The Gates Aren't Holding: Abdul El-Sayed and the Democrats' New Insurgency
Abdul El-Sayed told me exactly what he'd do to Bill Maher's audience. Then he did it to mine.
Welcome back to The Red Letter.
When I interviewed Abdul El-Sayed back in May, I did what I usually do: a loosely choreographed jousting session. I’m used to dealing with canned politicians who come with their beta-tested talking points, and I try to peel back the focus-grouped layer to find out what they actually believe. It becomes a game of knocking them off script.
With El-Sayed I realized I was playing that game against myself. He wasn’t obviously calculating what he was saying. He was just saying it. He wasn’t even really listening to me — he was using me. Sometimes he didn’t answer the question at all, and it didn’t matter, because he was charming the audience, who left comments like “refreshing to hear such authenticity” and “I’m glad you gave him a platform.”
That’s all I was. A platform. El-Sayed understood that implicitly.
In fact, unprompted, he told me he’d be happy to go on Bill Maher’s Real Time— the HBO/CNN show I’m appearing on Friday. Not because he wanted to talk to Maher.
“If Bill Maher, who said awful things about Muslims, invited me, guess what I would do? I would go on his show and I would talk to them through him,” El-Sayed told me.
The tenor of our conversation changed at that point.
Because that’s what Donald Trump does. He borrows audiences. Sometimes he steals them outright, by owning the host and walking off with the room.
Not because El-Sayed is anything like Trump ideologically. But because he understands something about modern politics that Trump understood before almost anyone else. You don’t go through the gatekeepers, you go around them. You own the host to take the audience. You take their community with you out the door.
“When you shut the door on some creator or another, what you are doing is saying that the people who pay attention to that person do not deserve a pathway back into our politics,” El-Sayed said.
Most candidates, especially Democrats, say they’ll go anywhere. They mean anywhere friendly. That’s because most politicians think an interview is something you survive. El-Sayed thinks it’s something you exploit. That’s why he goes on Fox News, and why he’ll sit down with a hard-nosed reporter like me.
On Tuesday night, the night of Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, it worked. El-Sayed — the Muslim son of Egyptian immigrants, running an explicitly anti-establishment campaign — won the primary after being outspent roughly ten to one with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer lined up against him. A quarter of a million more people voted in the 2026 Michigan primary than in 2024.
Big money came after him for a reason. El-Sayed has called Israel a “rogue state” guilty of “apartheid,” and has called for ending all U.S. aid to the country and all weapons sales to it. AIPAC spent roughly $30 million trying to stop him, with another $30 million was spent by other outside groups. This isn’t just another policy disagreement – it’s the second front of the Democratic civil war underneath the economic one, and Michigan — with the second largest Arab American population in the country--has a Jewish electorate of only 1.4 percent.
But in a state like Michigan where in 2024 Trump won by 80,000 votes and Democratic Senator Elyssa Slotkin won by 20,000, “You could lose a thousand Jewish voters and a few more moderates and there goes Michigan,” a prominent Democratic strategist told me.
Back in May, before El-Sayed was the nominee, when he was still locked in a three-way race with Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow and Haley Stevens, I pressed him on something that made him bristle. I told him he was running Trump’s populist playbook — that after eight years, the populists in his own party had perfected it. Trump ran on no corporate money, no foreign wars, protecting entitlements. His campaign was largely grassroots until he won the nomination. Nobody in the establishment wanted him, either.
“There is very little similarity between me and Donald Trump,” El-Sayed fired back. “Dude grew up as a nepo baby. My folks were educators. I studied to become a doctor. The man clearly has never studied a thing in his life.”
“There is very little similarity between me and Donald Trump… I studied to become a doctor. The man clearly has never studied a thing in his life.”
He’s not wrong. But neither was I, because I wasn’t talking about biography or ideology. I was talking about blowing past the political gatekeepers.
Here’s how El-Sayed describes himself: “I’m not supposed to run for office. I’m not baked and polished. I’m the wrong color. I pray the wrong way. My family comes from the wrong place. I got the wrong name.”
Now recall who the Republican Party was supposed to nominate in 2016, and who it actually nominated. A thrice-married reality star from Manhattan with a stack of bankruptcies, a porn-star fling, and no observable relationship to the churchgoing conservatism the party ran on. Both times the gatekeepers said no. Both times it didn’t matter.
What I saw in El-Sayed is a man who has spent his whole life on the other side of the gate and worked out that the permission structure was fake. Whoever notices that first wins. That’s what makes him dangerous to the people who run his party.
What the Losers are saying with the recorder off
Ahead of the election, I spent the week calling operatives in both parties to ask what’s keeping them up at night. For the establishment Democrats, the answer was El-Sayed. He is the commander of the insurgents in the war inside the party — or, as one of them put it, “the battle for the soul of the party.” And by the establishment’s own admission, the insurgents are winning.
“This DSA shit is killing us and everyone knows,” one told me. “If in 2016 we’d told Bernie, ‘You’re not a Democrat, so you can’t run as a Democrat’ and then he ran as an Independent we’d be blaming Bernie until the end of time. Instead we let them take over a third of the party. Why is everyone not saying, ‘Shut the fuck up’?”
