Photographs by Nic AntayaYou won’t find a much harsher critic of the Democratic Party than the progressive trying to secure its nomination for Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed. When I caught up with him last week in Ann Arbor, he was at a café holding an outdoor roundtable with young voters, many of them college students or recent graduates. The normally voluble El-Sayed, drinking matcha and dressed casually in his signature tight black T-shirt and jeans, listened as much as he talked, and he heard the students describe their disillusionment with politics—and especially with Democratic candidates. “Your generation has a great bullshit meter, because you’re fed bullshit online all day,” El-Sayed told the group. “And the Democratic Party brand right now is so bullshit.” It was not a statement with which any of the students seemed to disagree. “You tell it like it is, and that’s what we young people want,” Joe Garris, the president of the College Democrats at Eastern Michigan University, told El-Sayed. “We don’t want to hear corporate answers anymore. We just want the straight truth.” One of the few factors that could impede a Democratic wave in this year’s midterms is the party’s own unpopularity; polling suggests plenty of voters outside college campuses might also nod along to El-Sayed’s denunciation of Democrats. Antipathy toward the party is fueling the rise of populist insurgents such as El-Sayed, who castigate Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer with nearly as much fervor as they criticize President Trump. Nowhere are the lines dividing Democrats more clearly drawn than in Michigan, a state that they must win to have any real chance of retaking the Senate majority in November. Democrats have to flip four Republican-held seats without losing any of their own, and Michigan is the Democratic-held seat at the most risk of going red. (The incumbent, Senator Gary Peters, is retiring.) El-Sayed is battling Representative Haley Stevens in the August 4 primary, and the winner will face former Representative Mike Rogers, a formidable GOP candidate who came within roughly 20,000 votes of capturing Michigan’s other Senate seat two years ago.A 41-year-old doctor, Rhodes Scholar, and former county health director, El-Sayed is running as an unabashed critic of Israel and of corruption in both parties. He begins rallies with a call-and-response incantation of his campaign slogan: “Money out of … politics! Money in your … pocket! Medicare for … all!” I sat down with him after his event in Ann Arbor and asked him to specify the parts of the Democratic brand that he believes are “bullshit.” He began with some of his campaign themes and described Democrats as hypocrites in thrall to corporate donors. “You say you’re for human rights and can’t name a genocide a genocide,” El-Sayed said. “You say you want to give people health care, but take money from the people who are keeping us from having health care. You say you want to stand up to Big Tech and take money from Big Tech.”Nic Antaya for The AtlanticA yard sign for Abdul El-Sayed in Ferndale, Michigan.Nic Antaya for The AtlanticA person claps during an El-Sayed rally.“What are we actually for?” El-Sayed continued. “Are we just the permanent opposition party where ‘We’re not them’?” Then, referring to Republicans, he added, “At least they’re honest about who they are for the most part.” This message should be familiar to those who have watched progressives and democratic socialists topple establishment favorites in New York City, Colorado, and Maine over the past several months. But Michigan is a state that Trump carried in 2024, and many Democrats fear that nominating a candidate who calls for abolishing ICE and establishing a single-payer health-care system is too big a risk in such a crucial year for the party. El-Sayed is also seeking to be the first Muslim senator at a time when some Republicans are fomenting unrestrained Islamophobia. A poll released on Tuesday found Stevens running even with Rogers while El-Sayed trailed him by 10 points in a hypothetical general-election matchup. [Read: Something is happening in the Democratic base] El-Sayed’s confidence can border on cockiness—some Democrats see his strident attacks on Stevens as demeaning or even sexist—and he has leaned into the electability debate. Ahead of the 2028 presidential race, he and his progressive supporters view the Michigan contest as an opportunity to extinguish what they see as stale Democratic beliefs about the types of candidates that can win in swing states. “This is just a different time, and this time calls for different kinds of candidates,” El-Sayed told me. “I hope that coming out of this election, the question of electability is no longer asked and interpreted in the same way.” He turns the argument back against Stevens, who has trailed in many polls despite benefiting from more than $60 million worth of ads bolstering her candidacy and attacking El-Sayed (about half of it coming from AIPAC). “If