Abdul El-Sayed is right: only a landslide saves Michigan

By Dana Whitfield · Reporting from Washington · October 11, 2026

Abdul El-Sayed demands massive turnout against Republican election denial in Michigan, and voters must give him an undeniable margin to preserve institutions from dangerous populist fantasies.

The arithmetic of a stolen ghost Abdul El-Sayed knows the ledger. As Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee and a former public health official, he grasps the math of modern democracy. That math is being broken by men who refuse to add up the tallies. Reporting in NBC News notes El-Sayed's warning. He stated that Democrats need to “win by massive numbers” in the upcoming midterm elections so the result “is unquestionable.” He told NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” “Donald Trump has already threatened to do what he did in 2020, which is deny the outcomes of an election.”

El-Sayed is right to demand a blowout, because the Republican apparatus has turned sore-losing into an administrative art form. When Donald Trump was asked if he would accept the midterm results, he offered the familiar hedge: “Of course I will. But we don’t want cheating.” That hedge is the match thrown into the filing cabinet. El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, plays the same tune in a different key. El-Sayed told moderator Kristen Welker regarding Mike Rogers, “The guy I’m running against, he insinuates that he didn’t actually lose in 2020.” He added, “He talks about this mythical van that showed up in Detroit with a bunch of votes, as if he didn’t lose.”

This is the United States presidential election, 2020 all over again. It shares the exact mechanism where the denial of a certified election result by a losing candidate triggers a systemic crisis of legitimacy for democratic institutions. Following the presidential election, a judge dismissed Donald Trump's election fraud claims in Michigan, calling them “[nothing but speculation and conjecture].” People in Michigan were charged in a scheme to submit a slate of fake electors to the Electoral College to falsely declare Donald Trump the winner. The cases were later dismissed. Yet Rogers and Trump keep selling the fantasy that ballots vanish and reappear on ghost vans. Against this machinery of disbelief, a squeaker win is an invitation to litigation. Only a landslide breaks the ledger of denial.

The comfort of competing fallacies The strongest opposing case for El-Sayed’s strategy is clear. A fixation on election denialism lets Democrats dodge their own ideological overreach and hides the deep factional scars within the party. This argument, advanced by critics and party centrists, holds that voters care more about inflation, healthcare, and the cost of living than abstract institutional guardrails. Talking about Trump plays directly into the GOP’s trap of making El-Sayed the "main character" of the midterms.

As noted in AP News, El-Sayed himself welcomed the focus. He said, “If they want to make me the main character in the midterms, I’m not shying away from it. Run against me. See how well that works out for you.” But this defense misses the structural reality of the race. You cannot run a standard economic campaign when the rules of the game are on the ballot.

El-Sayed is trying to straddle two worlds. He pushes populist economic fixes like “Medicare for All” and fighting corporate interests, while also attempting to unify a fractured party. His campaign economic focus includes fighting corporate interests and making healthcare more accessible. He even noted on the trail, as reported by NBC News, that Trump voters approach him because “You really want me to have healthcare.”

Yet El-Sayed himself is not immune to historical revisionism. He once wrote in a 2012 HuffPost opinion piece that Barack Obama “was not the right choice. He just wasn’t the wrong one” and that Obama had “perpetrated war, violated our civil liberties.” Years later, he softened his tune to call Obama a “really capable leader.” The Obama presidency shows the tension between early progressive hope and later disillusionment over institutional constraints. That tension mirrors El-Sayed's shifting view of Obama. Both parties are selling fiscal and institutional fantasies. Republicans peddle the myth of stolen elections and protectionist auto tariffs that squeeze cross-border manufacturing, while the progressive left often discounts the sheer cost of its own wish-list economics.

The boring work of holding the line Elections are not won by moral purity or by pretending that institutional decay is a minor footnote. They are won by building majorities wide enough to survive the lawyers. The historical pattern predicts that close margins in swing states invite post-election chaos. That pattern was seen vividly during the January 6 Capitol attack, where the dynamic of challenging election results through claims of fraud sought to undermine the institutional transfer of power. For this time to differ, the margin of victory must be large enough to render the lawyers irrelevant.

El-Sayed understands this arithmetic, even if his democratic socialism makes moderate institutionalists wince. As El País notes, his campaign slogan translates to money out of politics, money in your pockets, and healthcare for all, backed by endorsements from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Yet his primary opponent Haley Stevens and outside super PACs like AIPAC poured nearly $30 million into the primary to stop him. That spending showed that his own party remains deeply divided over his foreign policy stances and past rhetoric regarding a synagogue attack near Detroit. For those remarks he expressed clear regret, stating, “If I step on somebody’s grief, of course I regret that.”

Despite these internal fractures and outside attacks, El-Sayed is leading Rogers by five points in a New York Times and Siena University poll. That lead defies the conventional wisdom that a progressive Muslim candidate cannot win a statewide race in Michigan. The antidote to election denial is not cautious silence. It is an undeniable tally that leaves the demagogues with nothing to count.

The Michigan Senate race will be decided not by the fantasies of stolen vans or the purity tests of the progressive left, but by whether voters reject the arsonists of democracy. El-Sayed is right that Democrats must win by massive numbers. The pragmatic answer for the electorate is to hand him a decisive victory that puts the election deniers out of business for good.

Abdul El-Sayed is right: only a landslide saves Michigan

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