Democrat Abdul El-Sayed is projected to defeat Republican Mike Rogers for Michigan‘s open U.S. Senate seat, a closely watched race that capped off a massive night for progressives.
The Associated Press called the race shortly after 2 a.m. Wednesday morning with El-Sayed leading by about seven points.
The candidates were competing to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, whose departure created one of the most consequential open-seat contests of the midterm elections. El-Sayed, a former Detroit health director, campaigned on expanding access to health care and lowering costs, while Rogers, a former congressman and House Intelligence Committee chairman, emphasized manufacturing jobs, tax cuts and his alignment with President Donald Trump.
The race took an unexpected turn just two days before Election Day when Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens, who narrowly lost the party’s August primary to El-Sayed, endorsed Rogers during an appearance at a Detroit church.
The endorsement stunned Michigan Democrats, prompting condemnation from party leaders and resignations among Stevens’ staff. Stevens cited disagreements with El-Sayed over Israel and his campaign’s direction, while Democrats accused her of undermining their nominee in a critical Senate contest.
El-Sayed sought to move past the controversy, urging supporters to focus on voting. His campaign reported raising $2.4 million on Sunday, while Michigan Democratic officials said the endorsement had prompted an increase in volunteers. Rogers, meanwhile, highlighted Stevens’ support in the campaign’s final days.
More than 2.3 million Michigan voters had already cast ballots by Monday, according to The Associated Press, raising questions about how much the late-breaking controversy could influence the outcome.
Across the country, voters are making their way to the polls in the climax of a vitriolic midterm election cycle set against the backdrop of an electorate souring on Donald Trump and Republicans. Inflation is up, consumer confidence is down, gas and diesel prices are through the roof, largely due to the president’s war of choice in Iran. The cruelty of his MAGA agenda has roiled the country and left a bad taste even in the mouths of some of his erstwhile supporters.
Each election is billed as being consequential; this one lives up to the hype. As we await the results, it’s worth taking note of several questions:
How big will the blue wave be?
A tsunami, a trickle — or something in the middle? All are possible, but signs are pointing to significant Democratic gains, likely up to 25 seats in the House, as well as a Senate majority. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed looks increasingly likely to win in Michigan, and James Talarico has Democratic hopes up in Texas. Senate races in Maine, Kansas, Iowa and Alaska are in play, and it’s worth keeping an eye on South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana as well.
One sign will come at 6 p.m. when polls close in Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District, where Democrat Zach Dembo is facing off against Republican Ralph Alvarado. Once a Democratic stronghold, the seat went Republican in 2012 and, despite a close call in 2018, has remained in GOP hands since. Although the district has been gerrymandered to favor Republicans, the energy on the ground is with Dembo. If he posts and maintains a healthy lead, look for significant Democratic gains to unfold throughout the night.
What effect did redistricting have on the GOP’s chances?
The midterms will be the first test of the GOP’s redistricting strategy, which saw the party redraw congressional districts in Florida, Texas and other states, partly in response to the gains Trump made with Black and Latino voters in 2024. But polls show those margins have been largely erased as the electorate has turned on the president after nearly two tumultuous years in office, while Democratic legislatures in California and Virginia have imposed their own gerrymanders. According to a Politico poll, the GOP increasingly sees the coalition that returned Trump to office as “crumbling,” and may have gained little or nothing from all this adventurous map-drawing.
Will progressives be bolstered or chastened?
Losses — or even narrow wins — by progressive candidates could be used as more evidence by the party’s establishment wing of the need to tack toward the middle ahead of the 2028 presidential election. Larger wins would provide rocket fuel to the movement.
The size of the blue wave could well come to be seen as a measure of progressives’ influence and power within the Democratic Party. Losses — or even narrow wins — by progressive candidates could be used as more evidence by the party’s establishment wing of the need to tack toward the middle ahead of the 2028 presidential election. Larger wins — and victories in unexpected places, such as Michigan’s 7th Congressional District where William Lawrence, co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, stands a real chance of unseating incumbent Republican Tom Barrett — would provide rocket fuel to the movement.
Progressive groups are already on the offensive, getting a head start on spinning tonight’s election results, particularly in anticipation of a narrow El-Sayed win in Michigan. “Expect to hear narrow victories cited as evidence of weak electability,” a Progressive Change Campaign Committee memo obtained by Politico reads. “But a candidate’s first winning margin is not their electoral ceiling.”
Will the Haley Stevens drama matter in Michigan?
