Politics
Michigan’s three-car pileup of a primary has Senate Democrats worried
DETROIT — As a professional driver navigated a gleaming new Ford Bronco Sport up a steep ridge, Mallory McMorrow found herself pinned in the back seat clinging to the overhead roll bar.
The Detroit Auto Show course is designed to show off the Bronco’s capabilities — while putting an escapist scare into its thrill-seeking passengers. But it just reminded McMorrow of her day-to-day reality running for Michigan’s open Senate seat.
“It’s a teeter-totter, man,” McMorrow told Blue Light News about her race, after having navigated a very literal giant teeter-totter in the Bronco. “It could go any direction.”
McMorrow is locked in a tight three-way primary with Rep. Haley Stevens and physician Abdul El-Sayed that has emerged as a test for what the next generation of Democrats will look like — and whether they can win a key swing-state election that will help determine Senate control.
In recent days, the trio of candidates’ squabbles careened hour to hour from whether they should embrace Medicare for All, to how far Democrats should go in fighting ICE. In fact, the contest has emerged as a catch-all for every question and problem plaguing Democrats politically and tactically: Where should they stand on Israel and Gaza? Should they send their aging congressional leaders packing? What does electability look like in this political environment? Should Democrats tap into the attention economy or focus on traditional campaigning?
El-Sayed, on the left, has taken consistently maximalist positions fitting for a man who wrote a book titled “Medicare For All: A Citizen’s Guide” and has vocal support from Sen. Bernie Sanders. Stevens, a classic swing-state centrist favored by many establishment Democrats, has taken smaller-bore stances. Between them sits McMorrow, who’s aiming to appeal to voters in both of their lanes.
But this three-way battle to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) isn’t just about what direction the Democratic Party takes in Washington — it’s whether they can get there in the first place.
Democrats think they see a route back to the Senate majority. But if they don’t hold on to their seat in Michigan, that faint path won’t materialize.
“It’s already a long shot, but it’s a doable thing — but not without Michigan,” said David Axelrod, the longtime senior adviser to former President Barack Obama.
Axelrod called it the “most fascinating and consequential primary” in the country.
Democratic leaders both in Michigan and D.C. are growing more worried by the day that the hard-fought contest, which won’t be decided until the August primary, will exacerbate ideological tensions and leave the nominee in a weakened position heading into a contest against former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.).
“We’re used to having long primaries,” Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) told Blue Light News. “No one loves them, but we’re used to having them. And I don’t think it’s insurmountable.”
For now, the race is wide open.
Most public polls have found a tight three-way race in the primary, with Stevens or McMorrow holding a slight lead depending on the survey; in those same polls, Stevens runs slightly ahead of Rogers in the general election, with McMorrow just a bit behind her and El-Sayed a bit further back.
Stevens has a fundraising edge. According to the latest Federal Election Commission reports, which posted on Saturday, she brought in $2.1 million in the past quarter and has $3 million cash on hand; McMorrow and El-Sayed both raised around $1.75 million and each has just under $2 million in the bank. Rogers raised just under $2 million and has just under $3.5 million cash on hand.
Part of the lack of separation in the polls is that voters haven’t engaged yet. The campaigns don’t expect cleavage until paid media starts happening in full (El-Sayed is the only candidate so far to roll out a statewide ad.)
“Only the most political have started to click in,” Slotkin said.
Michigan Democrats also worried about the impact the primary could have on the rest of the party as they fight to hold on to term-limited Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s office and win back control of the Legislature.
Whitmer, with her 60 percent approval rating, is facing a pressure campaign from some in the party to endorse either Stevens or McMorrow early in the race to narrow the field, according to two senior Michigan Democratic officials granted anonymity to speak about private discussions. Otherwise, one of them worried, “we could see real losses.”
Whitmer and El-Sayed duked it out in a 2018 gubernatorial primary, and the officials say bad blood remains between them.
A Whitmer spokesperson declined to comment.
A clash of ideologies
The candidates have sharp ideological divides on major issues including health care, Israel and Gaza and accepting corporate PAC money.
After a second person was killed by a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis, the three candidates’ diverging approach to ICE and its funding supercharged the primary.
