El-Sayed, the DSA, and the Battle for Michigan

The Long View runs every Sunday behind the premium wall. Today it runs twice, and this half runs free, for every reader, one time only. Not because Michigan moved into the Middle East, but because on Tuesday a piece of the Middle East file moved into an American Senate race, and I want every reader to see the record in one place. The week’s premium essay, on the purge at the Mossad and Israel’s real role in toppling Tehran, is described at the end.

The Operating System

Michigan just nominated a Senate candidate who says he is not DSA. The platform behind him does not care.

On Tuesday, Michigan Democrats chose a nominee for the United States Senate. The Associated Press called it Wednesday morning: Abdul El-Sayed, a 41-year-old physician and former county health official, defeated Representative Haley Stevens by roughly one point, fewer than fifteen thousand votes out of more than a million and a half cast. He did it against a 65 million dollar wave of outside spending for his opponent, against the governor’s late endorsement, against the retiring incumbent’s blessing. “We took on a machine,” he told supporters. On that, no argument. He will face Republican Mike Rogers in November, in a seat that may decide control of the Senate.

This newsletter does not cover American primaries, and it is not starting today. It covers the Middle East, the people who make policy toward it, and the movements that shape those people. Tuesday qualified on all three grounds. Stay with me.

Start where fairness requires: with his own words. “I’m not technically or practically DSA,” El-Sayed told the Wall Street Journal last month. “I am not somebody who is a socialist,” he told CNN. “I believe in capitalism, I just believe that capitalism has to be regulated.” Pressed again days before the primary, he said he was “simply not a socialist.” Take him at his word. He carries no card.

Now the file, all of it documented. Between 2017 and 2020 he spoke at six events held by the Democratic Socialists of America, headlining a 2019 Detroit fundraiser whose organizers called him “a longtime friend of Detroit DSA.” Bernie Sanders endorsed him the day he launched. By the final weekend, every member of the Squad had lined up behind him. And the movement, which held its national convention as Michigan voted, treats his rise as its own: CNN’s convention dispatch called this the democratic socialists’ biggest moment yet.

The membership question matters to him, and honesty requires printing his denial every time the connection is drawn. But here is the analytical point, and it is the whole essay: the movement does not need his card. It is not built that way.

“Candidates are the apps. The operating system decides what runs.”

The Democratic Socialists of America crossed 120,000 members on the Fourth of July, by its own announcement the largest socialist organization in American history, past a record that had stood since 1912. It is not a third party and does not want to be one. It is, in Newsweek’s phrase, a disciplined faction inside the Democratic Party: it contests primaries, endorses candidates who run on the Democratic line, and supplies the organizers, volunteers, and door-knockers who decide low-turnout races.

Think of it as an operating system. Candidates are the apps. The OS decides what runs.

And the OS publishes its source code. Two weeks before the primary, DSA national co-chair Megan Romer sat for a true-or-false round on Fox News Sunday about the organization’s 2026 platform. Abolish the Senate: “True.” Replace the presidency and the Supreme Court as we know them: yes. Abolish ICE: “Absolutely.” Abolish borders, with amnesty, as a long-term plan: yes. Defund the Pentagon: “Absolutely.” Phase out prisons: long-term, yes. Public ownership of most large corporations: “Yeah, absolutely.” The platform text itself, as USA Today and Newsweek’s full-platform review lay out, calls for an executive and judiciary “chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” No opponent wrote those words. The organization did, and its co-chair confirmed them on national television without blinking.

Understand what that document is. It is not a reform agenda; reform keeps the machine and changes the settings. This is a replacement agenda for the machine itself: the Senate gone, the independent courts subordinated, the executive answering to a single chamber, the largest private enterprises moved to state ownership. You do not have to call it any particular name. You have to read it.

El-Sayed did not write that document, and his campaign platform is his own; Medicare for All sits at its center, a case he has argued for years. But when a movement with that source code supplies a campaign’s energy, its marquee endorsers, and its ground game, and then claims the victory at its convention, the question for Michigan is not what the candidate calls himself. It is where the app ends and the operating system begins. New York is already running the install in the bluest city in America. Michigan, a state Donald Trump carried twice, is the first purple-state test. That is not my framing; it is the movement’s own.

Here is why this belongs in a Middle East newsletter.

On March 12, a man rammed a pickup truck loaded with fireworks into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, one of the largest Reform congregations in America, during preschool hours, with 140 children inside, and opened fire before dying. The FBI concluded the attack was “Hezbollah-inspired.” A rabbi there later told NPR that people do not understand how close it came to a massacre.

El-Sayed grew up fifteen minutes away. His first response was everything it should have been: he condemned the attack without qualification and told Michigan’s Jews, “Antisemitism has no place in our communities. Ever. Full stop.” Print that first, every time. Then came the second statement, in the same reflection: “hurt people hurt people,” an invitation to understand a terror attack on a synagogue preschool through the lens of a war six thousand miles away. Temple Israel’s Rabbi Jen Lader called that “offensive” in an essay titled The Two Faces of Abdul El-Sayed: “Michigan’s Jews are not abstractions or stand-ins for a foreign government.”

And Temple Israel was not the beginning of the record. It runs in dated entries, so read it that way. On the second anniversary of October 7, his campaign sent a fundraising email that opened, “Two years ago this month, Netanyahu’s military launched a ground invasion of Gaza,” and never mentioned Hamas, the massacre, or the hostages. The campaign said it “mistakenly went out.” His own statement that same day condemned Hamas plainly, “I condemned it then, and I condemn it now,” and in the next breath accused Israel of “genocide on Gaza with our tax dollars.” Noah Arbit, a Jewish Democratic state representative whose own congregation is Temple Israel, said the episode “completely disqualified” him from the Senate and demanded an apology to Michigan’s Jewish community. Both halves of that exchange are the record; carry both.