Haley Stevens, the Democratic congresswoman who narrowly lost to El-Sayed in Michigan’s Senate primary, has brought the drama in the race’s closing days. As late as Saturday night, she pledged to colleagues and friends that she was backing El-Sayed, only to turn up hours later at a church service with his Republican opponent Mike Rogers, and endorse the former congressman in a video. The cold-dish move has virtually drowned out El-Sayed’s closing message, with Stevens being formally kicked out of the Michigan Democratic Party.
The question now is if any of it will matter, especially in light of a New York Times/Siena poll taken before Stevens’ move that showed El-Sayed leading Rogers by 11 points. Michigan Republicans seem to think it won’t, telling Politico they wish the congresswoman had crossed the aisle earlier. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report agrees, moving the race in their ratings to “Leans Democratic,” a shift that was already in the works before Stevens detonated her bomb.
Still, the results in the state’s Democratic primary were far narrower than the polls showed, with El-Sayed besting Stevens by only 1%, or 14,893 votes.
Will Elon Musk get his money’s worth?
The New York Times reported yesterday that the world’s first trillionaire has dropped a staggering $474 million this election cycle, an historic first. The amount has been spread out across a variety of groups, PACs and funds, but it doesn’t include the “dark-money donations” the Times reports he has also made. Most of the $168 million he contributed to the Senate Leadership Fund has served to shore up Ken Paxton, the GOP nominee for Senate in Texas, who is locked in a tight race with Talarico.
Musk has a lot riding on Tuesday’s results. Beyond the simple math of whether he got enough bang for his buck, there is also the issue of what will surely face him in the event of a Democratic congressional majority: investigations.
Musk has a lot riding on Tuesday’s results. Beyond the simple math of whether he got enough bang for his buck, there is also the issue of what will surely face him in the event of a Democratic congressional majority: investigations. If the blue wave materializes, Musk can expect congressional inquiries of his activities, including his reported interventions in Russia’s war against Ukraine and his leadership of DOGE during the early months of Trump’s second administration.
Where will the surprises be?
Each election brings surprises. Think not one but both of Georgia’s Senate seats going to Democrats in 2020, or Republicans making big gains in New York two years later.
This is the year we could hear the echo of Georgia’s 2020 election results in another Southern state. Despite boasting large Black populations, Senate seats in South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana have long been out of reach for Democrats. But there is now a path to victory for the party’s candidates in each of those states.
In South Carolina, the GOP incumbent Darline Graham, who was appointed to the seat at Donald Trump’s command following the death of her brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham, has proven to be a lackluster candidate, alarming even some Republicans with her performance in debates and on the stump. Democrat Annie Andrews has run a more nimble campaign, and between Graham’s performance and the national state of affairs, she appears to have narrowed the gap.
Mississippi’s incumbent GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith has also run a lazy campaign, expecting to coast to victory. But the national political environment under Trump, coupled with campaign gaffes, large Black turnout in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act and clever campaigning by Scott Colom, her Democratic opponent, have helped to put the race in play.
Louisiana is also a wild card. The state, which is one-third African American, has also seen a surge in early voting among Black residents, and according to a recent poll, the race between Republican Julia Letlow and Democrat Jamie Davis, who is Black, is tied.
Polls are not predictive. The political history of these states continues to favor Republicans, but any of them could deliver one of 2026’s electoral surprises. If that happens, it will signal that the blue wave has become a blue tsunami.
Stevens appeared alongside Rogers at Detroit’s Perfecting Church after plans for her to campaign with Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., fell apart amid renewed tensions over Israel.
The congresswoman, who narrowly lost Michigan’s August Democratic primary to El-Sayed, praised Rogers’ support for investment in Black-owned businesses. In a video announcing her decision, Stevens said El-Sayed had made clear she was no longer welcome in his campaign.
I am endorsing Mike Rogers for the United States Senate today. https://t.co/pQgfSBuhOJ
The endorsement followed days of public disagreements between the former primary rivals. Stevens criticized an advertisement from Rebellion PAC, an independent group supporting El-Sayed, that linked American aid to Israel with rising grocery prices.
El-Sayed said his campaign had no involvement with the advertisement and explicitly rejected its contents Saturday. Stevens initially welcomed his response, but their planned joint appearance had already unraveled.
Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., who helped arrange the church visit, told The Associated Press she asked Stevens not to attend because the dispute had become a distraction.
“I’m the one who pulled it because it had become way too distracting,” Dingell said.
The rift intensified Wednesday when Stevens’ fiancé, Jason Turkish, announced he would vote for Rogers, citing concerns about El-Sayed’s positions on Israel. Stevens initially maintained that she would support the Democratic nominee.
The public split comes as Democrats seek to retain the Senate seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Gary Peters. Michigan is among the states central to the party’s effort to regain control of the chamber.
