Nessel Endorsed Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, Then Asked Him a Remarkable Question.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel endorsed Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed for the U.S. Senate. Then she sat down with him and asked a question you don't normally hear after an endorsement.

"Are you seeking our votes?" Nessel asked. "Do they matter to you?"

She was talking about Jewish voters.

Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed answered yes, saying he hoped to earn their votes if they trusted him to successfully be a leader despite disagreements. Earlier in the conversation, Nessel, who is Jewish and a Zionist, asked whether there was room for someone like her in the Democratic Party's "big tent."

Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed said there was.

The exchange deserves attention because Nessel wasn't some Republican interviewer trying to corner the Democratic nominee. She had just endorsed him while trying to help unify her party behind him after months of very public disagreements involving Israel, antisemitism, and Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed's relationship with Michigan's Jewish community.

Yet she still felt those questions needed to be asked amid growing pressure.

Seventeen additional Michigan Jewish leaders added their names Tuesday to the "Nonnegotiables" petition, which asks Democratic politicians to affirm five principles involving Jewish safety, Jewish identity, political participation, Jewish sovereignty in Israel, and a better future for the Middle East.

The new signers include Democratic state Rep. Noah Arbit, founder of the Michigan Jewish Democratic Caucus, along with a University of Michigan regent and several board members of the caucus.

This isn't a Republican operation wearing Groucho glasses and pretending to be Democrats. Nonnegotiable is backed by the Ziones Action Fund, a progressive Zionist organization. Its organizers explicitly describe themselves as Jewish Democrats who have marched, organized, donated, and voted with the Democratic Party.

Their argument is equally explicit: support should be earned rather than assumed.

Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed has not publicly agreed to the group's five requests.

There is another side to this story, and the numbers matter.

Other Jewish Democrats are actively supporting Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. A competing effort has gathered roughly 900 Jewish signatures pledging to vote for him. Another letter supporting Republican Mike Rogers has collected more than 500.

Michigan's Jewish community plainly isn't speaking with one voice about this election.

Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed has also spent weeks trying to repair some of these relationships. He apologized for previous remarks concerning the attack on Temple Israel, met with Jewish Democrats, distanced himself from Hasan Piker, and said Jewish safety is "never in question" for him.

We can't erase those efforts because of their complications to the story, yet grains of salt, truth, and politically based decisions all add to a very cloudy picture surrounding Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. PJ Media teammates Rick Moran and Matt Margolis have each written about Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed recently: Rick about mosques openly campaigning for him and Matt about his behavior. Combine our three pieces, and we're left with a fairly accurate picture of the current affairs of one Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.

Nessel herself illustrates how complicated Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed has made things. She criticized him, endorsed him, and then asked, publicly, whether a Jewish Zionist such as herself still fits inside the coalition he wants to represent.

There are political disagreements, and then there are questions about whether you belong in the room.

ICYMI: Abdul El-Sayed Knows He's Losing — and Here's the Tell

Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed answered Nessel's question by saying he believes in a big tent and emphasizing the 95% of issues on which Democrats agree. He also expressed interest in working on the bipartisan Jewish American Security Act and acknowledged the increase in antisemitism.

Those may seem like substantive answers, but it's also interesting to see that prominent Jewish Democrats are still asking for more.

And that's what makes this episode worth watching.

The remarkable part isn't simply that some Jewish Michiganders oppose Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. Candidates lose constituencies all the time, and Jewish voters themselves are divided over him.

It's that one of Michigan's most prominent Jewish Democrats endorsed her party's Senate nominee and still looked across the table at him and essentially asked two fundamental questions:

Is there room for people like me?

And do our votes even matter?

Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed said yes.

Seventeen more Jewish Democratic leaders just made clear they're still waiting to see what the answer means in practice.

What I see is a small man with a large temper towards people who have the temerity to challenge him to his face and a connection to a religion "of peace" that openly expresses its desire to see Israel wiped from the face of the earth.

This whole Machiavellian opera truly makes me wonder one thing: What do those Jewish Democrats expect will happen if Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed wins?

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