you can’t get elected without $60 million being spent for you, you can’t get elected. I’m so sorry,” El-Sayed said. The progressives’ chief data point is Trump’s 2024 win, which they interpret not as an endorsement of the president’s vision but as a rejection of Democrats and the political system more broadly. “You know what people hate more than Trump? Politics as usual. They hate politics as usual so much that they were willing to take Trump, warts and all,” El-Sayed told me. “So what happens if you offer them something that’s not politics as usual and isn’t a megalomaniacal billionaire narcissist? Well, let’s see.”Nic Antaya for The AtlanticRepresentative Haley Stevens laughs with supporters at the the Michigan Conference of Teamsters in Detroit on July 24.Stevens is in many ways the quintessential swing-state Democratic Senate candidate. A former Obama-administration official who worked on the auto-rescue task force during his first term, she won a Republican-held House seat in the Detroit suburbs in 2018. Her trajectory is broadly similar to that of Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA analyst and Pentagon official who was elected to Congress in 2018 and then narrowly defeated Rogers in the 2024 Senate race. In the House, Stevens has distinguished herself mostly through her loyalty to the Democratic leadership. She provided a reliable vote for President Biden’s major initiatives and enthusiastically backed his 2024 reelection bid even after many in the party were calling for him to drop out. Stevens’s campaign for Senate is well funded but also exceedingly conventional. She emphasizes her Michigan roots, her ties to Obama, and what she’s done for the state in Congress. Taking aim at El-Sayed’s personal wealth, Stevens likes to point out that she’s the only Senate candidate who’s not a millionaire, and she criticized him repeatedly for not releasing a complete financial disclosure. (He released it just before their final debate this week; it showed he’s worth as much as $2.1 million and earned income from a rental property his wife owns in Dubai.) Still, Stevens has not been able to generate the same amount of energy as El-Sayed, nor does she seem desperate to try. Over my three days in Michigan, he held at least eight events across the southern part of the state; she publicized just two, and her campaign declined to make her available for an interview. (It has helped El-Sayed that, unlike Stevens, he does not have to juggle campaigning with an important day job: “I’m Abdul. I’m 41, I’m unemployed, and I spend my time asking people for money,” El-Sayed joked to the students in Ann Arbor as he introduced himself.) [Read: The return of the Democratic manly man] Polling in the race has been murky. Surveys conducted by groups aligned with El-Sayed’s campaign have shown him up by double digits, as did an independent poll released today. But a Detroit News poll earlier this month found Stevens leading by nearly seven points. Supporters of Stevens had hoped the early-July exit of a third major candidate, State Senator Mallory McMorrow, would help her consolidate support. But one of McMorrow’s most prominent backers, Senator Elizabeth Warren, campaigned with El-Sayed over the weekend. With El-Sayed holding strong, Michigan’s most prominent Democrats have rallied behind Stevens in a bid to deny him the nomination. This spring, former Senator Debbie Stabenow endorsed Stevens. Then, soon after McMorrow dropped out, Stevens gained the endorsement of the retiring Peters, a former chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee who had earlier indicated he would stay out of the primary to succeed him. By far the biggest get for Stevens, however, was Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the state’s most popular Democrat, who announced her endorsement last Friday, a day before the start of early voting. Whitmer appeared that afternoon alongside Stevens and another key establishment backer, Representative James Clyburn, at a union rally in Detroit, where Stevens is counting on a big turnout among the city’s Black community. Without mentioning El-Sayed’s name, Whitmer strongly suggested Stevens would be the stronger general-election candidate. “Michiganders understand better than anyone that our vote has a consequence for every American,” Whitmer said. “We also know that winning Michigan is as tough as it gets. But as someone who won statewide twice, I know Haley is tougher than the environment we’ve got to win in.”Nic Antaya for The AtlanticEl-Sayed addresses the crowd in Ferndale.The primary race has turned nasty in its closing weeks, a concern for Democrats hoping that the party can unify to defeat Rogers, who has coasted to the GOP nomination without significant opposition. Stevens’s supporters erupted after El-Sayed implied to Semafor that she could not “string together two coherent sentences.” Soon after, he urged his supporters to stop making fun of Stevens “for things that have nothing to do with her policies or politics.” The