Abdul El-Sayed has won Michigan’s race for the U.S. Senate, holding a seat Democrats needed in their bid to retake the majority. Several news outlets called the race just after 2 a.m. EST, after Democrats won both the House and Senate.
But El-Sayed's victory over Republican opponent Mike Rogers means more than that. It expands the power of the party's progressive wing and emboldens its takeover of the Democratic Party.
El-Sayed and the party's progressive wing want to remake the Democratic Party in their own image. Their views are radical, they disregard norms and they have no interest in extending an olive branch to moderates. El-Sayed's Senate win lets them tighten their grip on the party.
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Abdul El-Sayed's hostile takeover worked
El-Sayed will take his seat in January as one of the most progressive members of the Senate. His platform centers on familiar progressive staples: Medicare for All, a tax on billionaires' wealth and getting "money out of politics." Look past those, though, and his agenda is unapologetically radical. He wants to scrap the Senate filibuster, end life tenure for Supreme Court justices and abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Beyond his policies, El-Sayed showed no qualms about alienating moderate Democrats uneasy with his campaign. U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, his opponent in a bitter Democratic Senate primary, swallowed her pride and endorsed him after she lost. Late in the race, the two clashed when Stevens demanded that El-Sayed condemn an outside group's ad that she called antisemitic. El-Sayed said he disagreed with the ad, but Stevens said he made clear she was no longer welcome in his campaign.
Two days before Nov. 3, she endorsed Rogers.
Stevens lost the August primary by under 15,000 votes, and she carried Wayne and Oakland counties with help from Black and Jewish voters.
Yet El-Sayed decided his campaign was better off without her. Stevens worked to unite Democrats after the primary and got nothing of the sort in return. She did turn her back on her party by endorsing Rogers, but only after El-Sayed made clear there was no place for her in his movement.
El-Sayed isn't afraid of a big tent. His version just trades moderates for the fringe. He rallied on two college campuses with Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who once said "America deserved 9/11."
Republicans, Rogers among them, hammered El-Sayed over the association.
Democrats didn't keep quiet either: Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Michigan, and Stevens publicly criticized his decision to campaign with Piker.
Democrats are making the GOP's mistake
Democrats will regret stretching their tent far enough to include El-Sayed. By lifting him and his allies into power, the party is widening its Overton window to admit fringe figures like Piker while narrowing it to shut out the establishment Democrats many voters still support.
Rather than court the voters in the center and on the right who have soured on today’s Trumped-up Republican Party, Democrats are charging left to try to appeal to an ever-narrower slice of the electorate. Much of the Democratic Party will follow, but some will be put off by how far their party is willing to go in the name of beating Republicans.
Democrats need only look at what happened to Republicans over the past decade. Fed up with their establishment, Republican voters turned to outsiders who promised to fight back. That impulse gave us President Donald Trump and left many conservatives politically homeless. Liberal Democrats will end up in the same place if their party keeps heading down this road.
El-Sayed set out to stage a progressive takeover in Michigan, and it worked. His win is one more sign that Democrats would rather lurch left than build broad appeal.
Dace Potas, a law student, is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY. Follow him on X: @DacePotas
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Abdul El-Sayed's win in Michigan is a gift to Republicans | Opinion