Stevens, who is not on Tuesday’s ballot, said she remains a proud Democrat despite endorsing her party’s Republican opponent.
With less than a week to go before the midterms, the Republicans’ desperation is becoming obvious. Donald Trump is stumping in Mississippi, where Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is locked in a tight race, and half the Cabinet is running around giving speeches to people who don’t know who they are. But the biggest sign of the GOP’s anxiety is the resurrection of a tried-and-true tactic: racism.
Only months ago, the party went all-in on red-baiting, accusing mainstream Democrats of being communist sympathizers, a reaction to the 2025 victory of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the primary wins of a few democratic socialist candidates. This came alongside the now perennial attacks on transgender Americans, led by the president who continues to insist that elementary schools are performing gender-affirming surgeries in the nurse’s office without parental consent.
We knew they would rely on xenophobia, which has been the central organizing principle of Trump’s decade of political dominance. He may not have kept most of his promises, such as “no new wars” and “bringing prices down on day one,” but he has delivered magnificently on his pledge to incarcerate and deport as many immigrants, undocumented and otherwise, as humanly possible. In fact, he’s even exceeded expectations.
Since they make up the largest share of immigrants, Latinos have been hit the hardest by this cruel policy, and Trump has long asserted that they are all violent criminals. But as we were warned in the 2024 presidential campaign, Haitians have also been among the top immigrant groups targeted by MAGA leaders, with Vice President JD Vance homing in on the racist right-wing id by declaring that these Black immigrants were eating the household pets of their Real American white neighbors.
For a moment, there seemed to be a new target when a social media post by Bo French, the GOP’s nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, went viral, exposing a growing conservative antipathy to Indian Americans. This was somewhat surprising since Vance, one of the party’s leading race-baiters, is married to the daughter of Indian immigrants, and Vivek Ramaswamy, another child of Indian immigrants, is Ohio’s Republican nominee for governor.
But none of these attacks and lies has gotten the traction they were hoping for, so the party has gone back to the deep well to draw up a big bucket of Islamophobia.
In the wake of 9/11, some in the GOP became infected by a strain of anti-Arab bigotry that, to his credit, George W. Bush attempted to fight. It waxed and waned as the attacks grew more distant. Then came Trump, whose demonization of Muslims goes back to the 2016 campaign. At that time, the U.S. was in the midst of an outbreak of “lone-wolf” terrorist attacks, and his violent rhetoric really got the crowds going.
Trump famously said he wanted to take up waterboarding “and worse,” and told lurid stories about dipping bullets in pigs blood to scare terrorists. Declaring that he would ban all Muslims from coming to America “until we can figure out what the hell is going on,” he executed his infamous “Muslim ban” days after taking office in 2017, an order that became the focus of legal challenges and, after some re-tooling by the administration, was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court in 2018.
Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., has long been a particular focus of Trump’s ire. As a progressive, she has been a fierce critic of the administration, but no more than most other Democrats. But she’s a Black woman, an immigrant and a Muslim who wears a hijab. Omar, who fled Somalia with her family at eight and lived for years in a Kenyan refugee camp, represents Minnesota, which became one of Trump’s bete noirs after Kamala Harris chose the state’s governor, Tim Walz, as her running mate. Trump began attacking Minnesota’s community of Somali Americans with some of the most bigoted comments in American history, and that’s saying something.
Somalia, he said, is “garbage, a “sh*thouse country” that “stinks.” He has even claimed that 98% of Somali immigrants don’t work and that they are all criminals driving around in Mercedes-Benz and BMWs. Reprising his role as inciter-in-chief, the president called for (white) Minnesotans to “fight back” against the state’s Somali population, writing that they “view you as weak and stupid people.”
Another target of MAGA’s anti-Muslim bigotry is Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan-born Democratic nominee for the Senate. Earlier this week, Vance referred to him as “very, very evil,” a “psychopath” who pushes “anti-white racial hatred.” This charge of reverse racism is one of the favorite tropes of the modern right, guaranteed to draw cheers at a MAGA rally. Trump called El-Sayed a violent jihadist, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. expanded the attacks, saying that the one billion Muslims worldwide contribute nothing to society, having never won the Nobel Prize or any other prestigious awards, an easily disprovable lie.
The blatant bigotry of these latest attacks is enough to take your breath away, not because they are unprecedented; this is America, after all, and racism is one of our “exceptional” characteristics. But until the last decade, Republicans had learned that it was far better for them to obscure their racism with dog whistles and code words so as not to scare the suburban white people.
