the Democratic party.
Michigan voters also delivered victories for other progressive candidates, nominating climate activist William Lawrence and Donavan McKinney, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, both of whom are backed by Bernie Sanders in their bids for seats in the House of Representatives.
Donald Trump won Michigan in 2016 and 2024, though Joe Biden won it in 2020. Both the state’s current senators are Democrats and retaining the seat remains critical to Democrats’ hopes of winning back the US Senate this year, and a crucial part of the map for the 2028 presidential election.
El-Sayed, 41, is a former public health official who centered his run on the Medicare for All model of universal healthcare, while confronting heavy outside spending against him, which became another theme of the race. Stevens, meanwhile, touted her work on the US auto rescue taskforce, where she served as chief of staff.
Rogers, a former congressman from the state, was also the Republican nominee for US Senate in 2024, when he lost to the senator Elissa Slotkin.
Should he win in November, and beat Rogers in the general election in Michigan, El-Sayed could become the first Muslim US senator. While he is not a democratic socialist, his primary win came amid a wave of wins by democratic socialist candidates elsewhere in the country. He has said he is a “capitalist who understands how capitalism works”, and who wants to regulate monopolies.
“They spent an unprecedented amount of money to beat us,” El-Sayed said at a press conference on Wednesday, referring to the tens of millions of dollars in spending against him. “But it turns out the commercials are the part of the television show most people don’t want to watch.
“We took on a machine. You’re not supposed to be able to beat $70m of outside spending, a record amount of money spent in a campaign against a Democrat in a primary, in any campaign. You’re not supposed to be able to beat that. And what we showed is that the power of our many is greater than the power of their money.”
Stevens saw the backing of establishment Democrats, including Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, while El-Sayed received endorsements from prominent progressives such as Sanders.
In a statement on Wednesday, Stevens said: “I love Michigan and am so proud to have put up my hand to serve. I spoke with Abdul a few moments ago to offer him my full support as we work to defeat Mike Rogers this November.”
Until earlier this summer, the race was a three-way race with Mallory McMorrow, a state senator who eventually dropped out. Early Wednesday, McMorrow threw her support behind El-Sayed. “I’m proud to give Abdul my full endorsement and support as we head to November together as a unified party,” she said in a statement.
The role of Black voters in the Democratic primary came into focus in the final weeks of campaigning, with both candidates seeking to turn out the vote in Black communities, which make up about one-fifth of the Democratic primary electorate, via events at churches and festivals.
More than $40m poured into the race from outside groups supporting Stevens or attacking El-Sayed, including from groups associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), a pro-Israel lobby. Some ads elevated Stevens’s connection to Barack Obama on the auto rescue, which voters have seen as a quasi-endorsement, despite Obama not formally endorsing in the race.
Trump celebrated El-Sayed’s victory on Tuesday, claiming it was “great news” for Republicans in a post on his Truth Social platform. The president went on to call El-Sayed a “communist loser who hates Jews and Israel”, despite the Democratic nominee’s frequent denunciations of antisemitism.
“Now, the Dumocrats crazy policies will only get worse!” Trump wrote.
Shortly after 1am, when the race remained too close to call, El-Sayed took the stage at Detroit’s Majestic Theater to Tupac Shakur’s Changes, telling hundreds of supporters to stay patient as the votes were being counted.
Instead, he cast his contest with Stevens as proof that a grassroots campaign could compete against unprecedented outside spending.
“We’re still standing,” he told the raucous crowd, arguing Michigan voters were motivated less by ideological divides than by the rising cost of rent, groceries and healthcare.
The political streamer Hasan Piker, the democratic nominee for Philadelphia’s third district, Chris Rabb, and Colorado Democratic nominee, Melat Kiros, were in the room.
Rabb said he believed El-Sayed’s campaign reflected a broader shift inside the Democratic party, pointing to recent victories by progressive candidates including Zohran Mamdani in New York and Adam Hamawy in New Jersey. “This is not just among coastal elites,” Rabb said. “That’s something that could benefit Democrats if they have the collective wisdom to move us forward, not left or right. Because if they don’t learn this lesson, it’ll be through all of our defeats.”
More than 1.2 million Michiganders cast ballots before election day, including nearly 139,000 who voted during the state’s nine-day early in-person voting period, a number that doubles 2024’s primary, according to the Michigan department of state.
Rabb argued that unusually strong early turnout suggested the campaign was expanding the Democratic coalition rather than simply energizing existing voters. He said voters were turning out “because they believe in this brother”, adding that Democrats should see the result as evidence that “our base is radically expanding to folks who have not been seen, heard, or respected”.
During his speech in the early hours of Wednesday, El-Sayed sought to lower the temperature of the bitter primary, calling on his supporters to unite behind the eventual Democratic nominee against Rogers.
“Tomorrow we begin to mend fences,” he said. “There is so much more that unites us than divides us.”
