A Democratic candidate in a crucial Senate battleground showdown is taking plenty of incoming fire from his primary rivals as well as the Republican contender in the race as he prepares to team up on Tuesday with a controversial far-left online streamer.
Abdul El-Sayed, the 2018 Michigan Democratic gubernatorial runner-up who is backed by progressive champion Sen. I-Vt., as he seeks his party’s 2026 Senate nomination, is scheduled to hold campus rallies at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University with Hasan Piker, as well as with progressive Rep. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania.
Piker, a potent progressive influencer, could help boost El-Sayed in a competitive and combustible thanks to his millions of younger, progressive social media followers on YouTube, Instagram and X.
But the appearance at the campus rallies by Piker â who once said “America deserved 9/11,” and who critics argue is antisemitic due to his sharp criticism of the Israeli government and the downplaying of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel â is alarming to many Democrats.
El-Sayed’s top two rivals for the nomination have blasted his scheduled appearance with Piker, which was announced less than two weeks after a man rammed his truck into a , wounding a guard in what authorities said was a targeted act of domestic terrorism against the Jewish community.
“It is unacceptable for a candidate wanting to represent all Michiganders to campaign with Hasan Piker, a person who is unapologetic about a career of making hurtful and anti-Semitic comments,” Rep. Haley Stevens said in a statement. “With all that’s at stake in this election, we should be focused on the challenges Michiganders are facing and how to fight for them.”
And State Senator Mallory McMorrow, in an interview with the Jewish Insider, called Piker “somebody who says extremely offensive things in order to generate clicks.”
“That is not somebody that you should be campaigning with at a moment when there is clearly a lot of pain and trauma across our state,” McMorrow added. “You dont fan the flames and stoke division just to get attention.”
El-Sayed, Stevens, and McMorrow will face off in an early August primary.
It’s not just El Sayed’s who are criticizing his decision to team up with Piker.
Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and the Anti-Defamation League have charged Piker is antisemitic and Matt Bennett, a leader of the well-known moderate Democratic group the Third Way, slammed El-Sayed as a “disgrace to the Democratic Party.” Â
Former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, who’s on a glidepath to the GOP Senate nomination in Michigan for a second straight cycle, told Fox News Digital in a statement, “If you would have told me a few years ago that Democrat frontrunners would campaign with known antisemites, I would’ve thought you were crazy. But one thing Abdul continues to prove, there’s no limit to how far left Democrats will go.”
“From calling to defund the police and make Michigan a sanctuary state, to attempting to abolish private healthcare, and now campaigning with an antisemite who claimed America deserved 9/11, one thing that’s for certain: Abdul and the Democrats are too radical for Michigan,” Rogers argued.
In the wake of the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack that incited , Piker described Hamas, a terrorist organization, as the “lesser of two evils” in the conflict.
Once, when asked if he supported terrorism, Piker answered by saying, “No, I dont. I dont support the state of Israel, and I dont support the state of the United States of America.”
He also faced backlash for praising the “brave” “mujahideen” who injured Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, who lost an eye in Afghanistan.
“What the f— is wrong with this dude? Didn’t he go to war and like literally lose his ey