The blatant bigotry of these latest attacks is enough to take your breath away, not because they are unprecedented; this is America, after all, and racism is one of our “exceptional” characteristics. But until the last decade, Republicans had learned that it was far better for them to obscure their racism with dog whistles and code words so as not to scare the suburban white people. The famous quote from the notorious GOP strategist Lee Atwater, who recommended referring to “welfare” and “busing” to stand in for overtly racist language, held true for years.
Republicans stuck with that tactic for decades, starting with Richard Nixon, who used the term Trump thinks he invented, “law and order,” as a code word for cracking down on Black protests in inner cities. Ronald Reagan famously talked about “welfare queens” during his 1976 primary bid for president, and four years later he opened his presidential campaign by declaring his belief in states’ rights — another dog whistle — in Mississippi, near the spot where white civil rights workers were killed. Three decades later, Trump turned even more creative with his “birther” campaign against President Barack Obama, combining the party’s burgeoning Islamophobia with classic All-American racism. To this day, Trump refers to Obama using his full name — Barack Hussein Obama — with a childish glee.
I don’t think claiming that a whole African country is a “sh*thouse” or saying that Black immigrants are barbecuing their neighbors’ cats for dinner is the kind of subtlety Atwater was talking about. In fact, I will not be surprised to see Trump, who has lost virtually all rhetorical restraint, drop the ugliest epithets of all someday soon. It’s just a matter of time. And if he does, I’m sure JD Vance and all the rest of MAGA’s staunchest loyalists will find a way to rationalize it as something the other side is responsible for.
President Donald Trump escalated his attacks on Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed on Sunday, accusing him without evidence of being a Muslim extremist, a day after former President Barack Obama defended El-Sayed against attacks on his religion and patriotism.
“Heading to Michigan to fight a Jihadist Member of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, referring to the physician and former public health official, who is running against Republican Mike Rogers.
Trump also claimed El-Sayed wanted to impose Sharia law in the United States, adding, “If it ever does, he should be the first that’s tried!” He offered no evidence for either accusation.
The remarks followed Obama’s Saturday campaign appearances in Ohio and Michigan, where the former president criticized Trump’s leadership, rallied Democratic voters and delivered a memorable assessment of the president’s gold-heavy White House renovations.
“He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” Obama joked during a Cleveland rally. “He should be on HGTV,” Obama added, questioning Trump’s priorities as Americans contend with rising costs.
Obama appeared alongside Ohio Senate candidate Sherrod Brown, who is challenging Republican incumbent Jon Husted, and gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, who faces Trump-backed Vivek Ramaswamy. He also criticized a Ramaswamy campaign advertisement featuring Acton’s estranged mother, arguing that political ambition did not justify such personal attacks.
In Detroit, Obama campaigned for El-Sayed and gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson, invoking the racist birther conspiracy theories Trump promoted against him while defending El-Sayed.
“We have seen this movie before. I starred in it,” Obama said. “I have a long form birth certificate to prove it.”
Trump, meanwhile, escalated his attacks on El-Sayed during a Sunday rally in Port Huron, Michigan, where he campaigned for Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers.
“I’m here to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator,” Trump told supporters, echoing his Truth Social post from earlier in the day. El-Sayed, a former public health official who would become the Senate’s first Muslim member if elected, has repeatedly denied any affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood and rejected attacks on his faith and patriotism.
Trump also invoked the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, comparing opposition to El-Sayed’s candidacy to the passengers who fought back against hijackers aboard United Flight 93. “Twenty-five years later, Michigan needs to stand up and fight, just like Todd did, to stop a jihadist from walking into the Capitol,” Trump said, referring to passenger Todd Beamer.
Todd Beamer’s father, David Beamer, also addressed the crowd, questioning El-Sayed’s claim to American identity and arguing that being born in the United States and having an American birth certificate does not, by itself, make someone a “real American.”
The president’s lengthy remarks ranged from familiar, unsubstantiated claims about fraud in the 2020 election to attacks on Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee. Rogers and Republican gubernatorial candidate John James also addressed the crowd, urging supporters to vote.
For all their political differences, Obama and Trump appeared to agree on one thing this weekend: Trump is on the ballot in November, even if his name isn’t.
“My name is Abdul; it means servant.” So begins the most compelling ad of this year’s election cycle. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed speaks, simply and directly, to the camera. Seated in a brown leather armchair while holding a coffee mug, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee lays claim to his Muslim faith in straightforward, affecting terms.
“I pray everyday,” he says. “I reflect on my role in this life, on this earth, how we leave it better than we found it, to serve God, to serve our neighbors.”
