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The Democrats Don’t Know Who They’ll Be in 2028. Michigan May Offer an Answer.

The outrage over Abdul El-Sayed’s appearance with Hasan Piker reveals a schism that runs deeper than his Senate primary race against Mallory McMorrow.

Speaking to a modest crowd of voters inside a Canton brewery on Tuesday evening, Mallory McMorrow, a leading candidate for Senate in the swing state of Michigan, made an anti-war appeal as President Donald Trump’s threats to kill “a whole civilization” hung over Iran and the world.

“This is a moment for people to stand up and to decide who they are actually for — are they for the Constitution, are they for Americans, are they for Michiganders, or are they for Donald Trump?” McMorrow said to applause. She encouraged Democrats to consider invoking the 25th Amendment as an option to counter Trump.

Later that evening, 17 miles to the west before a packed auditorium at the University of Michigan, McMorrow’s opponent Abdul El-Sayed also criticized the war — and a key distraction from it. 

“Our president is waging a genocidal, illegal, unjustifiable war with Iran that is torching our tax dollars to the tune of $1.5 billion a day,” El-Sayed said. And yet, “apparently the most important thing happening on Twitter was whether or not we were gonna campaign with Hasan.” He was referring to the popular political streamer Hasan Piker, who stood by his side at two 600-attendee university rallies that day, the largest of any campaign events in Michigan so far this year. 

The primary contest between McMorrow, a Michigan state senator, and El-Sayed, a physician and former candidate for governor, has turned into a referendum over the future of the Democratic Party and who should lead its insurgent left flank. The two are locked in a three-way race for Michigan’s Democratic Senate nomination with Rep. Haley Stevens, a moderate with establishment backing who led the polls early on but has since seen her popularity slip. McMorrow and El-Sayed have both positioned themselves as outsiders to D.C. who promise progressive policies to help Michiganders struggling in an increasingly unaffordable economy — but the finer points, like debates over appropriate language and acceptable surrogates, reveal a deeper source of uncertainty: How far left is too far for the Democrats?

How far left is too far for the Democrats?

How far left is too far for the Democrats?

“This is almost like a proxy fight for 2028 in the presidential election,” said Adam Carlson, a political consultant and pollster behind Zenith Research. “It’s kind of like an AOC versus ‘insert more progressive center-left politician here.’ I think that whichever side comes out victorious will claim that as a mantle.”

Michigan is a state of key presidential importance. Its voters have backed the winner in every presidential election since 2008, swinging for Trump both times he won and against him the one time he lost. The 2026 general election for Senate is poised to be a close contest between the parties, too: In retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters’s last election in 2020, he fended off Republican challenger John James by a slim 1.7 percent margin. Democratic Sen. Elisa Slotkin won her seat by an even slimmer margin, defeating Republican Mike Rogers by less than 1 percentage point in 2024. Rogers is running again this year.

As the Democratic Party seeks to consolidate support against Republicans, the fury over seemingly minor events like Piker’s appearance speaks to a growing gap between its establishment and the younger, more progressive part of its base. Piker, a leftist streamer who commands a massive audience in an online format often dominated by the far right, has been both held up as an essential asset for the left and shunned by centrists for his critical view of the U.S. and Israel’s role on the world stage.

Comparing Piker to the far-right, neo-Nazi podcaster Nick Fuentes, McMorrow told Jewish Insider, “That is not somebody that you should be campaigning with at a moment when there is clearly a lot of pain and trauma across our state,” a reference to a March 12 attack in which a U.S. citizen whose relatives the Israeli military killed in Lebanon rammed his car into a Michigan synagogue and opened fire before killing himself.

A McMorrow campaign staffer told The Intercept that the comments were given to Jewish Insider as a part of a longer feature story about the Temple Israel synagogue attack and her connections to the Jewish community; McMorrow’s husband and daughter are Jewish. But to El-Sayed, who released a lengthy statement decrying the synagogue attack, McMorrow’s comments revealed a disproportionate “hierarchy of pain,” in which the suffering of Jewish people matters more than that of the Arab and Muslim communities to which El-Sayed belongs. Piker, meanwhile, has objected to........

© The Intercept