Around 1 pm on an overcast Fourth of July, I sat with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed on a park bench by the shores of Reeds Lake in East Grand Rapids, Michigan. The populist US Senate candidate had just finished walking his third parade of the day, tossing hundreds of pieces of candy and campaign pins, mostly to children, some of whom looked disappointed to get buttons instead of candy. El-Sayed was wearing a stars-and-stripes cowboy hat and bicep-hugging black T-shirt, in which he’d started off the day by dancing to Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” for a video that quickly went viral. He did not look classically senatorial, nor did he attempt to sound it.

“The world is not an episode of The West Wing,” El-Sayed insisted, after I mentioned that he seemed more confrontational than during his widely covered but unsuccessful 2018 run for the Michigan governorship. El-Sayed has called his Democratic opponent, Representative Haley Stevens, nothing more than “a suit with a large AIPAC bank account.” He has described the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers, as having “the charisma of a doorknob” and “the aesthetic of the guy at a country club who sneers at you from his Lincoln.” El-Sayed has promised that by the time he finished with Rogers, pieces of him would be “scattered all over the state of Michigan,” although he clarified that he meant “politically” rather than bodily.

El-Sayed told me that these harsh comments are not slips of the tongue. Polls show Democrats want politicians who fight for them, and are sick of those who follow James Carville’s advice to “roll over and play dead.” For El-Sayed, the fear of seeming “mean” gives the advantage to bullies like Trump. “What did you think fighting was?” El-Sayed asked me. Being meek and polite when the times call for blunt talk, he says, “is why we lose.”

With his credentialed background and soaring speeches, El-Sayed was compared to a left-wing Barack Obama during his first run for office. But he says that Obama’s conciliatory approach toward Republicans produced disappointing results. While “as a man and as a statesman, [Obama] was unparalleled in our time,” El-Sayed told me, “one of the big lessons that I’ve learned is [Republicans] are never going to negotiate with you in good faith, so at the end of the day, don’t give an inch on the things that people need, don’t go in there assuming the compromise because they’re going to fight it tooth and nail.”

And so you won’t find El-Sayed paying cordial tribute to the fundamental decency of Republican candidate Mike Rogers. “I have zero love lost for Mike Rogers,” he told me. “He is a scion of a system that is picking people’s pockets left and right. I’m coming for him. I’m coming for his political future. I want to make sure he never gets to run for office again, because everybody will remember what happened to him in 2026.” Rogers recently threatened to sue El-Sayed for calling him a “pharma lobbyist,” which Rogers is not, although he did receive substantial campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry and arguably served their interests in Congress. (El-Sayed may have been following LBJ’s famous notion that it’s worth it to make your opponent deny an outrageous charge. In a blatantly insincere apology, he said: “My mistake… When I say Mike Rogers, do not think of a pharma lobbyist. When I say pharma lobbyist, do not think of a Mike Rogers.”)

But behind the trash talk and weightlifting videos, El-Sayed is at heart a policy wonk. A Rhodes Scholar with an MD and a PhD, he taught epidemiology at Columbia, and his Google Scholar page is eye-glazingly long. He is not just an advocate for Medicare for All but cowrote the most comprehensive scholarly book on it, a densely end-noted volume from Oxford University Press, as well as co-editing the textbook Systems Science and Population Health, also published by Oxford. Through stretches as health director for both the city of Detroit and Wayne County, El-Sayed focused on small interventions that could improve lives, like giving free eyeglasses to poor children and testing schools for lead.

El-Sayed is not, however, a technocrat stressing incremental tweaks. He wants to fundamentally overhaul the political system, which he says is “spitting out billionaires while union participation is at an all-time low.” He wants to “end the system that allows these 527s and 501(c)(4)s and super PACs to buy politicians and rig the system against us.” In 2018, he described his campaign as an effort to “take and build on what [Bernie Sanders] had done” two years prior. Bernie, he told me, taught him that “standing consistently and deliberately and passionately and confidently on principle matters.”