A cloud of suspicion, much of it tangled up in his ethnicity and religion, has hovered over El-Sayed’s candidacy. The othering has been both blatant and subtle. In August, I spoke with Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., as he made his way from the Capitol subway to his Senate office the day after El-Sayed’s primary win. Tuberville told me the Michigan Democrat was “a cheerleader for 9/11” and “basically” a terrorist. A pair of debates has seen El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, accusing him of being “bought” by and “pledg[ing] his support” to the Muslim Brotherhood, claims that are unfounded. Others, including wavering centrist Democrats such as party strategist James Carville, who recently gave El-Sayed a reluctant endorsement, have pointed to the nominee’s attacks on Israel over the Gaza war as evidence that he is hostile to Jews and Judaism. More broadly, anti-Muslim rhetoric and attacks are becoming a defining feature of the GOP.
El-Sayed’s ad, released last Sunday, is entitled “Prayer” and marks an obvious attempt to refute those accusations and change the conversation — to persuade hesitant voters in the final days of this tight race to pull the lever for him. As El-Sayed speaks, snapshots roll. He stands with a voter, who points across the river, a subtle message of an aspirational future. There is El-Sayed standing and holding hands in prayer with a group of Black churchgoers. A menorah and a humble church flash on the screen. And then there’s the candidate himself, standing alone in prayer, his head bowed.
El-Sayed connects his belief to a national crisis of faith embodied in Washington: “We don’t have faith in our future; we don’t have faith that we can actually fix things.” Then he returns to his own candidacy. “I’m Abdul El-Sayed,” he says at the end. “A man of faith — and that’s a good thing.”
The ad offers a reason for his candidacy and life of public service, and ends what has been a tumultuous campaign on a grace note — and with an implicit promise. Everyone is welcome in my coalition, El-Sayed is saying, I’ll protect you.
A good election spot offers an appeal to voters by telling a story, and “Prayer” certainly does that. But there are other ingredients that can boost a political ad to the realm of greatness. In a positive ad, voters are offered an intimate look into the candidate’s reason for running. “Prayer” also does that, and therein lies its true power. It shows a different side to El-Sayed, whose refusal to back down from a fight and ability to cut through the noise, as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte recently wrote, “terrifies MAGA.” The ad offers a reason for his candidacy and life of public service, and ends what has been a tumultuous campaign on a grace note — and with an implicit promise. Everyone is welcome in my coalition, El-Sayed is saying, I’ll protect you.
Even though “Prayer” is targeted to Michigan voters, it cannot be divorced from what’s happening nationally. It adds El-Sayed to an emerging list of Democrats who, as unabashed members of the religious left, are comfortable talking about their faith openly. Most, such as Texas U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico, Kansas U.S. Senate nominee Adam Hamilton, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, are Christian. Others, such as Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, are Jewish. By attaching his name to those ranks, El-Sayed is staking out important space for Muslims in public life.
But there’s more to it than just his religious and ethnic identity. The ad’s message serves as a proxy for the stark choice facing voters across the country, and just south of the Wolverine State’s border. In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor, funded and produced an ad attacking Dr. Amy Acton, his Democratic opponent, and featuring her own mother.
The spot, released only 24 hours after El-Sayed’s, carries a message that is the direct inverse of the Michigan candidate’s. Rooted in cruelty and scripted with a lashing of DARVO, a tactic easily recognizable to victims of abuse — Deny, Attack and Reverse Victim Offender order — the ad is uncomfortable to watch, and vile.
Viewers see an elderly woman looking into the camera and identifying herself as Donna Arthur. “It’s not easy for a mother to say this,” she says, “but Amy has a serious problem: she is a liar.” Arthur goes on to attack her daughter’s credibility, but without producing any evidence beyond her own testimony, which is severely imperiled by a documented history of her own actions.
Arthur has been estranged from her daughter since 1978, when the 12-year-old Acton accused her stepfather of raping her. According to court records, Cledith Arthur was arrested and charged with the crime, but fled the state before being tried. When his wife supported him, branding young Amy Acton a liar, both the girl and her younger brother were removed from Donna Arthur’s custody and raised by their biological father. In a statement released by her campaign, Acton’s brother stood by his sister’s account and branded Ramaswamy’s campaign “despicable” for turning the abuse Acton says she suffered “into a political talking point.”
In the ad, Arthur does not mince words. “My daughter needs help,” she says, “and she can’t help you if she can’t help herself . . . Don’t vote for people who lie; don’t let her become your governor.”
Setting aside Arthur’s agency and the willing role she played in the ad, Ramaswamy has chosen to retraumatize his opponent before the eyes of millions of voters. By platforming a woman who is, at the very least, an enabler and accomplice to the alleged sexual assault of a minor, if perhaps only in the aftermath, he is sending a chilling signal to victims of abuse in Ohio and throughout the U.S.: There are consequences to speaking up.
