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Abdul El-Sayed: “The Power of Our Many Is Greater Than the Power of Their Money”

The lessons from a primary win that can be applied to defeat a Republican in November.

Abdul El-Sayed speaks during a news conference at the Spirit of Detroit shortly after winning the Democratic nomination for US Senate in Michigan, Wednesday, August 5, 2026, in Detroit.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed beat the power of big money in Michigan’s tightly contested Democratic Senate primary. That wasn’t easy. El-Sayed was dramatically outspent and relentlessly attacked by his opponents. Yet the candidate who ran with the endorsements of US Senator Bernie Sanders, US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the United Auto Workers union prevailed Tuesday over US Representative Haley Stevens, who benefited from as much as $70 million in spending—in support of Stevens and against El-Sayed—by corporate donors and groups aligned with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

“In the words of Muhammad Ali, ‘We shook up the world,’” El-Sayed declared on Wednesday morning, after winning a close primary fight in which his campaign said he was outspent by as much as 11 to 1. “What we showed is that the power of our many is greater than the power of their money.”

El-Sayed’s win came on a big night for progressives in Michigan, where democratic socialist Donavan McKinney, who was backed by Sanders, Democratic Socialists of America, Justice Democrats, and the Working Families Party, beat Democratic US Representative Shri Thanedar in the Detroit area; and where progressive Will Lawrence, a Sunrise Movement cofounder who assembled a similar coalition of backers, won a three-way contest to take on a vulnerable Republican incumbent in central Michigan’s seventh district. All of the winners are supporters of Medicare for All, taxing the rich, building strong unions, and strengthening Palestinian rights.

But El-Sayed’s win stands above the rest, given that it was considered by many to be the highest-profile Democratic contest of the summer. Now that he’s prevailed in the primary, El-Sayed faces two immediate........

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