El-Sayed is running as much against Chuck Schumer as against Donald Trump, drawing applause when he says that anything Schumer and Trump agree on is probably bad for the country. They agree, he says, that we can’t have universal healthcare, that we have to send money to Israel, and that “it’s more important to give a corporation a fat check than to raise the minimum wage for everybody.” Plus: “Go talk to Chuck Schumer and Donald Trump and they both agree that I shouldn’t be inside the US Senate!” (Schumer has not publicly endorsed in the race but has privately signaled his support for Stevens.)

At a July 3 rally in Grand Rapids’ historic Harris Building, El-Sayed electrified a crowd of mostly young supporters by lambasting a rigged political system. For El-Sayed, ineffective Democrats are just as much a cause of the country’s woes as tyrannical Republicans. “Donald Trump is not himself the disease of our politics, Donald Trump is the worst symptom of that disease. The disease is a system that allows big corporations, billionaires, special interests like AIPAC to buy and sell politicians that rig the system against us.” He promised to “mobilize union organizing in every single sector of American life,” and to tax billionaires. El-Sayed drew especially large cheers when he promised to cut off unconditional military aid to Israel. “Why should our tax dollars get misappropriated abroad to buy bombs and tanks for other people’s countries instead of buying schools and healthcare for our own?”

El-Sayed has been called “the Mamdani of the Midwest,” and like Zohran Mamdani, he has built his campaign around a few simple economic promises. Mamdani liked to have audiences fill in the blanks to finish his sentences (“Freeze the…” “RENT!”), and El-Sayed does the same with his own three signature slogans. Rally-goers know the points by heart and shout them out:

“Money in your…” “POCKET!”

“Money out of…” “POLITICS!”

“Medicare for…” “ALL!”

A Sanders-style insurgency may resonate better now than it did when El-Sayed ran eight years ago. With Donald Trump back in office, there is a “hunger for anti-establishment fighters” among a Democratic base looking for leaders who do more to fight back than sending strongly worded letters. Leftists backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have recently been winning improbable victories, including Mamdani’s successful New York City mayoral campaign, the ousting of the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Adriano Espaillat, by democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier, and the victory of Melat Kiros in Colorado, who showed that the phenomenon may be spreading outside New York.

But it is an open question whether staunch progressivism can win in Michigan. El-Sayed is not a DSA member, but he is a proud Berniecrat, and the conventional wisdom is that this makes him less electable in a “purple” state that voted for Obama, Trump, Biden, and then Trump again. The centrist think tank Third Way has published a list of “Ten Reasons Why Mamdani Politics Won’t Win Outside of NYC,” arguing that “the far left doesn’t flip swing seats.” Eric Levitz of Vox has argued that “to date, the insurgent left has demonstrated little ability to win” in “purple-to-red jurisdictions.” Stevens and her backers argue that El-Sayed is a risky choice. Former senator Debbie Stabenow said that Democratic senators who supported El-Sayed or Mallory McMorrow (who suspended her campaign on July 5) “don’t know Michigan.” At their first one-on-one debate, Stevens told El-Sayed that the GOP wants him to defeat her, because they think it will be “easier for Mike Rogers to win if you are the nominee.” If El-Sayed wins in August, and then in November, it would deal a devastating blow to the theory that purple states want centrists. What if brash anti-corporate populism is not, in fact, a liability in Michigan? What if it is an electoral advantage? What then?

Dan Scott, a social worker I spoke with at an El-Sayed event in Grand Rapids, says the whole premise that Democrats should run to the center in order to win Michigan is based on a misunderstanding of the state’s political culture. “People always say Michigan is a purple state. It’s bullshit. Michigan is a populist state. It’s a labor state.” Scott says that he grew up among Trump supporters and still shoots and hunts with them. “I can kick it with those guys, and get them talking excitedly about Medicare For All. If we can get someone like Abdul…when they see their lives get better, when they see their small towns not getting decimated by corporate policy, I think they’ll shift.”

Ivan Diaz, a 28-year-old democratic socialist candidate for the Michigan state Senate, said he’d already seen a shift. “People are so fed up,” he said. “They’re done with parties.… Politicians like Abdul, the ones who understand that they’re the ones with the best chance of winning.” He says the political environment is different from during El-Sayed’s 2018 run, and the Michigan electorate is far more open to El-Sayed’s antiestablishment message. Diaz credits the pandemic-era stimulus checks with showing people that government could easily help people if our officials actually want to. They’re angry knowing their representatives could be helping them but choose not to.

