To hear a lot of the chatter about the pivotal U.S. Senate race in Michigan this year, you’d think the election was more or less a referendum on Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. The fiery leftist with a large online following has campaigned for and with Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed, to be sure, but so have a lot of other opinion leaders. Still, El-Sayed’s critics during his intense primary battle with Representative Haley Stevens, which he narrowly won, and now his general-election opponent, Mike Rogers, have made the biggest possible deal out of his association with Piker.

Piker hasn’t helped by keeping a low profile, of course. Even as El-Sayed worked to unite Michigan Democrats behind his candidacy after becoming the party Senate nominee, Piker stirred up fresh controversy, as my colleague Nia Prater noted last month, when he warned that “someone is going come around and take action” against American Jews if they don’t distance themselves from Israel. El-Sayed distanced himself from those remarks after previously criticizing Piker’s past comment that America “deserved 9/11.”

Rogers has really harped on the El-Sayed–Piker connection, broadcasting it nationally in his speech to the GOP’s Midterm Convention in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, as the Michigan Advance........

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