El-Sayed Beat $62 Million and the Centrist Playbook Collapsed

By Mars Vega-Kaplan · August 8, 2026

Opinion

Abdul El-Sayed just won a U.S. Senate primary in Michigan while being outspent nine to one. Let that number sit with you for a second. Not two to one. Not three to one. Nine to one. The pro-Israel lobby’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, poured nearly $32 million into Haley Stevens’s campaign, the largest sum it has ever spent on any congressional race. Another $30 million in corporate money piled on top. That is $62 million in outside spending deployed against one progressive candidate in a state Donald Trump carried twice. And he won anyway.

This was not a fluke. This was not a narrow moral victory. This was the most expensive nonpresidential primary in Michigan’s history and the third-most expensive Senate primary ever held in this country, and the person who was supposed to be bought and paid for lost. The people who actually showed up to vote rejected the entire architecture of plutocratic capture that has been dictating Democratic primaries for years.

The denial from the consultant class was instantaneous. Politico ran a headline declaring that “progressives didn’t get the big election night they wanted.” This, about a night where five of six Bernie Sanders-endorsed candidates won in Michigan. Where DSA member Donavan McKinney won the 13th District and will likely become the ninth socialist in the U.S. House. Where Sunrise Movement cofounder William Lawrence took a purple district that centrist Senator Elissa Slotkin’s own endorsed candidate finished third in. Where Uncommitted Movement cofounder Abbas Alawieh won a state senate primary by 18 points. Where DSA member Yousef Rabhi defeated a four-term mayor of Ann Arbor. If this is a bad night, then the word “bad” has lost all meaning.

What actually happened is that the centrist playbook finally broke. Chuck Schumer arranged donor support for Stevens. DSCC Chair Kristen Gillibrand, who last year falsely accused Zohran Mamdani of talking about “global jihad,” reportedly lied to donors about the other centrist in the race being a DSA member. Gretchen Whitmer and Jim Clyburn parachuted in with last-minute endorsements. Stevens’s ads literally fabricated a Barack Obama endorsement that never existed. Rep. Hillary Scholten called El-Sayed a misogynist and “anti-American” and hinted she might not support him in November. Every lever of establishment power was pulled. Every lever snapped.

And the lobby? AIPAC’s UDP spent $32 million and got nothing. In 2022, that same PAC spent $3 million to crush Andy Levin, a Zionist and former synagogue president whose sin was suggesting maybe U.S. aid to Israel should come with conditions. That was enough to beat him by 20 points. This time they multiplied that investment tenfold and lost. The lobby that once functioned as a veto on any Democrat who questioned Israeli policy just watched its biggest bet ever go up in smoke.

This is the same pattern we saw in New York, where Mamdani routed Andrew Cuomo. Same pattern in Maine, where Democratic voters rejected their own governor for a left-populist outsider. The Democratic electorate has moved. The people running the party have not. They are still running the 2022 playbook, still calling in favors, still flooding airwaves with attack ads, still assuming that enough money can paper over a platform nobody actually wants.

What El-Sayed proved in Michigan is that the money wall is not invincible. It is expensive, it is ugly, and it can be beaten. Every organizer who has ever knocked on doors in the rain, every volunteer who has ever phone-banked until their voice gave out, every small-dollar donor who has ever chipped in twenty bucks while the other side drops thirty-two million. This is your proof of concept. The structural advantage of concentrated capital is real, and it is not permanent.

The work now is to replicate this everywhere. Not to celebrate one race and go home. To build the ground game in every district where a corporate-backed incumbent thinks they are safe. To make every primary the one where the money loses. El-Sayed showed it can be done. The question is whether the movement has the discipline to do it again, and again, and again, until the people who buy elections understand that the receipt is no longer a guarantee.

Sources

Editor’s note. I suppose the real victory here is that the lobby's wallet is still intact enough to write another check next cycle, but for now, the voters seem to have outspent the playbook. (W.K.)