Mason Pressler, an El-Sayed–supporting school board member in Bay City, told me he’d been surprised, in talking to older members of his family, by how open they are to El-Sayed. “They’re all like, ‘Oh, Abdul is great, we love him, I think he’s right on the issue of Gaza.’” Pressler has found it “very interesting to see how these older, typically more conservative white Democratic primary voters have really shifted in terms of where they’re at ideologically.”

Illinois Representative Delia Ramirez, who came to Grand Rapids to rally for El-Sayed, had a similar assessment. “If you talk to a senior in a very rural community and a senior in an urban community, they want the same damn thing,” she told me. “They want to be able to retire with dignity, not to have to find a new job at 75, they want their kids to have a better life than they’ve had and they want their grandchildren to be able to buy a house one day.” The belief in running centrists, she said, is not actually about their superior electability. It “is really about making sure you maintain the status quo for the people who have profited from the pain of our communities.” El-Sayed, she said, is “someone who is going to call out the crap that Democrats have offered.” Speaking at an event for Latino community leaders earlier in the day, Ramirez told them Abdul was “someone who will fight like hell for Latinos, who will fight like hell for Palestinians, fight like hell for working people, fight like hell for humanity, fight like hell for Michigan.” Abdul showed what it would be like to have “authentic public servant leaders who are going to put the BS aside and actually care for people.”

“Authentic” is a word you hear a lot among El-Sayed supporters, along with “not bought by corporations.” But while they have similar reasons for liking him, El-Sayed’s supporters come from eclectic backgrounds. At one Fourth of July parade, I spoke to the vice president of a bank (he asked to remain anonymous, for obvious reasons), who said he had been a hardcore member of the MAGA “alt-right” before realizing that Trumpist politics were incompatible with his feelings of compassion for humanity. At El-Sayed’s Latino roundtable I met Ana Olvera, a 33-year-old stay-at-home mom whose brother was deported to Mexico by the Obama administration, and who said she was sick of Democrats’ not pushing seriously for immigration reform and encouraged by El-Sayed’s forthright insistence on abolishing ICE outright. At another parade, I encountered Bob Wood, a political science professor who had been teaching in Ukraine for four years, but who had quit his job and moved back to the United States specifically so that he could campaign for El-Sayed. Some supporters cited specific actions taken by El-Sayed that gave them confidence in him. Dina Carlisle, a registered nurse who serves as president of Local 40 of the Office and Professional Employees International Union said that since his gubernatorial run, El-Sayed had shown he “walks the walk” for labor. Other candidates, she said, had only started showing up to labor events when election season started, while El-Sayed “has attended every single strike, picket, and rally we have hosted.”

But there is one phrase that El-Sayed’s supporters repeat more often than any other: “He’s not funded by AIPAC.” El-Sayed may prefer to focus on kitchen-table issues, but the issue of Israel-Palestine is inescapably important to the race, and may well prove decisive in determining its outcome. Stevens was elected to her current seat in Congress in part thanks to millions of dollars in AIPAC funding, which helped her beat Andy Levin, a Jewish critic of Israel. Stevens herself, while not Jewish, is so devoted to Israel that she said the country “comes to me in my dreams.” (I met several people in Michigan who suggested that to win, El-Sayed should simply play the clip of Stevens’s “dreams” quote over and over. Several days later, his campaign produced a website that does just that.) She has voted to ban the State Department from citing the Gaza Ministry of Health’s death statistics, called on Columbia University to crack down on Gaza protesters, voted to sanction the International Criminal Court for pursuing war crimes charges against Benjamin Netanyahu, and has rejected the consensus of human rights groups that Israel has committed genocide. (The Stevens campaign did not reply to multiple e-mails seeking an interview.) El-Sayed disagrees with every one of these stances. Speaking to Current Affairs last year, he was scathing about those who tell Americans that “the best use of their tax dollars was to be sent abroad to backstop an apartheid regime, to subsidize genocide, and to now fight a war [in Iran] that we have no business fighting at the behest of a foreign government’s prime minister.”