flap may have helped Stevens find her voice—literally in a certain sense. She has turned her thick Michigan accent into a calling card of authenticity. “Some of you have seen, there’s those cool kids on the internet. They’re doing the cool-kid chatter. Some of them might be the coastal elites making fun of how I talk,” she told the crowd in Detroit, which laughed loudly. “They’re thinking they’re better than us. And what they don’t know is I am your voice, and their jokes and their criticism only makes me fight harder.” [Read: One morning of controlled chaos in Maine] As I talked with voters in Detroit and its suburbs, it seemed apparent that after such a bitter primary, either candidate could struggle to assemble the coalition they would need to win in November. Younger voters filled El-Sayed’s events, and several of them told me they weren’t sure they would support Stevens if she were the nominee. The image painted by El-Sayed of Stevens as a politician beholden to big-money interests had taken hold. “She would depress the youth vote,” Scott Siegal, a 24-year-old student, told me at an El-Sayed rally in Ferndale. If Stevens wins the nomination, he said, “I’d probably just not vote.” Colin Takata, a 27-year-old who works for an audio company, said of Stevens: “It almost feels like she’s a corporation in a trench coat.” At the Stevens rally, some of her supporters said they found El-Sayed likeable and appealing, but they favored Stevens’s experience and had concerns about his ability to win. “I have nothing against the brother. He’s a nice guy,” Robert Royster, a funeral director in Detroit, told me. “But she has receipts.” Others, however, took offense at El-Sayed’s treatment of Stevens. “From what I’ve heard, I don’t think he likes women,” Tyrone, a former auto worker who declined to give his last name in discussing such a fraught primary, told me. Long-simmering tensions between the Arab and Black communities in Detroit could also hamper El-Sayed. One of the first attendees I spoke with at the Stevens rally told me he didn’t care for El-Sayed in part because he doesn’t like Arab people. He was not the only person at the event who expressed such prejudice. Tyrone Carter, a state representative from Detroit backing Stevens, acknowledged the Arab-Black tensions in the city. “They’re real, and they exist,” he told me at the rally.Some of the nation’s most popular progressives have come to Michigan to campaign with El-Sayed, including Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (as well as Warren). But an endorsement he values as highly as any of those has come from a Democrat with a far lower national profile, at least for now: Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. El-Sayed told me he wants to see Van Hollen replace Schumer as the Democratic leader in the Senate; Van Hollen says he’s “kicking the tires” on a 2028 presidential run instead, though he has notably not told El-Sayed to stop promoting him for the Senate leadership. [Read: New York’s warning for Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer]Nic Antaya for The AtlanticStevens signs line the wall at the Michigan Conference of Teamsters.As a chair of the Democratic campaign committee first in the House and then, more recently, in the Senate, Van Hollen was responsible for recruiting candidates in the party’s toughest races. Many of those picks looked and sounded a lot more like Stevens than El-Sayed. But Van Hollen has become one of the Senate’s staunchest critics of Israel, and he told me the Trump era has changed his view about electability. “I think people want somebody who’s going to rock the boat,” he said, pointing to the election of “a convicted felon” to the presidency. “I think Donald Trump’s election was a symptom of a deeper unrest among voters. That unrest is real.” When I asked him if he agreed with El-Sayed’s assessment that the Democratic Party’s brand is “bullshit,” Van Hollen did not repeat the word, but he didn’t dispute it, either. Were he to win in November, El-Sayed would be the most progressive candidate elected in a swing state in modern times, but he keeps some space between himself and the leftward bound of today’s Democrats. He is not a democratic socialist, and when the question comes up, his position hews closer to Elizabeth Warren than to Bernie Sanders. “I think that capitalism is, when it actually works, an efficient way to allocate resources,” El-Sayed told me. “It’s not working right now.” “I know that the establishment desperately wants to turn me into a DSA candidate,” he went on. “I’m just not, and it bothers them so much.” El-Sayed is right about that. Neither his Democratic critics nor the Republicans who seem to be awaiting his nomination with glee are apt to make that distinction for Michigan voters. And if he defeats Stevens next week, the general election will test just how far the progressive movement can advance in this political era. It’s an opportunity that El-Sayed and his supporters have been waiting years to grab.