While McMorrow and Stevens glad-handed at the Detroit Auto Show and union halls around the MLK holiday, after immigration agents killed Renee Good and before they killed Alex Pretti, El-Sayed, who has championed the Abolish ICE movement since 2018, went to Minneapolis and filmed man-on-the-street interviews for social media that were reminiscent of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s successful viral campaign videos.
He told Blue Light News he was there to “understand what it looks like when an arm of the government lays siege to a city in America.” (El-Sayed also jetted to California for a fundraiser earlier that week).
McMorrow has expressed supportfor reforms to ICE, such as requiring agents to be unmasked, and argues Republicans and Democrats should “deny DHS one penny more until complete overhaul and accountability of this agency” happens.
Stevens, meanwhile, is co-sponsoring a bill that would divert what she called ICE’s $75 billion “slush fund” to state and local law enforcement agencies; she has also called for DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s impeachment.
The candidates are also at odds over health care, an issue over which they’ve sparred in recent days.
In an interview with Democratic influencer Brian Tyler Cohen last week, El-Sayed reignited the health care debate. He said, “if you like your insurance from your employer or from your union, that can still be there for you,” apparently flipping on his stance on Medicare for All. McMorrow and her allies seized on his remarks as El-Sayed seemingly embracing a position he had repeatedly attacked her on. El-Sayed hosted a December health care town hall with Sanders where he contrasted his Medicare for All support with McMorrow’s and Steven’s backing of a public option.
“It’s wild to call yourself the ‘next generation’ of Democratic leadership and be running AGAINST Medicare for All in 2026,” he posted on X a month ago, quote-tweeting McMorrow.
In an interview with Blue Light News after the dustup, El-Sayed declined to discuss specifics of his position on the record. In a statement, a spokesperson said that he supports Medicare for All as a baseline option for everyone, “and if folks want additional private coverage through a union or an employer then that can be there for them too.”
The conflict in Gaza has also led to sharp divisions in the race.
El-Sayed, who is the son of Egyptian immigrants, has been an outspoken critic of Israel, which he has long said was committing genocide in Gaza. That’s a major issue in a state with the highest percent of Arab-Americans in the country; more than 100,000 people voted “uncommitted” instead of backing then-President Joe Biden in the 2024 primary over his administration’s support of Israel — an effort El-Sayed helped lead.
He told Blue Light News that when he talks about U.S. tax dollars “being misappropriated to weaponize food against children and to subsidize a genocide, rather than to invest in real people in their communities and their kids and their schools and their health care, it is the single biggest applause line in every speech.”
McMorrow took a bit more time to come to that view. In October, when asked whether she thought the conflict was a genocide, she paused for several seconds, exhaled, and responded, “Based on the definition, yes.” Her campaign said her view was informed by a September United Nations Commission of Inquiry report.
Stevens has been more supportive of Israel, and has the support of AIPAC, the politically influential pro-Israel lobby. Some senior Michigan Democrats have expressed concern that an AIPAC independent expenditure campaign backing Haley could make the primary even more toxic ahead of the general election. Asked about their plans, an AIPAC spokesperson told Blue Light News they had no updates.
Asked by Blue Light News in November whether she was comfortable with AIPAC support, Stevens dodged, saying she’s delighted to “see the hostages get home,” and added she “wanted to see an enduring ceasefire where Hamas surrenders and so that we can get the people of Palestine and Israel in long standing peace, living peacefully, side by side with one another.”
Stevens’ campaign also attacked both El-Sayed and McMorrow’s record on manufacturing, a sector that employs some 600,000 in Michigan. She told Blue Light News that McMorrow “has a history of criticizing Michigan’s key industries” and that El-Sayed “supports policies that would decimate Michigan’s manufacturing economy,” citing his support for the Green New Deal.
“I’m going to call out what isn’t working for Michigan’s manufacturing economy, whether it is Mike Rogers or members of my own party,” Stevens said in an interview in the conference room of the Teamsters Local 234 union hall in Plymouth.
Old school vs. new school
The race is also shaping up as a test of offline coalitional politics at a moment increasingly defined more by viral videos than baby-kissing and union hall campaign stops.
Stevens has leaned hardest into traditional brick-and-mortar campaigning, while El-Sayed has been much more focused online, with McMorrow’s approach once again falling between them.