Pro-Israel groups are working hard to ensure that Stevens defeats the man who would be America’s first Muslim senator. When I arrived in Michigan, United Democracy Project, a pro-Israel PAC, had just dropped $2 million on an attack ad against El-Sayed, part of over $34 million in pro-Stevens ad spending during the cycle. The new ad doesn’t mention Israel, likely because AIPAC and its affiliates are aware that Democratic voters have turned sharply against the country. Instead, it accuses El-Sayed of having a “long history of disrespecting women.” The charges are thin. Even the Detroit Free Press, which does not support El-Sayed, published a fact-check calling it “unpersuasive” and said it “stretches its facts.” (It cites an op-ed in which El-Sayed called Michelle Obama’s nutrition campaign “commendable, if ineffectual” as its first example of “disparaging women.”) But the sheer saturation of the Michigan airwaves is astonishing. The spot is everywhere. I saw it three times within 30 minutes of flipping on my hotel TV, and about a dozen times in total over a long weekend in the state.

The long shadow of Gaza was evident even during an early-morning Fourth of July parade, where I walked the route alongside Stevens. As we snaked through a leafy, Rockwellesque neighborhood of front porches and tire swings, with a marching band blasting “Yankee Doodle,” she was repeatedly heckled from the crowd over her support for Israel. One man shouted “Take down the AIPAC ad!” at Stevens. A few blocks later, while a group of Boy Scouts recited the Pledge of Allegiance, an older woman screamed “GENOCIDE! GENOCIDE! You’re killing children! GENOCIDE!” I spoke to the woman, Jo Anne Zarowny, a retired court administrator, and asked her why she decided to heckle the congresswoman on Independence Day. Zarowny pointed to a pin she was wearing. “It’s from the Holocaust museum,” she said. It reads “What I Do Matters.” “I know my history. What do we wish people were doing in 1938 in Germany? Talking about it? Smiling?” With a “fascist” in the White House, and a genocide in Gaza, she felt the minimum she could do was speak out. Zarowny is supporting El-Sayed.

A few hours later, as I talked with El-Sayed on the shores of Reeds Lake, the last dregs of the parade were passing by. There had been men dressed as Captain America, women as suffragettes, and George Washington on a unicycle waving Old Glory. As the patriotic display wound down around us, I could not shake the feeling that here, on America’s 250th birthday, I might be watching the end of one era of our country’s history and the beginning of another. Perhaps that was wishful thinking, a desperate hope in dark times that something major must be about to change. But after spending a weekend meeting the extraordinarily passionate supporters of El-Sayed’s campaign, all of whom were ready to throw out their party leadership in an effort to transform the country, it was impossible not to wonder whether Democratic politics might be headed for a major earthquake. In 2018, when I first met El-Sayed, my first impression was that I was speaking to the future first Muslim president of the United States, and the left’s most formidable statesman-in-waiting. This guy could be the real deal, I thought.This might be the moment when things start to change. It wasn’t, and El-Sayed has since spent nearly a decade in the political wilderness. But his supporters tell me things are different this time. On August 4, we shall see if they are right.

“If you can do it in Michigan, you can do it anywhere,” El-Sayed told me. “If a politics centering people and their needs…can succeed here, then it disabuses us of this idea that milquetoast moderate policy that continues to accommodate corporate power to do corporate bidding is the recipe for winning in the Midwest.” He’s right that if Sanders-style politics prevails in Michigan, a lot of received wisdom will suddenly seem shaky. Could it be that the recipe for winning in the Midwest is not what Democrats have been saying? Could it be that a smack-talking, Oxford-trained, leftist Muslim doctor is the party’s secret weapon for winning back the heartland?

But if El-Sayed does beat Stevens, it remains an open question whether the forces within the party that have tried to keep him from getting the nomination will fall in line behind him in the general election. Centrist Democrats will have mixed feelings at best about helping El-Sayed to the Senate. An El-Sayed primary victory sets up a high-stakes test of what kind of Democratic politics are most effective against the right. If Michigan sends a Senator Abdul El-Sayed to Washington, traditional “electability” assumptions will have been shattered for good. It will no longer be possible to argue that centrism and pragmatism are synonymous, and insurgent progressives everywhere will have a stronger case that they are the Democratic Party’s future.