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Speaking to a modest<\/span> crowd of voters inside a Canton brewery on Tuesday evening, Mallory McMorrow, a leading candidate for Senate in the swing state of Michigan, made an anti-war appeal as President Donald Trump\u2019s threats<\/a> to kill \u201ca whole civilization\u201d hung over Iran and the world.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a moment for people to stand up and to decide who they are actually for \u2014 are they for the Constitution, are they for Americans, are they for Michiganders, or are they for Donald Trump?\u201d McMorrow said<\/a> to applause. She encouraged Democrats to consider invoking the 25th Amendment as an option to counter Trump.<\/p>\n Later that evening, 17 miles to the west before a packed auditorium at the University of Michigan, McMorrow\u2019s opponent Abdul El-Sayed also criticized the war \u2014 and a key distraction from it.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOur president is waging a genocidal, illegal, unjustifiable war with Iran that is torching our tax dollars to the tune of $1.5 billion a day,\u201d El-Sayed said. And yet, \u201capparently the most important thing happening on Twitter was whether or not we were gonna campaign with Hasan.\u201d He was referring to the popular political streamer Hasan Piker, who stood by his side at two 600-attendee university rallies that day, the largest of any campaign events in Michigan so far this year.\u00a0<\/p>\n The primary contest between McMorrow, a Michigan state senator, and El-Sayed, a physician and former candidate for governor<\/a>, has turned into a referendum over the future of the Democratic Party and who should lead its insurgent left flank. The two are locked in a three-way race for Michigan\u2019s Democratic Senate nomination with Rep. Haley Stevens, a moderate with establishment backing<\/a> who led the polls early on but has since seen her popularity slip. McMorrow and El-Sayed have both positioned themselves as outsiders to D.C. who promise progressive policies to help Michiganders struggling in an increasingly unaffordable economy \u2014 but the finer points, like debates over appropriate language and acceptable surrogates, reveal a deeper source of uncertainty: How far left is too far for the Democrats?<\/p>\n How far left is too far for the Democrats?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n \u201cThis is almost like a proxy fight for 2028 in the presidential election,\u201d said Adam Carlson, a political consultant and pollster behind Zenith Research. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like an AOC versus \u2018insert more progressive center-left politician here.\u2019 I think that whichever side comes out victorious will claim that as a mantle.\u201d<\/p>\n Michigan is a state of key presidential importance. Its voters have backed the winner in every presidential election since 2008, swinging for Trump both times he won and against him the one time he lost. The 2026 general election for Senate is poised to be a close contest between the parties, too: In retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters\u2019s last election in 2020, he fended off Republican challenger John James by a slim 1.7 percent margin. Democratic Sen. Elisa Slotkin won her seat by an even slimmer margin, defeating Republican Mike Rogers by less than 1 percentage point in 2024. Rogers is running again this year.<\/p>\n As the Democratic Party seeks to consolidate support against Republicans, the fury over seemingly minor events like Piker\u2019s appearance speaks to a growing gap between its establishment and the younger, more progressive part of its base. Piker, a leftist streamer who commands a massive audience in an online format often dominated by the far right<\/a>, has been both held up as an essential asset for the left and shunned by centrists for his critical view of the U.S. and Israel\u2019s role on the world stage.<\/p>\n Comparing Piker to the far-right, neo-Nazi podcaster Nick Fuentes, McMorrow told Jewish Insider<\/a>, \u201cThat 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,\u201d a reference to a March 12 attack in which a U.S. citizen whose relatives the Israeli military killed in Lebanon rammed his car into a Michigan synagogue and opened fire before killing himself.<\/p>\n A McMorrow campaign staffer told The Intercept that the comments were given to Jewish Insider as a part of a longer feature story<\/a> about the Temple Israel synagogue attack and her connections to the Jewish community; McMorrow\u2019s husband and daughter are Jewish. But to El-Sayed, who released a lengthy statement decrying the synagogue attack, McMorrow\u2019s comments revealed a disproportionate \u201chierarchy of pain,\u201d in which the suffering of Jewish people matters more than that of the Arab and Muslim communities to which El-Sayed belongs. Piker, meanwhile, has objected to characterizations of his pro-Palestine politics as antisemitic<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThe south of Lebanon where a lot of communities in Michigan come from has a dire history<\/a> of being destroyed by Israel<\/a>,\u201d El-Sayed said. \u201cIsrael right now is setting up to annex parts of southern Lebanon. If you have family who are dying or displaced in a war, that is deeply painful. There are a lot of people all over the state who are sad, but certainly, if you got family members who are running for cover because of Israeli bombs, you\u2019re going to be pretty sad.\u201d<\/p>\n That this ideological debate manifested in outrage over Piker \u2014 largely driven<\/a> by the neoliberal think tank Third Way<\/a> \u2014 suggests a fearful response from the party establishment to the surge of younger, progressive candidates, Carlson said. He sees the attacks as an attempt by the establishment to hold on to influence within the party, with the ultimate hope of sending a more moderate candidate into the presidential election<\/a>.