But if Ramaswamy’s behavior wasn’t bad enough, Donald Trump and JD Vance had to get in on the act. Vance, who as an Ohioan has particular skin in the game, positioned himself alongside Ramaswamy as a truth-teller, saying he “wasn’t even supposed to talk about” the ad but “couldn’t help himself.” The vice president went on to praise the candidate for having the “audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar.”
On Thursday, the president was even more crass, calling the ad an example of “hitting pay dirt.” Ramaswamy, he wrote on Truth Social, “should keep it up, and let everyone listen to the mother of a defective, dishonest, and incapable Candidate, explain how the daughter is a DISASTER who, uncontrollably, lies, cheats, and steals! I only wish the mothers of my opponents would be so brave.”
A handful of other Republicans, including outgoing Gov. Mike DeWine and former Ohio Rep. John Kasich, decried the commercial and said it should be taken down.
There is no other word for the behavior of Ramaswamy and MAGA leaders: It is personally and publicly cruel, and the message it sends acts as a reveals far too much about Republican policies and the political leaders who advance and implement them. In their world, victims are treated with disdain and abusers defended while the American people are subjected to severe economic and psychological mistreatment.
The cost-of-living crisis is ignored, all because a vainglorious president decides to wage an unnecessary war in Iran. The healthcare of millions is stripped away to line the pockets of the wealthiest. The rights of women, people of color, immigrants and LGBTQ+ Americans are under assault because of leaders and voters who want to hoard their privilege.
Against this backdrop, El-Sayed’s ad stands as a balm for voters who long not just for a fighter, as he has well demonstrated he is, but also for a leader who is unafraid to lead with compassion and humility. It’s too early to know if his appeal will result in success at the polls. But the ad, in contrast to Ramaswamy’s, nonetheless underscores what’s at stake in the midterms: a choice between faithful service and abject cruelty.
When I watched veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl report from the West Bank on a recent Sunday night, my first thought was to wonder how the segment had slipped past the watchful eyes of Bari Weiss. Stahl accompanied a group of Palestinians trying to reach their own land, only to be confronted by Israeli settlers clad in black. The Palestinians had approached the settlers with their hands behind their backs to make plain they posed no threat. One man was headbutted in the face and his nose fractured. An Israeli army captain finally defused the standoff, but the Palestinians never reached their property and the settlers appeared to suffer no consequences. It was a riveting piece of television, framed by the Oct. 27 Israeli elections.
The report did not slip past Weiss, of course. Within a day, Oliver Darcy of the Status newsletter reported that screenings of the segment had grown extraordinarily contentious, with the CBS News editor-in-chief taking a “very, very hands-on” role and Stahl, who has been at the broadcast since 1991, privately floating the idea of quitting. Darcy’s sources said Weiss’ objections were not confined to a single factual assertion but ranged far more broadly, and that some on the team were unsure the report would even air at all.
CBS News, for its part, called the Status account a “ludicrous, twisted narrative” and insisted the piece received far fewer edits than most. Perhaps so. But even the network’s version concedes the larger point: A correspondent of Stahl’s stature had to survive an internal fight over an eyewitness account of violence that she and her crew watched unfold.
The former Free Press editor arrived at the network promising to rescue mainstream news from ideological conformity. Yet her tenure has increasingly been defined by disputes over editorial interference, the departure of veteran journalists and a growing perception that certain political narratives receive more scrutiny than others.
That contradiction sits at the heart of the Bari Weiss experiment. The former Free Press editor arrived at the network promising to rescue mainstream news from ideological conformity. Yet her tenure has increasingly been defined by disputes over editorial interference, the departure of veteran journalists and a growing perception that certain political narratives receive more scrutiny than others. As I’ve previouslyargued, the crisis at CBS News is bigger than one controversial editor. It is about what happens when corporate power no longer values a news organization’s independence as a principle to be defended.
Under the watch of Skydance boss David Ellison and Weiss, whom he handpicked, CBS News’ rightward renovation is running into a problem. The internal revolt at the network has become a daily reality for rank-and-file employees who watched the forced departures of foundational figures like Scott Pelley, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. The journalists who remain have not all agreed to become instruments of Weiss’ apparent worldview; many are leaking their misgivings to media reporters. Nor do the audience numbers establish that replacing an investigative institution’s identity with a slickly packaged right-wing populist brand constitutes a successful business strategy. Now the network is caught struggling to hold on to the credibility it inherited while forging the political project its leadership appears determined to impose.
