Haley Stevens

It’s election season in Michigan, and pundits have reached for familiar tropes to talk about the Democratic primary contest for the U.S. Senate.

The race between Abdul El-Sayed, a physician and former public health official, and Haley Stevens, a four-term member of Congress, is “shaping up to be 2026’s highest stakes showdown between the party’s rising progressive insurgency and an establishment more focused on electability,” according to recent reporting from CNN.

The more local Michigan Public aptly summarized the consensus angle: “National conversations have often framed this race as an indicator for the future of the Democratic party: an outsider pushing a progressive agenda versus an establishment-backed candidate with a moderate message.”

But there’s a more honest way to describe what’s happening in Michigan: What, exactly, tens of millions in outside spending can buy in a hotly contested Democratic primary, especially from pro-war lobbies like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

AIPAC doesn’t lobby for better roads or schools, more environmental protections, affordability, or civil and voting rights – the issues most Americans and Michiganders care about. And yet its outsized spending may decide the outcome of this U.S. Senate primary, at a time when a rising number of Americans are growing opposed to its principal cause.

Domestic spending, foreign wars

AIPAC's aim is to preserve the status quo political alliance between the U.S. and Israel, characterized by virtually unconditional American taxpayer and diplomatic support for the Israeli military. It uses tens of millions in campaign spending and other influence tactics to ensure American leverage is never used to pressure the Israeli government ‒ even as Palestinian, Israeli and global human rights groups have concluded that Israel is committing genocide with American backing.

For most of my lifetime, pledging support for the so-called “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel was one of the most vigorously enforced litmus tests in American politics, in no small part due to AIPAC’s success. It would have been inconceivable even a decade ago for an Arab American politician like El-Sayed, who acknowledges Israel’s genocide in Gaza, to aspire to a seat in the U.S. Senate.

But public opinion has shifted. In 2023, for the first time on record, Americans who lean Democratic said they sympathized more with Palestinians than Israelis in the “Middle East situation” by a margin of 49-38. By 2025, that margin had widened into a chasm, with 65% of Democrats supporting Palestinians and only 17% Israelis. Three-fourths of Democrats want to end American taxpayer aid to the Israeli military, which totaled nearly $30 billion in the last five years alone. This shift has not been limited only to progressives, but the Democratic electorate overall, 95 percent of whom oppose the AIPAC-supported war on Iran.

This growing consensus has led AIPAC ‒ through its Super PAC, United Democracy Project (UDP) and other shell PACs ‒ to spend many millions in Democratic primaries to defeat the Israeli government’s most vocal critics. In 2024, AIPAC channeled more Republican donor money into Democratic primary races than any other organization, a practice that enrages many Democrats, and is also opposed by a supermajority of American Jews. UDP is the single largest spender in Michigan’s primary season, having already committed nearly $30 million worth of ads to both attack El-Sayed and boost Stevens. Whether you watched the World Cup or have a penchant for cat videos on YouTube, you are all but guaranteed to see an AIPAC ad if you live in a major population center in Michigan.

If not for this outside spending, the playing field might be radically different: In the most recent reporting period, El-Sayed outraised Stevens. And while direct fundraising prowess doesn’t always assure victory, it certainly helps.

El-Sayed and Stevens' ideology is not what this primary is about

It’s worth pausing the appreciate the absurdity of this state of affairs.

Over a quarter of Michigan families are considered cost-burdened when it comes to housing. Our roads are infamously bad. We are only a decade removed from the Flint Water Crisis, and our state has serious air and water quality concerns ‒ to say nothing of ever-more-frequent heat domes, power outages, flooding events. Yet AIPAC’s messaging is clear about its priorities. They do not promote candidates based on who has the experience, relationships, and platform to address Michigan’s biggest challenges, but rather who will reliably vote to supply billions worth of American bombs, planes and other aid to the Israeli military, despite its abysmal human rights record.

It’s true that El-Sayed’s plans would be categorized as more progressive than Stevens’s on a classic left-right spectrum. Medicare for All and the state intervention it requires – a centerpiece of El-Sayed’s campaign ‒ is a further left position than protecting ACA subsidies, as Stevens advocates.

But these are not the primary battle lines on which the election is being fought. The obsession with factional rivalry ‒ left vs center ‒ is a classic case of pundit projection. People who consume and produce horserace coverage will inevitably conflate this genre’s core assumptions with the facts on the ground. This approach also saves time on the back end; after Election Night, the post-mortems will predictably focus on which faction ultimately won.

The reality is that AIPAC is expected to spend tens of millions to defeat El-Sayed, not because he wears the “progressive” label or champions Medicare for All, nor because some of Stevens’s views might be closer to the center, but rather because El-Sayed is viewed as the candidate who will upset the status quo U.S.-Israel relationship. The vast majority of Democrats ‒ including the 70% of Jewish Democrats who oppose the unconditional military and financial assistance to Israel that AIPAC lobbies for ‒ want to see change in our foreign policy, and an end to unpopular, immoral, and expensive forever wars in the Middle East.

AIPAC spending does not advance any serious discussion on US foreign policy (their ads make no mention of Israel). It only serves to corrupt our democracy by bringing more MAGA billionaires’ money into our Democratic primaries, in service of policies that do not improve the lives of Michigan families. Michiganders are choosing not between left and center, but between AIPAC’s billionaire-backed, pro-war agenda and our own.