McMorrow’s biggest splash of the campaign so far came with a viral video that attacked NFL RedZone for adding ads as “the latest example of corporate greed,” and tied it to spiking grocery costs. It earned nearly 2 million views.
El-Sayed has built a national profile and fundraising network in part with a health care-focused podcast on Crooked Media, the network run by the Pod Save America team made up largely of former Obama senior advisers. At least three members, Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett and Ben Rhodes, appeared as hosts on an invite to El-Sayed’s fundraiser earlier this month in California.
Stevens has taken a different tack, putting more focus on campaign stops and meat-and-potatoes fights for local industry, especially auto and other factory jobs.
In a year-out-from-election day memo, Stevens’ campaign argued that her “strength with Black Michiganders and union workers, her relentless focus on lowering costs and protecting Michigan manufacturing, and her record fighting for Michiganders — which has led to her winning tough primaries and general elections — will propel her to victory.”
Campaigning at a Teamsters Local 234 union hall in Plymouth, she spent a lot more time talking about a local labor contract dispute than national concerns.
“Look, manufacturing might not light up the internet, but it fuels a lot of jobs here,” she told Blue Light News afterward.
That dogged approach helped her flip and hold a swing seat, then win a tough incumbent-on-incumbent primary in 2022, and is one she thinks will pay dividends now.
“I’ve had a couple of tough primaries before, and I’m just out here trying to win it for Michiganders,” she said.
But it remains unclear how well it will translate in a statewide campaign.
“Haley seems to have more institutional support — whether or not it’s admitted as such — and that is a strength, but it also could be a weakness,” said a longtime Michigan Democratic operative who remains neutral in the race and was granted anonymity to assess the primary. “Her presence on the campaign trail I’m not sure is one that’s really like, Man, I got to be with her.”
Stevens has earned criticism over whether she can galvanize the online, grassroots activists, or electrify crowds on the trail. “She’s [an] uneven campaigner when it comes to the retail stuff,” said Adam Jentleson, a longtime Democratic campaign strategist whois pushing for the party to break more with left-wing interest groups and focus more on expanding the party’s coalition to win (he also voiced concern about El-Sayed as a general-election candidate).
Right now, both El-Sayed and Stevens have been training most of their fire on McMorrow rather than each other, seeing her as the bigger threat to their potential voting coalitions.
Insiders and outsiders
Stevens’ electoral track record is part of why many establishment-leaning Democrats in D.C. prefer her in the race.
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) invited her to attend a fundraising retreat in Napa Valley that featured a crypto roundtable, but Stevens told Blue Light News she did not attend due to the government shutdown.
In an interview with POLITICO, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was bullish on defending Michigan but declined to appraise any individual candidacies; a DSCC spokesperson declined to comment on whether the committee would officially endorse in the race.
McMorrow has taken a very different approach to D.C.’s Democratic leadership.
Shetold POLITICO last March, before she was even officially a candidate, that she wouldn’t vote for Schumer as party leader should she win her Senate seat. She also previously penned a scathing letter to Biden following his disastrous debate with Donald Trump, urging him to drop out.
“We’re drawing a contrast that is really about defining my lane,” McMorrow said in an interview at a campaign stop at a park in Grand Rapids late last year, suggesting Stevens, without naming her, was running “an uninspiring campaign that’s right out of the D.C. playbook” and that El-Sayed, also without naming him, was campaigning on the idea “that there’s just one weird trick to fix democracy.”
Stevens has said it’s too early to determine whether to would back Schumer; she has called him “a great leader.”
El-Sayed also hasn’t said whether he’d back Schumer for leader. But he’s made it clear he is running headlong against the Democratic establishment.
“The movement we’re building is about taking a bet on the divide in our politics not really being about left versus right, but being about the folks who are locked out and the folks who are locking them out,” El-Sayed told Blue Light News.
About the only thing the candidates can all agree on is the stakes of the contest.
“The future of this party is going to be based on what happens in this race,” McMorrow said.
Elena Scheider contributed to this report.
SEATTLE — As a lesbian who was born in Egypt, Noha Mahgoub could have chosen to dress for what local organizers branded a “Pride Match” in colors associated with either her sexual orientation or her country of origin. The 43-year-old Democratic legislative aide — one of the top staffers in Washington state government — chose the latter, arriving in a red Egyptian national team jersey, a black hat emblazoned with YALLA and red-white-and-black tricolor facepaint.
