Tuesday night was brutal for Republicans, and one result stands out as extremely tough to accept more than any other. And I’m not talking about Texas. Texas was a shocker, no question. Even so, I expect a full self-correction in four to six years. Texas didn't become a blue state because of the Iran war and gas prices any more than Massachusetts became a red state when it elected Mitt Romney governor. South Carolina was a loss that should never have happened, but Darline Graham Norton was an exceptionally low-quality candidate.
Some losses, however, carry troubling implications, and that's what makes one race so hard to swallow. The loss that should alarm every American happened in Michigan, where Democrat Abdul El-Sayed somehow won.
Michigan hasn't sent a Republican to the Senate in decades, and Democrats always had the edge there. El-Sayed's primary victory changed the math and put the seat in play for the GOP. That primary result was bad enough on its own. It showed that Democrat voters, given the choice, will virtue signal their tolerance even if it means nominating the most extreme and radical candidate on the ballot. Still, Michigan is considered a swing state. Trump won it twice.
So how did El-Sayed pull this off? It’s not like we don’t know who he is.
During his 2018 run for governor, El-Sayed pushed to cut police funding and shrink Michigan's prison population, including sentence commutations for some people convicted of murder and rape. On the twentieth anniversary of September 11, he set the nearly three thousand Americans slaughtered by terrorists alongside deaths caused by American military operations, accusing America of spreading devastation "ignorantly in the name of my country." He later deleted that post, along with others comparing 9/11 to COVID-19 deaths and calling for a decade-long war on poverty and public health modeled on the War on Terror.
Then there's Hasan Piker, the far-left streamer who infamously declared, "America deserved 9/11, dude." Piker has praised Hamas and spewed inflammatory rhetoric about Israel, and El-Sayed campaigned alongside him again and again. Pressed to disavow Piker, El-Sayed brushed off the criticism as "cancel culture." "I'm not here to disavow people's views," he said.
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El-Sayed also held leadership roles in the University of Michigan's Muslim Students Association, a group with historical ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. His half-sister has publicly said their family has long been associated with the Brotherhood. In 2012, El-Sayed signed a letter backing Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi that urged him to "purge the media and the police as soon as possible." His father-in-law has held leadership posts at CAIR Michigan and the Islamic Society of North America, both named as unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial.
El-Sayed has refused to condemn the Muslim Brotherhood and has received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions linked to the group.
And after a terrorist attacked Temple Israel in Michigan, El-Sayed essentially argued the congregation had it coming, pointing out that the attacker's family members died in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon. "Hurt people hurt people," he said.
A man who rationalized an attack on a synagogue now sits in the United States Senate. I still can't wrap my head around it.
This never would have happened in the years right after 9/11.
Radical Islamists in America will read this victory as a green light. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's tenure has already made the city an uncomfortable place for Jews. Now that discomfort is going national.
Texas will correct itself. South Carolina will, too. But Michigan revealed something worse: a Democrat Party willing to elevate a man like this and enough voters willing to shrug it off.