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Tuesday night marked another significant battle in the clash between establishment Democrats and insurgent progressives that has come to define the 2026 primary season. After hard-fought battles in Michigan, Missouri, and elsewhere, progressive candidates defied expectations and reams of outside spending to emerge victorious in most of the closely watched races.

In Michigan, insurgent candidate Abdul El-Sayed defeated Democratic establishment favorite, Rep. Haley Stevens. El-Sayed led by about 14,000 votes on Wednesday morning, edging Stevens in the marquee race.

El-Sayed’s victory is the culmination of a remarkable primary campaign that began with him as an outsider candidate who was lagging in the polls in the beginning of the year. Stevens, meanwhile, was the clear establishment pick from the beginning of the race. She held endorsements from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, outgoing Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to lend an air of inevitability to her campaign. Ultimately, though, neither the full-throated backing of the political establishment nor tens of millions of dollars could get Stevens’s candidacy across the finish line.

El-Sayed is now set up for a bruising general election against Republican Mike Rogers, who was narrowly defeated in Michigan’s 2024 senatorial race by Elissa Slotkin. A victory in the general election would make El-Sayed the first Muslim to serve in the U.S. Senate.

In the months leading up to the primary, Stevens benefited from record-breaking spending by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its affiliates. AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, dumped more than $30 million into this Senate primary alone. This marked AIPAC’s single biggest spend on an individual race since it became active in primaries near the beginning of this decade. Together, outside groups spent more than $60 million to back Stevens, a 9-to-1 spending advantage over El-Sayed. In dark money-funded ads that ran across the state, Stevens was celebrated for her purported close connection to former President Barack Obama and her pro-manufacturing policies, with no mention of Stevens’s stalwart support of Israel. Other ads alleged, without evidence, that El-Sayed was disrespectful toward women, and painted him as an opponent of the Obamas, and suggested that El-Sayed had helped Donald Trump win in 2024. Stevens’s surrogates on the campaign trail repeated these talking points, bombarding Michigan voters with a false image of El-Sayed as a misogynist and secret right-winger.

Abdul El-Sayed Triumphs Over Haley Stevens in $60M Loss for AIPAC, Corporations

The spending, though, became an issue of its own during the race. El-Sayed and his campaign surrogates repeatedly brought up corporate spending, as well as regularly pointing out AIPAC by name, making an effective boogeyman of an organization that, until recent cycles, was rarely directly mentioned by candidates running for office. Stevens’s loss is........

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