“I’ve seen Pride shirts, I’ve seen Pride face paintings,” she observed from a concourse minutes before national anthems began echoing around Lumen Field. “It’s been really great, but I’m seeing a lot more Egypt and Iran and people cheering for their countries and singing their songs.”
Indeed, despite FIFA’s announcement that rainbow flags would be permitted in the stadium, few were visible as the match began. Instead, the stands rippled with the colors of the two Middle Eastern countries on the field, including many of the pre-revolutionary lion-and-sun flags that FIFA has attempted to ban under a stadium code of conduct that prohibits political displays.
Mahgoub had seen Egypt’s national team in person only once before, as a child while the team was angling to qualify for the 1990 World Cup. Since then, Mahgoub and her family relocated to Washington state, where she said the local Egyptian-American community has become enlivened by new arrivals coming to work at Seattle-based tech companies.
“You know how it is, you start calling everybody your cousins — a lot of cousins that I wasn’t related to,” Mahgoub said. “Well, I think a lot of them are here.”
Ah, Belgium. The country of fries, chocolate, Kevin De Bruyne and, some might say, chronic political division.
Beyond Brussels, a mighty international melting pot, the country is split between Dutch-speaking Flanders, French-speaking Wallonia and a small German-speaking community. Those linguistic divisions are mirrored in its politics: Belgium has separate party systems on either side of the language border, as well as a highly devolved federal structure that gives significant powers to its regions.
Today, Belgian politics is as fragmented as ever. It took 234 days to form a federal government after the June 2024 election (yes, you read that right). The delay was driven largely by the fact that no camp came close to winning a majority, forcing months of negotiations between parties with sharply different ideological and linguistic bases.
Flemish nationalism has also become a growing force, shaped by two right-wing nationalist parties: the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), which wants to transform Belgium into a looser confederal state and ultimately give Flanders far greater autonomy, and the far-right Vlaams Belang, which openly campaigns for Flemish independence.
So, you might think the 2026 World Cup would offer Belgium’s leader a rare opportunity to rally and unify the country behind a shared national symbol, right?
Wrong.
Prime Minister Bart De Wever, who hails from the N-VA party, has expressed almost no public support for the Red Devils, Belgium’s national soccer team.
That contrasts with leaders in nearby countries that also qualified for the World Cup. The leaders of the Netherlands, Germany and France have all publicly backed their squads, whether on social media or through public appearances.
The reason may be simple: De Wever just doesn’t care for the sport.
A Belgian official told Blue Light News: “The prime minister is not a soccer fan, so he doesn’t seek to project that image publicly. To do otherwise would not be authentic.”
Flemish media have indeed reported that the prime minister has little interest in soccer. In a podcast appearance a few years ago, he said the sight of people “going totally crazy in a group in the stands” left him feeling “ice cold.”
But politics is likely part of the story too. De Wever has led the Flemish nationalist N-VA since 2004. Throughout his political career, he has argued that Flanders should have far greater autonomy and that Belgium should evolve into a confederal state. For a politician with that background, overt displays of Belgian national unity probably don’t come naturally, and in fact contradict emphasis on Flemish autonomy.
This is not the first time the N-VA’s relationship with the Red Devils has attracted attention. In 2015, after Belgium reached No. 1 in the FIFA world rankings, Francophone Socialist Party leader Laurette Onkelinx asked the Chamber of Representatives to applaud the team. All parties joined in, except the N-VA.
During Euro 2016, the N-VA had to deny it instructed ministers and MPs to avoid publicly celebrating the Red Devils so as not to appear too Belgian, after rumors circulated in Belgian media.
One of De Wever’s few comments about this year’s World Cup concerned Belgium’s official tournament song. His complaint: It did not contain a single word of Dutch.
“My staff have confirmed to me that not a single word is sung in Dutch. That is, to put it mildly, not elegant,” he said, in keeping with his ideologies of promoting Flanders, when asked about the song during a parliamentary committee hearing.
Sport is often treated as a vehicle for national unity. In New Zealand, Belgium’s opponent in today’s match, elite teams have successfully woven elements of Māori culture into their sporting traditions, most famously through the prematch haka, which has helped create a shared cultural identity that connects Māori and non-Māori New Zealanders.
