Abdul El-Sayed, a public-health official who lost in a primary landslide when he ran for governor of Michigan eight years ago, eked out a victory over Representative Haley Stevens on Tuesday night in one of the most closely watched, bitterly contested and expensive Democratic Senate primaries in the country.

He overcame more than $60 million in super-PAC spending against him, most of it from AIPAC, the deep-pocked pro-Israel group that’s spending in this midterm cycle has backfired against its chosen candidates as much as it has helped. In this campaign, El-Sayed wore the spending barrage against him as a badge of pride.

“As I reflect on the last 15 months, I reflect on people coming together, believing that we really could have a politics bigger than what they said we could have,” he said at an election-eve rally at a cocktail bar and café in Detroit’s wealthy Boston–Edison Historic District. “A politics bigger than a record amount of spending to try and pick a U.S. senator that represents the interests of corporations or special interests rather than the interests of Michiganders.”

For progressive Democrats, the general election between El-Sayed and Mike Rogers, a former representative who lost the........

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