Bernie-backed El-Sayed runs for Senate in Michigan

El-Sayed’s last campaign grabbed national attention for his youth, faith, and plan to bring single-payer health care to Michigan. (It helped that an early Guardian profile compared his charisma to Barack Obama’s.)

After losing to Whitmer, he wrote a memoir, co-wrote a guide to Medicare for All, and led Wayne County’s health department; he had re-established Detroit’s health department before the 2018 run.

As he prepares for a Senate run, he’s candid about the intra-party criticism, centrist backlash, and big party money that rolled back the 2018 wave he’d hoped to ride — especially in Michigan, where pro-Israel groups beat liberal Rep. Andy Levin in a 2022 primary. El-Sayed hadn’t kept track of that “Abolish ICE” T-shirt, but the second Trump administration, he said, had highlighted the danger of the migrant control apparatus.

“If you look at how ICE has been weaponized, they’ve been used, in effect, as brownshirts for this administration,” said the candidate, a Rhodes Scholar who got one of his medical degrees at Columbia University.

“They’re literally disappearing people off the street for the awful crime of signing their name to an op-ed in a school newspaper. That is un-American. It’s unconstitutional,” he added. “And I think all of us ought to be condemning that action.”

McMorrow has also criticized the Trump administration’s deportation regime, calling for the return of deportee Kilmar Abrego Garcia in a video this week. But unlike the suburban state senator, El-Sayed has described Israel’s war in Gaza as genocide.

And last year, he joined the movement to vote “uncommitted” in the state’s presidential primary, instead of supporting Joe Biden, to send a message about the war “before it’s too late” to stop Trump. He endorsed Kamala Harris as soon as Biden quit the race.

“When you eliminate a group of people from a particular place for political reasons, that has a definition,” he said of the war in Gaza. “I worry that our taxpayer dollars, and our government, have been on the wrong side of this issue.”

Michigan’s set for the first real ideological Democratic primary contest of 2026, with Sanders on one side and others in the party still figuring out who to support.

El-Sayed and McMorrow are likely to be joined by Rep. Haley Stevens and Joe Tate, who until January was the first Black speaker of the state House. None have taken El-Sayed’s (or Sanders’) positions on health care or Israel; Stevens’ victory over Levin three years ago has fueled speculation that AIPAC, Democratic Majority for Israel, or other groups might spend for her again, especially if another candidate vows to join the small Sanders bloc in the Senate and vote to cut off weapons sales to the country.

If you weren’t closely following the 2018 primaries, you might not appreciate how important El-Sayed’s campaign was. It was staffed by Sanders campaign veterans who built a sizable grassroots operation that found 342,179 primary votes, which would have been enough to win in other, lower-turnout cycles. It went after Whitmer as a pawn of the insurance industry and churned out progressive white papers that were partly designed to inspire other candidates.

His campaign got far more attention after Ocasio-Cortez won her race, when it looked like the party “establishment” had a glass jaw. But a mythos was already starting to form.

A documentary crew followed El-Sayed and his campaign that year, capturing moments like an ambush by anti-Islamic pundit Laura Loomer (“You guys gotta jump on that way faster”), an ad taping where the candidate kept Islamic books out of view (“Trying to keep the shot secular”), and a challenge that failed to remove Thanedar from the ballot.

The resulting film, “How to Fix a Primary,” portrayed an inspirational campaign that was undone by Democratic corruption and big money. El-Sayed told me that he had “no role in designing or telling that story” and was focused on 2026. But this is a candidate who progressives invested great hope in; who they believe was unfairly undermined in 2018; and who they think can prove that progressive, redistributionist, anti-war politics can win in a swing state.

Republicans are gleeful about the prospect of a contested Democratic primary in the state.

“Michigan Democrats are going to spend the next year fighting amongst themselves about who in their primary will fight harder to let males play in girls’ sports or against the deportation of criminal illegal aliens,” said National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesman Nick Puglia.

“Meanwhile Republicans are united behind Mike Rogers and ready to fight for Michiganders by restoring American manufacturing and unleashing American energy.”