In Belgium, however, this World Cup has not yet become that kind of unifying project. At least not from the very top.
HOLLYWOOD, Florida — Colombia and Portugal’s World Cup match in Miami Gardens won’t be the only major draw pulling crowds to South Florida this weekend: Florida’s Republican grassroots are heading to Hollywood for their “Sunshine State Showdown.”
The GOP’s event at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino is one of the state party’s biggest of the year. The GOP sold more than 800 tickets, with the party’s most devoted volunteers and many donors coming in from all over the state to get revved up for the midterms, gameplan their messaging and hear directly from top candidates.
The shindig will feature speeches from Sens. Rick Scott and Ashley Moody, as well as gubernatorial candidates Rep. Byron Donalds, former Florida House Speaker Paul Renner and Lt. Gov. Jay Collins. It will also include two congressional debates.
Several “Showdown” attendees said they were thrilled about the convergence of their party’s bash with a World Cup match. South Florida has already seen a huge economic boom in recent years, and the Magic City is poised to become even more prominent given Miami is set to be home to Donald Trump’s future presidential library and will host the G20 in December. “Miami is again at the center of the universe,” observed Miami-Dade County GOP Chair Kevin Cooper.
Several prominent Republicans said they see the international event as an opportunity to showcase the state. State Rep. Dean Black of Jacksonville, who also chairs the Republican Party of Florida’s fundraising committee, said he’d enjoyed seeing fans from abroad show appreciation over social media for American culture. “They have fallen in love with the greatness of America,” Black said. “By being exposed to the Republican Party event, they will learn just how that greatness came to be.”
Collins’ team said that while the lieutenant governor wasn’t attending the game, he was “happy the state of Florida is hosting so many fans from across the world experiencing the beauty of our state.”
Former Fox 35 Orlando anchor Ryan Elijah, a GOP candidate for Congress who’s attending the showdown, said he would be checking his phone regularly for World Cup updates.
“What a night for Florida to see the biggest names in Florida politics and World Cup soccer be just miles apart!” he said in a text. “It’s a dream night for tourism numbers and local businesses!”
But the packed weekend also risks turning into a logistical headache. The Hard Rock Hotel is one of the pickup points offering shuttle services to Miami Stadium. It’s less than 9 miles away from the big game.
Angie Wong, Republican executive committeewoman in Miami-Dade, attended Wednesday’s match between Scotland and Brazil. She said her family paid $200 for parking near the stadium and that it took more than an hour just to get out of the parking lot.
“We were lucky — we actually left before the game ended,” she said.
Yet this year’s “Showdown” is a more scaled-back affair than in the recent past. It won’t, for example, feature a dinner like in previous years. But that’s probably good news for any attendees who don’t want to miss the soccer match — or who are just trying to get back home without getting stuck in traffic. And it doesn’t have any major Trump administration officials attending, in comparison to last year, when the event prominently featured White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and now-former deputy chief of staff James Blair, who is currently running Trump’s political operation for the midterms.
Florida’s GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis — who remains highly popular with the state’s grassroots — won’t be speaking at the “Showdown” this weekend and his office didn’t reply to an inquiry about whether he’d attend Saturday night’s game. The governor was in the Miami area during the last couple of days, including hitting the Brazil-Scotland game on Wednesday night and holding a press conference at the former Alligator Alcatraz immigration detention center on Thursday.
Evan Power, chair of the state party, had already arrived at the Hard Rock Hotel on Wednesday night and said he got to watch a Brazilian victory parade happening right outside the restaurant where he was having dinner. He added he hadn’t had any issues getting in and out of the events center and that Republicans sold out their room block, “so I think we were able to get in before the craziness.”
“In our room block, people are happy because they’re not paying the market rate that is out there,” Power said. “Seeing some of the prices — they’re crazy now.”
- The “Pride Match” that wasn’t
- Congressional Black Caucus blasts Slotkin over her calls for new leadership in the House
- Why Belgium’s prime minister isn’t cheering on the Red Devils
- Key Democrats urge House to reject kids’ safety proposal
- World Cup match collides with Florida GOP bash
- A drag queen, a rainbow festival and a game FIFA can’t control
- Envoy’s pharaoh well party
- The world’s not big on the US. The World Cup might help.
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