<\/p>\n Rallying with El-Sayed at Michigan State University, Piker criticized Democrats who spent the last several weeks attacking him rather than decrying Trump\u2019s war on Iran<\/a>, singling out McMorrow and Stevens by name, drawing boos and jeers from the crowd.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s exactly what\u2019s wrong with politics in this day and age, and that\u2019s why all of you came here,\u201d he said, connecting the moment to the student protests against Israel\u2019s genocide in Gaza<\/a>. \u201cFor two-and-a-half years, they smeared people like myself and people like yourselves, and said that we were radical, said that we were wrong, and yet, we persevered, and we understood the violence that was taking place.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cMallory is about<\/span> representing everybody,\u201d a spokesperson for her campaign told The Intercept. \u201cThere\u2019s a way to satisfy people who do have bold, progressive visions of what it is that they want to see in terms of policy, and meeting them there and saying, \u2018This is how we get to your goal.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n This brand of progressivism<\/a> has put her in a tricky position, seeking to appeal both to voters who want to see a stronger fight out of establishment figures like Stevens and those who view El-Sayed as too radical. Former Bernie Sanders speech writer and founder of The Lever David Sirota labeled her a \u201cclickbait candidate<\/a>\u201d over a campaign ad<\/a> against surveillance pricing, pointing out that she had not introduced legislation to halt the practice in the state Senate, and instead voted for tax incentives to build data centers in 2024. (The tax incentives also included environmental and consumer protection measures.)\u00a0<\/p>\n Such debates over progressive labels may have limited significance to actual voters, experts and analysts told The Intercept.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of this division is a national Democrat division that regular voters don\u2019t care about and\/or are ignorant of,\u201d said Corwin Smidt, a political science professor at Michigan State University.<\/p>\n Amanda Litman, co-founder and president of Run for Something, which backed McMorrow in her successful seat-flipping 2018 state Senate run, agreed that many people don\u2019t vote based on ideological labels.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThis conversation about progressive versus moderate, leftist versus centrist \u2014 that\u2019s not how most people think,\u201d Litman said. \u201cThey think my housing is really expensive<\/a> and my child care bills are really high<\/a>, and why the fuck is Congress fighting about like TSA and why are the lines at the airports long? That\u2019s where voters are.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n El-Sayed and McMorrow diverge in key areas where voters have pushed Democrats to be bolder<\/a>. McMorrow has called for drastic reforms of Immigration and Customs Enforcement; El-Sayed calls for ICE\u2019s abolition. El-Sayed is running on Medicare for All and co-wrote a book on the policy; McMorrow advocates for a public option, which her campaign said she sees as an initial step toward enacting universal health are. El-Sayed has called for ending all military aid to Israel \u2014 in line with a recent high-profile pledge<\/a> made by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez \u2014 and McMorrow has said she would halt sending offensive weapons to Israel, while maintaining other weapons, such as the Iron Dome. (Stevens has regularly voted in favor of sending weapons to Israel, called to lower Medicare costs, and pushed for ICE accountability measures.)\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMy opponents each have the same policy positions,\u201d El-Sayed told The Intercept. \u201cOne of them has better comms and more charisma. The other one has the DSCC establishment behind them.\u201d<\/p>\n McMorrow\u2019s campaign rejected the assertion that her platform is indistinguishable from Stevens, calling McMorrow\u2019s plan a \u201c21st century agenda to bring back the American dream and make it actually work for people.\u201d<\/p>\n She has decried the application of a \u201cpolitical purity test\u201d over how to describe Israel\u2019s genocide in Gaza. El-Sayed was the first among the candidates to use the word, joining the overwhelming international<\/a> consensus<\/a> among human rights organizations<\/a> as well as the independent United Nations commission on Palestine. McMorrow embraced the term in October but maintained, in a January radio interview, that she finds litmus testing over it unproductive. She differentiated between the genocide of Palestinians and the Holocaust, which she said, \u201cdoes mean something very different and very visceral.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf you can\u2019t call that what it is, a genocide, then I\u2019m so sorry, but it\u2019s very difficult to believe that you\u2019re actually going to show up and do the things that you say you\u2019re going to do,\u201d El-Sayed told The Intercept, without mentioning McMorrow by name.<\/p>\n Basim Elkarra, executive director of Council on American-Islamic Relations Action, which has endorsed El-Sayed, said in places with large Middle Eastern and North African communities, especially swing states like Michigan, these issues will prove critical in elections as Israel continues its wars on Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. The Uncommitted Movement<\/a> of 2024, which motivated 13 percent of Michigan\u2019s Democratic primary voters to cast protest votes while calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo<\/a> on Israel, began in Michigan\u2019s MENA community and snowballed into a national movement.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cFolks are going to have to go through these communities in order to win in Michigan,\u201d Elkarra said, \u201cso it doesn\u2019t help to alienate this growing voting bloc.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n