If you want to hear what passes for rigor in Weiss’ newsroom, the tape is available. After Weiss fired London bureau chief Claire Day in April — her offense was apparently coverage of Israel that displeased the new regime — she installed Shayndi Raice as foreign editor. Last week Raice summoned the foreign staff to a virtual meeting and delivered a 15-minute tirade that Status obtained on audio and later released in full. “This is not your publishing platform,” she told the assembled journalists. “This is a company that we all work for, and there’s a hierarchy in place.” Failure to follow that hierarchy, she explained, “is called insubordination, and it’s legal grounds for firing.”
When Holly Williams, the veteran correspondent whose report on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks had been edited to remove the Palestinian death toll, respectfully challenged her, Raice informed Williams that she had gotten her own story “wrong.” Williams, Raice said, does not know it as well as she does. As for the figure itself — more than 74,000 Palestinians killed in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza — Raice waved it off as a “magic number.” Including it in the report, she suggested, amounted to “posturing” rather than journalism.
The same partisan thumb has appeared on the scales in CBS’s domestic political coverage. Semafor’s Max Tani reported that Weiss has taken a personal interest in Michigan’s Senate race, and she has pushed CBS journalists to pursue story after story about Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and his supposed sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood, raising the subject on editorial calls and tasking the network’s investigative unit with combing his background for a link to the organization.
The raw material for this enterprise is a 2012 tweet by El-Sayed’s half-sister describing a conversation with their mother about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the early 1970s. El-Sayed has disavowed the group. He has explained that his parents divorced when he was young and that he was raised by his father and stepmother, and the leap from a mother’s politics in another country half a century ago to a candidate’s secret loyalties is the kind American journalism once required evidence to make.
To be fair, El-Sayed is a legitimate story. A Senate candidate’s family history is fair game, and there is nothing inherently scandalous in an editor telling reporters to look into it. The scandal, though, is in the selectivity. The same editor who dispatched investigators after a Democrat on the strength of his mother’s biography also tasked staff with pursuing the theory that James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, had secretly checked into a mental health facility during his nine-day absence from the campaign trail, a claim right-wing influencers manufactured out of a bad case of the flu — and one that collapsed on contact with a hospital’s denial and time-stamped security footage. One CBS staffer told Semafor that Weiss’ story ideas “routinely come from social media influencers or from opposition research that’s been placed in conservative outlets,” and that the resulting reports “usually leave out important context and facts.”
It is worth highlighting what unites the targets: El-Sayed and Talarico are both progressives who have criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank.
What Weiss is building with her other hand is a stage to platform MAGA. Her signature project is Things That Matter, a town-hall series she devised and launched by interviewing Erika Kirk, the widow of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, in a December broadcast that drew 1.87 million viewers, which was notably down 11% from what CBS ordinarily draws in that hour. Of the series’ single-guest town halls since, exactly one has featured a Democrat, Maryland Governor Wes Moore. The segment’s latest installment on Saturday handed a Michigan stage to Vice President JD Vance a little over two weeks out from the midterm elections, in a state where the administration needs every vote it can find.
Ironically, the format’s one unscripted moment came from the audience. Joey Amor, whose wife, Master Sgt. Nicole Amor ,was one of six American soldiers killed in an Iranian drone strike on an outpost in Kuwait in March, asked the vice president when this administration would hold its own officials accountable for the failures that left those troops exposed. Vance pleaded unfamiliarity, explaining that “sometimes information doesn’t filter up to me.”
The irony was abundant: A town hall designed as a coronation had accidentally produced a news story, and the news was that the vice president of the United States had nothing to say to a man widowed by President Donald Trump’s war of choice.
Now consider what the new CBS has gotten for all this friction. “60 Minutes” recently saw the smallest audience of the season and the smallest for a fourth episode in at least a quarter century. The season premiere in September managed 7.94 million, a 21% drop from 2025 and the weakest opening this century.
This is a broadcast that grew 9% last season. Nobody was asking Weiss to fix it.
Jesse Watters can’t seem to stop admiring Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. The Fox News host loves to talk about how Michigan’s Democratic nominee for the Senate is “in great shape” and how “Abdul . . . beat the machine” — meaning the party establishment’s candidate, Rep. Haley Stevens — in a hard-fought primary. During an interview in August, Watters clearly enjoyed El-Sayed’s jokes and blunt speech, which included calling his opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, a “beta,” and asking the host if he was circumcised when Watters tried to corner him on gender-affirming surgery for minors. The next day, Watters made no bones about El-Sayed’s appeal. “I like him,” he said. “I don’t want to like him. I like him for some stupid reason.”
