Why did Kamala Harris lose the “Blue Wall,” and every other swing state in 2024?
For the three leading candidates vying to win the Democratic nomination to succeed retiring Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, providing an answer could determine their political futures.
At least one already has: Abdul El-Sayed argued on Monday that his party ran away from its voters — not towards them.
Polling within the margin of error against Rep. Haley Stevens, El-Sayed, 40, is very well positioned to pull off the historic feat of becoming the first-ever Muslim member of the United States Senate.
A poll conducted by the NSRC, the GOP’s Senate campaign arm, put him two points behind Stevens, a Democratic congresswoman and reportedly the Democratic party establishment’s favorite to win the seat. Mallory McMorrow, a state senator, trailed both but was nearing striking distance.
“Democrats still haven’t learned this lesson,” El-Sayed insisted on Monday. “It’s frustrating because these people made a calculated decision about who they needed and who they didn’t. And it turns out that that decision was way off.”
El-Sayed spoke to The Independent two days before he was set to visit a Yemeni coffeeshop in Dearborn Heights for a meet-and-greet with voters, an area of Michigan that saw one of the sharpest drop offs among Democratic-leaning voters last year.
Across the state, El-Sayed is running the exact opposite kind of campaign as an increasingly frail Joe Biden ran in 2024. In some ways, his strategy contrasts with Harris,’ too, in ways which clearly didn’t sit well with the former Detroit health commisioner.
On a recent interview with Twitch streamer Hasan Piker (HasanAbi), the two discussed the Israel-Hamas war and starvation crisis in Gaza, which El-Sayed labels a genocide. But in the hourlong conversation — the likes of which Harris avoided to some dismay from Democrats — the two also bro’d out, chatting about fitness as well as the YouTube and Twitter “shorts” seemingly consuming social media and transforming it into slop.
“I watched this campaign actively run away from certain groups of voters because they did not want to take questions that would expose the inconsistency of their values,” said El-Sayed. “Whether that was Joe Rogan’s audience, whether that was Hasan’s audience, there are just groups of people that Democrats have said, ‘you know what? We’re going to give up on you, because we don’t think we need you to win an election.
“That’s not how you do politics,” he continued. “Your job is not about just trying to architect a winning coalition. Your job is about trying to identify the issues that all people need, and then being able to be clear, specific and direct about how you solve them in an effort to win an election, because your agenda would deliver for the most people in the ways that they need.”
He pinned much of the blame for the party’s stiffness in 2024, exemplified in both Biden and Harris’ campaigns, on a steady stream of donor money the two-time Bernie Sanders-backed candidate argued was poisoning the party. Democratic policies were being winnowed down through a narrow lens of what would be palatable to both the party’s base and their corporate-backed financiers, El-Sayed argued.
The devastation in Gaza and the Democratic Party’s complicity in not pressuring Israel over it under Biden highlighted a gulf between those two groups he argued was growing for years. The man who could very well be the Democratic Party’s champion in a crucial Senate race spared no criticism for those Democratic elites he argued were responsible for the mess within which the DNC was now mired.
“Joe Biden’s handling of Gaza was indicative of a general failure to be able to do the job,” El-Sayed told The Independent.
“I wasn’t in those rooms,” said El-Sayed. “What I can tell you is what I watched, and what I think the American public watched, [which] is an American president who was struggling to give a coherent statement, to get through a debate, [and] … to manage a extremely complicated situation in Gaza.
“I also know that there was this effort to silence those voices who were willing to state what was obvious before our eyes,” he added.
A disrupting voice in the party, El-Sayed is pledging to shake up the geriatric halls of the Senate as well should he become his party’s nominee.
As senator, El-Sayed says he’d back leveraging Democratic votes on legislation to fund the government: the kind of shutdown politics Chuck Schumer refused to play earlier in 2025. He also supports ending the filibuster, according to a staffer. El-Sayed also would not commit to supporting Schumer for another term as leader of the caucus, telling The Independent he wanted to look at his options as 2027 came into view.
First he’ll have to win the 2026 primary as well as a general election against Mike Rogers, the Republican Trump-supporting congressman on a path to be crowned the GOP nominee. With a unified Republican Party backing Rogers, El-Sayed is well aware that his Muslim background and stance on Gaza could be weaponized by Republicans in an attempt to overshadow a Zohran Mamdani-like focus on affordability and Michiganders’ financial stability.
Republicans see Michigan as a path to expanding a majority and giving Donald Trump the breathing room he needs to further his legislative agenda in 2027. The loss of Michigan would be a massive blow for a battle-weary DSCC, and a pro-Israel site has already attacked El-Sayed over his sitdown with Hasan Piker.
El-Sayed argued that the momentum was on his side, and that Democrats needed to be ready to brawl.
“I think we need to stop being afraid,” he said. “I just think we need to punch back harder, right? They want to come after us on this issue, punch back harder.
“I don’t back down, I don’t pull my punches, and I am more than happy to go at this issue or any other issue with lying MAGA types,” El-Sayed continued. “ I think we can win the American public, but we gotta stop being afraid of our own shadow.”