In April, CNN’s Manu Raju asked him directly whether Israel’s government is as evil as Hamas. His answer, on camera: “Yes, killing tens of thousands of people makes you pretty damn evil. Hamas: Evil. Israeli government: Evil. We can say both.” Is Netanyahu a war criminal? “Absolutely.” That same month he was campaigning beside Hasan Piker, the streamer who has said Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel, and whose fuller file, as Congressman Josh Gottheimer summarizes it, includes praise for Hamas, Orthodox Jews called “inbred,” and America blamed for September 11. El-Sayed’s defense was that America is “a place where we have freedom of speech.” The partnership was no stumble: Piker was still on the trail beside him the day before the primary.

By July the vocabulary had hardened into doctrine. Asked on CNN whether Washington should designate Israel’s government a terrorist organization, he answered: “It’s certainly a rogue state... I mean, they did a genocide... At baseline they do apartheid.” At the debates he cited “the impact of AIPAC in our politics” as the reason for the joint American-Israeli war on Iran, called a 3.3 billion dollar aid vote “the pro quo that comes with the quid,” and told CNN that “every definition of a Jewish state ends up in some articulation of illiberal values, every single one.” Could a Democrat’s support for Israel ever be about more than money? “Not if you’re a Democrat and you believe in human rights.” The pro-Israel spending against him he called “legalized bribery at its worst,” from a rival “more committed to the future of a foreign country than keeping your tax dollars here.”

The nomination softened nothing. The morning the race was called, he told MS NOW that Israel has grown “so aggressive and frankly so bloodthirsty” and that the problem “supersedes Netanyahu himself”: “we’ve been talking about an illegal apartheid regime for a very, very long time.” Pressed the next day by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, he explained that he opposes American funding for Israel’s weapons, offensive and defensive alike, Iron Dome included. Sit with that one. In the sixth month of a war in which interceptors are the scarcest commodity the alliance owns, the nominee’s stated position is that the shield over Israeli civilians should not cost American dollars, and neither should anything else.

Do not take this newsletter’s word for what the file adds up to. Take a Democrat’s. Three days after the primary, Congressman Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey wrote in The Free Press that El-Sayed won “by making the U.S.-Israel relationship the villain of his campaign, repeatedly questioning Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state,” and that the victory “is only the latest evidence that my party is being overrun by antisemitism. We know where this leads.” Gottheimer did not stop at the community’s gates: “This shouldn’t scare only the Jews. These sentiments are anti-American.” A sitting congressman of the nominee’s own party chose those words about his party’s own nominee. El-Sayed’s answer stands on the record too: he says he stands against antisemitism, ever, full stop. The file above is how the two claims read side by side.

And the platform of the movement that claims his victory goes further than he does: DSA’s 2026 program calls for ending all military and economic aid to Israel and prosecuting American and Israeli leaders. He has not adopted those planks. The question a Michigan voter is entitled to ask, with the record open, is the operating-system question again: when the app and the OS conflict, which one ships?

Now weigh what a Senate seat does with all of this, because a senator is not a pundit. The next Senate will vote on replenishing the interceptor lines this war has drained, and he opposes funding the shield at all. It will vote on aid packages he has already priced as bribery. It will vote on Iran policy he traces to a lobby’s influence rather than to a regime that has chanted death to America for forty-seven years. It will confirm every official who runs Middle East policy into the 2030s, and Michigan may decide which party holds the gavel for all of it. That is the danger, stated coldly: not that Michigan nominated a critic of one Israeli government, but that one of one hundred votes over the American arsenal, the American alliance, and the American war may belong to a man who calls the ally a rogue state and the alliance a purchase. Michigan’s voters may weigh all of that exactly as they see fit. The job of this essay was to put the record in one place, every link live. Done.

Now the part this newsletter owes you in writing. Middle East Insider does not endorse candidates. Not El-Sayed, not Rogers, not anyone, not today and not in November. The Forum’s work is nonpartisan; the record above is sourced to the candidate’s own words and the movement’s own documents, with his denials carried in full. We publish files. Michiganders vote.

And one thing this newsletter will not become is a campaign tracker. The beat here is the Middle East, and tomorrow morning the daily brief goes back to it: the war, the deal on the table, the purge at the Mossad. Michigan will re-enter the file the way everything enters it, on the merits, when the record moves: a Senate vote that touches the arsenal or the alliance, a platform demand accepted or refused, an Israel question answered on the record. When that happens, you will read it here, held to the same standard as today: his words, their documents, every link live.

That standard is why this essay went out free. The other half of today’s double edition, on the two Mossad division chiefs reassigned last week over the failed plan to topple Tehran, and on what Israel’s role in the fall of the Islamic Republic actually is, runs where the Long View always runs: behind the wall. One Sunday, two essays, one standard.

Today’s companion essay, The Spark and the Scalpel, on the Mossad purge and Israel’s real role in toppling Tehran, is live now for Insider Premium members: $12 a month or $100 a year. Every MEF donor reads free, with the Forum’s thanks; if your invitation has not arrived, write [email protected].

Dues-paying members the Democratic Socialists of America announced on July 4, by their own description the largest socialist organization in American history. The record they broke had stood since 1912.

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