Every now and then, a Senate race sets the direction for an entire party. In 1991, a state official named Harris Wofford – advised by a foul-mouthed Cajun named James Carville – upset his far better-known Republican opponent to win a special election in Pennsylvania. He did it by promising to expand access to healthcare – and thus created a template for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign the following year.

If Abdul El-Sayed can follow up his victory in last night’s Democratic senate primary by winning the general election in Michigan this fall, he will have created a template of his own. Despite his closer-than-expected margin of victory, his campaign offers a model for how Democrats across the country can answer the political challenge posed by Donald Trump.

By casting the Michigan Senate primary as yet another battle between progressive insurgents and establishment centrists, media coverage of El-Sayed’s campaign has tended to overlook what is innovative about it. Like Zohran Mamdani and the democratic socialists who have won House races in New York, Pennsylvania and Colorado, El-Sayed wants to end unconditional US military support for Israel. But while Mamdani sometimes discusses Israel purely through the language of human rights and international law – as he did in his recent video arguing that Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested as a war criminal – El-Sayed’s message is more nationalistic. He rarely discusses the Jewish state without linking it to Washington’s failure to address problems at home.

In a recent interview, the New Yorker editor, David Remnick, asked El-Sayed whether he supports one or two states in Israel-Palestine. El-Sayed did not take the bait. He replied that his focus was less on “what’s happening there rather than what’s happening here”. His primary concern, he explained, was that the US was allocating money for Israeli weapons that it could be spending on schools in........

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