Abdul El-Sayed's COVID Radicalism Is a Callback to a More United Party

Most of the votes are in, and it looks like former public health official Abdul El-Sayed is going to win the Michigan Democratic Party’s much-watched Senate primary. 

Coverage of the race has treated it as the latest battle in Democrats’ civil war; the progressive (but not officially socialist) El-Sayed was going up against the more moderate Rep. Haley Stevens (D–Mich.). El-Sayed’s likely victory would seem to confirm that Democrats’ left flank is ascendent in this intra-party struggle. 

The well-covered fissures between El-Sayed and Stevens include their stances on Israel (El-Sayed calls Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide, Stevens wants military aid to the country to continue) and healthcare (the former wants Medicare for All, the latter merely supports a public option). 

Interestingly, one criticism that Stevens did not levy against El-Sayed was his extreme progressivism during COVID. 

As right-wing websites have extensively covered in the final days of the primary, during the summer of 2020, El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former director of Wayne County’s health department, expressed simultaneous support for lockdowns and mass demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s death. 

“There is no fair pitting of the protests for Black lives against public health,” El-Sayed said to liberal podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen, per Breitbart. “Unless you devalue the lives that we’re fighting for, which are Black lives, by saying that they’re somehow less important to focus on than the lives that are lost to COVID-19, which, by the way, are disproportionately Black lives as well, then there is no coherent approach to pitting these protests against public health.”

He was backing renewed lockdowns well into 2021. 

One would think that this peak wokism might be a fruitful avenue of attack for Stevens as she tried to paint her opponent as excessively left-wing. 

A possible reason that she demurred is that El-Sayed’s pro-lockdown unless it’s a left-wing protest position is the one that effectively everyone in the Democratic Party adopted during the summer of 2020. 

For all the talk of a Democratic civil war, the pandemic shows how recently the left and liberal wings of the party were in lockstep on the issue of the day. 

Stevens herself gave less explicit support for Black Lives Matter protests than El-Sayed, but she did express the requisite “love” for George Floyd at the time while signing on to Democrats’ criminal justice legislation. 

On COVID specifically, she urged people to “listen to Dr. Fauci” while she voted for trillions in pandemic stimulus funds and criticized efforts to target those stimulus funds to the truly needy. 

During the primary, Stevens’ moderate campaign bid received the support of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who issued lockdown orders that closed schools and banned people from buying seeds at the hardware store while also offering full-throated support for George Floyd protests. 

The governor’s support for demonstrations did come with the weak request that mass demonstrations follow “social distancing guidelines.” 

Support for COVID mandates, trillions in federal COVID spending, and anti-racist criminal justice reform was the glue that held the Democratic Party together during the presidency of Joe Biden. 

Arguably, one of the reasons that no one in the party was able to launch a successful challenge to Biden’s bid for a second term until long after it became undeniable he was not physically up for the job was that no one within the party (progressive or moderate) had a real policy critique to level at this COVID-era three-legged stool. 

But COVID is far enough in the rearview mirror that it can’t serve as a unifying force for the party anymore. It doesn’t help that voters found extreme public health and fiscal interventions to counter the pandemic, and all the inflation and crime spikes that came with it, unpalatable enough to elect Donald Trump again. 

Democrats are still united in their opposition to Trump. Yet the current president’s unpopular wars, trade policies, and corruption haven’t proven enough of a crisis to get all of the party on the same page. 

Instead, issues like the Israel-Palestine conflict and socializing healthcare rule the day. They’re divisive enough that while El-Sayed was expected to win, the primary was not a blowout by any means. 

For Democrats to be united again, they’ll need another pandemic. Until then, expect the intra-party civil war to continue.

The post Abdul El-Sayed’s COVID Radicalism Is a Callback to a More United Party appeared first on Reason.com.

Source: https://reason.com/2026/08/05/abdul-el-sayeds-covid-radicalism-is-a-callback-to-a-more-united-party/