But the reason was obvious. The doctor-turned-politician has an aggressive bro style that appeals to someone like Watters. Quick-witted with bulldog energy, El-Sayed never backs down from a fight. But despite Watters’ admiration, Fox News has become obsessed with taking El-Sayed down. It’s not because he’s Muslim, though Republicans are ratcheting up the racism in their efforts to derail his campaign. It’s because he is a model for how Democrats can escape their reputations for being weak and feckless.
El-Sayed has a lot going for him. He spent years running public health services in the Detroit area and speaks eloquently and with authority about people’s struggles to afford healthcare, even writing a book about Medicare for All. Most importantly, he’s an excellent communicator who can boil down complex policy ideas into easily digestible concepts without dumbing them down. A video of him explaining to Trump voters why universal healthcare is cheaper than the insurance system went viral for good reason. One can see that, for these voters, it’s likely the first time someone plainly explained how removing executive salaries and profit incentives from healthcare makes it cheaper.
Other politicians, like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., or Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., are good at explaining progressive policy. But what really seems to scare Republicans about El-Sayed is his political persona as a brawler — and for good reason. Vice President JD Vance learned this last week when he lobbed a strange insult at El-Sayed during a rally in Michigan for Rogers. The Democrat, Vance said, is “a little weasel who should shut his mouth and show a little gratitude.”
This is a common and deeply racist attack from Vance, who portrays non-white progressives as undeserving recipients of white people’s largesse — a caricature that has no relation to reality. El-Sayed left a position as an assistant professor at Columbia University to work in public health, where he won awards for his success in protecting children’s health from environmental pollution. During this same period, Vance worked as a venture capitalist who was close with tech billionaire Peter Thiel.
El-Sayed resisted the temptation to “well, actually” Vance, and instead hit back by calling the vice president and those around him “carnival barkers” who “are small and want to make us small like them.” His response was smooth. “JD Vance called me a little weasel today,” El-Sayed said. “I’m like, ‘No, no, no. What you’re talking about is a Wolverine,'” a reference to the mascot for the University of Michigan, where the Democrat got his undergraduate degree.
As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye recently wrote, El-Sayed has been courting Fox News viewers by appearing on the channel and running endless ads on it, all without softening his left-leaning message. He clearly hopes his bravado will woo some of the network’s audience, just as it won over Watters.
For his part, President Donald Trump is worried that El-Sayed is right. He’s been openly complaining at rallies and on Truth Social about how charming the candidate is in his Fox appearances. In early October, Axios reported that the White House contacted the network to complain about El-Sayed’s coverage. Trump was especially miffed at the Democrat’s interview with Martha McCallum, during which the host’s efforts to bait him into saying something that could be spun as “radical” failed. Instead, MacCallum embarrassed herself by defending billionaires hoarding wealth, to which El-Sayed said that he’d rather pay for schools than be so “focused on allowing a billionaire to make another billion.”
Since then, it seems that Fox producers got the White House’s message that they have to do something to dirty up El-Sayed. But they’ve learned the hard way that it won’t work to come at him directly, because he ends up dominating interviews and beguiling those who, like Watters, love his commanding and clever style. MacCallum later tried to redeem herself by interviewing progressive activist Corbin Trent and pretending he was a stand-in for El-Sayed.
At first glance, Trent performed as Fox producers no doubt hoped he might. He took MacCallum’s bait by defending the Muslim Brotherhood, something that the host could not get El-Sayed to do. The problem, though, is that Trent has no discernible relationship to the candidate. While he has worked for other progressives, including Sanders, I found no evidence that he has even met El-Sayed, much less is qualified to speak for him.
This attempt to hobble El-Sayed was revealing; it’s clearly all Fox News has. If the network tries to bring El-Sayed on again to ask him the same questions, they know from experience that he’ll probably just win over even more of their viewers. This isn’t idle speculation. MS NOW recently conducted a focus group with regretful Trump voters in Michigan and found that five out of the six are voting for El-Sayed. Republicans should be worried about the young male demographic in particular. Trump won male voters under 30 by a narrow margin in 2024, but they are jumping ship and now strongly favor Democrats.
El-Sayed is a compelling model for a new kind of Democrat. Polling by Strength In Numbers/Verasight shows that even Democratic voters take a negative view of the party, but not because they think their leaders are too progressive. “[T]he single most common complaint about their own party is that it is too weak, too cautious, or not fighting hard enough,” writes G. Elliott Morris in an analysis of the poll.
The Democratic base wants the party to take a more aggressive stance toward their GOP opponents, which will be key to building a more lasting coalition — especially one that includes younger and more male voters. El-Sayed is doing just that, and it has the right scared.
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