In March, Michigan Sen. Mallory McMorrow attacked Abdul El-Sayed over his plans for campaign rallies with pro-Palestinian Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, igniting a protracted, acrimonious debate over the future of the Democratic Party and criticism of Israel.
At the time, McMorrow and El-Sayed were locked in a tight Democratic primary race for U.S. Senate, and she and pro-Israel allies demanded El-Sayed cancel the rally with Piker, who they claimed was toxic to Democrats, antisemitic, and should be shunned.
El-Sayed rejected the calls, rallied with Piker, and, so far, it has paid off. While momentum was already building, El-Sayed has since recorded a string of nine strong polls and broken out as the race’s frontrunner. He brought in a record fundraising haul amid the debate, saw an influx in volunteers, and received several major mainstream endorsements. McMorrow, meanwhile, has sunk in the polls.
The attacks boosted El-Sayed by significantly increasing his name recognition statewide and nationally, and cementing his position as the race’s change candidate, a review of polling and campaign finance data suggests. Meanwhile, it suggests Piker is not the toxic figure moderate Democrats claim he is.
Piker told Mondoweiss he and El-Sayed’s positions on the genocide and ending U.S. support for Israel are in line with the vast majority of the Democratic base, and he knew the McMorrow attack would backfire.
“I was confident from the start and kept telling people ‘This is a 90-10 issue’ so if they come at me, then that’s great for me, and that’s great for [El-Sayed],” Piker said.
The controversy quickly became a proxy war between the pro-Israel establishment and the insurgent progressive left that is winning primaries across the country. In New York last week, Democratic Socialist of America-affiliated candidates, also backed by Piker, nearly swept in 12 state and Congressional races, while other pro-Palestinian candidates have won or are leading in other key races nationally.
The three-way race in Michigan for the nomination includes El-Sayed, a progressive focused on the working class’s economic needs; McMorrow, a young, establishment state senator favored by many center-left Democrats; and Haley Stevens, a U.S. representative backed by AIPAC and most moderates. The primary is August 4.
Piker has 3 million followers on the streaming platform Twitch, but he has been targeted by pro-Israel figures over comments he has made about Israel and accused of antisemitism.
The March controversy, in part, boosted El-Sayed by drawing the spotlight to his campaign at a time when he had relatively weak name recognition. Michigan’s media had not paid especially close attention to the race, making it more difficult for him to reach undecided voters, and a late January poll showed 55% of Michiganders did not know El-Sayed.
The attacks drew heavy local and national media coverage, and a post-controversy poll showed a 13-point jump in El-Sayed’s name recognition. Simultaneously, he surged ahead of McMorrow and Stevens to become the frontrunner. The data suggests many of those who were undecided moved to El-Sayed after learning about him during the controversy.
A poll taken from April 11-13, days after the rally with Piker, found El-Sayed for the first time tied for the lead with McMorrow. El-Sayed has led in six of the eight polls since then, including the last five. Since McMorrow attacked, El-Sayed has never trailed her, as he consistently did before the controversy.
Name recognition alone is not enough, Piker told Mondoweiss. Once people got to know him, they liked him because “he has the fundamentals.”
“That means good policies that people want because they center the working class’s needs and address them clearly,” Piker said. “As long as you center your campaign around those policies, then you’re going to be successful – Abdul did that.”
Meanwhile, El-Sayed’s numbers in a hypothetical match-up against the likely GOP nominee, Mike Rogers, also improved. In early polls, El-Sayed consistently trailed Rogers by an average of five points, but the head-to-head race tightened in April. El-Sayed has led by several points in each poll since the beginning of May.
In June, GOP pollster Steve Mitchell wrote, “One of the reasons for [McMorrow’s] seeming collapse is the fact El-Sayed had received a large amount of unpaid media because of the endorsements by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Hasan Piker the anti-Semitic podcaster.”
Importantly, the controversy also cemented El-Sayed’s position as the race’s anti-establishment candidate. Through March, McMorrow attempted to position herself as the race’s change candidate.
The lane is important in a cycle in which Michigan’s – and much of the nation’s – Democratic base is hungry for outsider candidates. Evidence of that lay in Michigan’s April Democratic nominating convention, in which establishment, pro-Israel candidates were defeated by outsiders. Conversely, the attack aligned McMorrow with the widely loathed pro-Israel political establishment.
Piker said “fake outrage manufacturing campaigns” put tremendous pressure on candidates to fall in line with pro-Israel positions, and voters noticed that El-Sayed did not back down.
“A lot of candidates would have buckled under that pressure,” Piker said. “It showed that he’s not corruptible, he’s a fighter, he’s responsive, he has moral convictions, and he’s not doing this just because he wants to win an election. That translates to other issues.”
Piker has very low name recognition overall among Democrats, said political analyst Josh Cohen, who writes the popular Ettingerementum Substack on Democratic Party politics. The attack was not a “case of people being mad because she attacked some guy they knew about and liked.”
“Along with just putting El-Sayed in the news, it was also the kind of attack that a Republican would make in a general election, which I think made liberals take an immediate defensive posture around him,” Cohen said.
The controversy also elevated El-Sayed’s status among national leftists and pro-Palestinian advocates who may have been familiar with him, but not donating to his campaign – until he and Piker came under attack.
That may help explain his massive April fundraising haul of $1.16 million, a monthly record in the race that doubled his opponents and shot him to the top five of ActBlue.
Though the race has shifted, an El-Sayed win is far from guaranteed. US Sen. Gary Peters, whose seat the candidates are vying for, on Saturday suggested McMorrow should drop out to give the establishment a better shot at stopping El-Sayed.
McMorrow told CNN last week that El-Sayed should not have rallied with Piker because Democrats need to build a “big tent,” and the event came a month after an attack on a Michigan synagogue. She said it “could have been” a major mass killing.
The claims have fallen flat.
“People saw McMorrow and the opposition to El-Sayed either as evil because they are in support of Israel, or they saw them as unserious because they were focusing on a random Twitch streamer,” Piker said.
Tom Perkins
Tom Perkins is a Detroit-based freelance reporter who covers the domestic response to the genocide in Gaza.
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