On the eve of Abdul El-Sayed’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary victory over Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), CNN aired a segment featuring Michigan voters.
“I’m not voting for anybody who takes money from AIPAC,” declared Democratic voter Rome Moore.
“Why is that?” CNN asked.
Moore replied, “Because the money should be spent here, not over there.”
While not naming specific Michigan candidates, Moore could have been thinking of the moderate Stevens, who received $60 million from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups and firmly backs U.S. military aid to the Jewish state.
If so, it would suggest that this voter, at least, had been persuaded by progressive Democrat El-Sayed (who, unlike some of his hard-left confreres, does not call himself a socialist). During his primary campaign, El-Sayed made antiwar, anti-foreign aid rhetoric a central part of his messaging. As he told Detroit Public Radio in late May, “We should be using our tax dollars here to invest in health care here and education here, rather than sending it over there to buy bombs and tanks that get used to drive apartheid and genocide there.”
“I don’t have AIPAC behind me,” El-Sayed continued. “I am going to be the biggest opponent that they have in the 2026 cycle, and they’ve already said I’m the single biggest danger to the U.S.-Israel relationship.” Nor is this opposition to foreign aid restricted to the funds America gives to Israel: “It has nothing to do with my position on any one group of people,” El-Sayed has said, “because frankly, I don’t think we should be sending foreign military aid to Egypt either, where my family came from.”
After El-Sayed’s Democratic win, Donald Trump immediately endorsed his Republican opponent, the former Michigan congressman Mike Rogers. “America First Patriot Mike Rogers is running for U.S. Senate in the Great State of Michigan, a State I love and WON BIG!” Trump wrote.
The first thing Trump called Rogers was “America First,” a political branding the president by no means created but repopularized like no other politician of the 21st century.
Yet in his second term, Trump has found himself overseeing precisely the kind of foreign war that he once promised to avoid in the name of “America First”—and, arguably worse, seemingly at the behest of a foreign country whose interests don’t necessarily line up with those of the United States.
Still, Trump was elected twice bashing the neoconservative foreign adventurism so prevalent in his party in the past (and George W. Bush’s Iraq War in particular).
And whatever he might call himself now, Mike Rogers is still an unrepentant Bush-Cheney Republican who not only voted for the Iraq War in 2002 but supported the entire Global War on Terror package of endless conflict, torture and mass surveillance. (AIPAC announced its unabashed support for this longtime advocate of foreign aid and staunch Israel supporter immediately after the primary results were known.)
This has given El-Sayed an opening. As the Democratic candidate said on Wednesday morning, “What’s funny about Mike Rogers is that he’s like the worst of all versions of the Republican Party, right?”
“He’s the worst of the neocon version,” he added. “I mean, he was in the House during the entirety of the Iraq War.”
This is not a column about whether a socialist Democrat is preferable to a neocon-flavored Republican. This is not a column about whether El-Sayed’s hard left politics might make him easier for a Republican to beat in Michigan’s general election. It is not about whether this Democrat possibly becoming the first Muslim-American senator might be a help or hindrance for him in his state.
It is not even about whether Trump’s record-low approval ratings have now opened up the electoral doors for a crop of socialist candidates who might have never seen daylight otherwise but are now having a moment.
It is about whether El-Sayed or Rogers is more “America First.” It is about which candidate can say with greater justice that he is putting our country first, and which candidate has the better claim to the mantle that helped Trump twice enter the Oval Office.
And right now, before campaigning for the general election really gets underway, El-Sayed seems to have the “America First” advantage.
Even taking a snapshot of the current U.S. policy toward Iran of both major parties, last week only four House Republicans voted with 210 Democrats to pass a war powers resolution to end the U.S. war with Iran.
If, as seems reasonable, a central criterion of “America First” is the prioritization of America’s domestic problems over continuing a foreign war 6,000 miles away, the Republican Party does not pass the test.
El-Sayed’s stance is also not unique to him. He sits among a new crop of Democratic socialists who have won Democratic primaries recently in New York and other states.
In early July, journalist Glenn Greenwald observed of New York’s District 7 Democratic primary winner, avowed socialist Claire Valdez:
Note how Claire Valdez—when asked about Israel or foreign policy generally—emphasizes the need to stop burning American resources on Israel and foreign wars and instead invest them in American communities for the American working class: a potent MAGA political message not all that long ago.
When the self-described democratic socialist mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, participated in a debate during his campaign, each candidate was asked if he or she would like to visit Israel. And Mamdani, as none other than popular commentator Tucker Carlson observed to former Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, “was the only person in the New York City mayor’s debate to say he wanted to focus on New York City.”
All of the others had answers, Carlson noted, adding that “I think most said Israel.” But Mamdani stood out to the populist conservative, because “he [Mamdani] said, ‘I wouldn’t go anywhere. I’d stay in New York. And like, if I want to meet Jewish constituents, I go to their synagogues, their homes or whatever, but I’d be here in New York because that’s what I’m doing.”
“I’m running New York. That’s my job,” Carlson concluded.
Greene agreed with Carlson’s observation, saying that Mamdani gave the “right answer” (it is no coincidence that Carlson, Greene, Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie, former Trump intelligence official Joe Kent, and other conservative dissidents are now working on a project to give voters an “America First” option).
And leftist podcaster Hasan Piker said at El-Sayed’s victory party this week that the new batch of ascendant socialists and antiwar Democrats winning primaries now represents the “real America First movement.”
Does Piker have a point? More importantly, might El-Sayed and similar dissident Democrats now be able to make this point in a way that resonates with voters?
All the ingredients are there.
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Conservatives should not want socialists to succeed with their domestic projects. Traditional conservatives should also, naturally and definitionally, seek to put their own country before others.
The Trump administration does not appear to be doing this in the Middle East right now, and polls show that Americans notice.
If socialist Democrats are able to make a better “America First” case than the MAGA Republicans who once deserved that moniker, that may say more about those Republicans than their left-wing opponents.
