MORNING GLORY: Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary had two winners — but only one was on the ballot
Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed is Hasan Doğan Piker and Hasan Doğan Piker is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.
That’s the bottom line for Michigan voters considering the race for an open United States Senate seat as they prepare for that October-November election. (Early voting in Michigan begins on October 24 and ends November 1, 2026. Election Day is November 3, 2026.)
El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s open United States Senate seat, and Piker is a progressive Twitch commentator. A particularly vulgar, hate-filled, racist "streamer," an online ranter who hates Blacks, Whites and women of all races with seemingly equal passion. This isn’t a hidden secret. Piker’s calling card is the endless streaming of his unhinged diatribes. I’d recommend searching for his clips on X, formerly known as Twitter, but you don’t really need that sort of unhinged radical ranting in your life. Piker is Robespierre without even a false front of education.
In a major embarrassment for the El-Sayed campaign, the University of Washington was recently forced to step in and cancel a planned, university-hosted lecture featuring Piker, citing flaws in their approval process. Though the school didn't ban him from campus grounds entirely, stripping him of an official institutional platform shows just how toxic his rhetoric is to mainstream institutions.
El-Sayed attached himself to Piker’s hip in order to win the Michigan Democratic primary (barely) over liberal Congresswoman Haley Stevens. Piker is now effectively on the general election ballot with El-Sayed. If El-Sayed wins, so does Piker. Piker would then become the new kingmaker of internal Democratic Party politics. Attaching himself to this malign force in American media was a reckless move by El-Sayed, the equivalent of a Republican candidate palling around with white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
But it worked. Sort of. El-Sayed/Piker polled 743,455 votes last Tuesday. His principal opponent, Congresswoman Haley Stevens, tallied 727,758 votes—so El-Sayed’s/Piker’s margin of "victory" was 15,697. As a third candidate, Mallory McMorrow, who dropped out of the race, still polled 61,407 votes, the El-Sayed/Hasan Piker "ticket" didn’t even garner a majority of Democratic primary voters.
And then the defections from the Democrats posting their goodbyes to the Democratic Party online began. They announced their intention to vote for GOP nominee Mike Rogers, a seven-term congressman from Michigan who retired after his tenure as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Rogers is a former FBI special agent and U.S. Army lieutenant. Mike Rogers is the definition of "normal Michigan guy."
Rogers ran against Elissa Slotkin in the 2024 Michigan Senate race and lost in the general election by a truly narrow margin. Rogers polled a bit over 2,694,000 votes, and Slotkin won her seat by just 18,000 votes, about a third of 1%. It won’t take many defections to put Rogers over the top in Michigan this year.
ROGERS OPENS DOOR TO DEMOCRATIC VOTERS AFTER EL-SAYED’S PRIMARY VICTORY: ‘THERE IS STILL HOPE’
The stakes for Democrats are off-the-charts. If El-Sayed somehow fools the Michigan electorate into sending him to D.C. in November, Piker will push aside Bernie Sanders or AOC as the key "kingmaker" in the Democratic Party.
El-Sayed’s victory was tainted by many deeply flawed "polls" that showed him beating Stevens by double digits right up to the primary. On Election Day, though, his margin of victory was around 15,000 votes out of 1,500,000 cast.
It was a con job, whether or not the "polls" were intentionally tilted to El-Sayed or just more terrible polls in a decade of terrible polls. El-Sayed did nothing to hide his close association with Piker throughout the campaign. Quite the opposite. In fact, El-Sayed stapled the repulsive radical to himself as he stumped Michigan’s Arab-American community in the campaign’s closing days. Piker wasn’t a warm-up act; he was actually the main attraction for the hard-left fringe of the radical Democrats.
Stevens did not hire the sharpest campaign team because it was only after El-Sayed’s razor-thin primary win was in the books that some of the most vile Piker videos began to surface online, along with El-Sayed gems like his blunt admission that he "hates" Michigan’s beloved Mackinac Island. There’s got to be hours and hours of clips of both men spouting repulsive rhetoric. I have no doubt Mike Rogers’ campaign will find them.
With 84 days to go, expect a steady stream of those El-Sayed/Piker video clips to flood your feeds if you have any interest in American politics.
El-Sayed is easily the most radical major-party candidate for the United States Senate since the Civil War. He’s running in a "normie" Midwestern state, not Vermont or a "deep blue" congressional district.
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Michigan is a friendly place that loves its Wolverines, Spartans, Tigers, Lions, Pistons and Red Wings. It’s not filled to the rim with graduate students. Mike Rogers is a serious man, a national security expert and patriot whose life has been one of service. He’s also a disciplined and effective candidate.
El-Sayed and Piker will raise a staggering sum from the radicals across America. "Center-right" and "center-left" donors need to keep Rogers competitive in the fundraising race, matching the stream of small donations to the radical twins.
If it’s even close in the funding competition, Rogers should pull this race out.
And working in Rogers’ favor? Michigan doesn’t want to become known for the craziest hater in the Senate since the Civil War.
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