As the tide recedes on the Democrats’ “Blue tsunami” this past Tuesday, before the votes were even tallied, the internecine fight over The Narrative among the US center-left began in earnest. Centrist ideological curators, as is their function, came out strongly to paint the historic drubbing of Republicans as evidence that centrists are more electable than progressives. And progressives, likewise, have made the opposite argument, buoyed by the 7-point swing state victory of progressive and strong Israel critic Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.
This piece won’t litigate the empirical question as such (though pollster G. Elliot Morris does an excellent job debunking the “centrists overperformed” conventional wisdom), but will highlight instead how many of the “El-Sayed is toxic and can’t win middle America” narratives completely evaporated Tuesday night, and how those pushing them will, of course, never be held to account nor asked to explain why so many outright lies were advanced about the Democratic nominee. El-Sayed won by roughly 340,000 votes despite being subject to nonstop intra-party, intra-liberal attacks emanating from everyone from the president of the most influential liberal think tank in the US, to key Democrats in Congress such as House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, Jim Clyburn, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to influential liberal media outlets The Atlantic magazine and The New York Times, to his largely Republican-funded primary opponent Hayley Stevens, who––unlike the others––at least had the courtesy to break kayfabe and come out in support of Republican Mike Rogers explicitly. Unlike genetic white media darlings Roy Cooper and James Talarico who, the centrist wonk expects insists, Covered The Spread, El-Sayed was subject to one of the most openly cynical and anti-Muslim hate campaigns this election cycle not just from his GOP opponent but from within his own party and the liberal media establishment under the guise of Concerns About Antisemitism.
NBC News exit polls make clear that El-Sayed received 95% support from Democrats, which was two points higher than the 93% support Republican Mike Rogers received from Republican voters. Yet, as I detailed, we had nonstop reports highlighting the former and literally zero reporting on the latter. Why?
So what happened to The Narrative that El-Sayed was uniquely “divisive” and “fracturing the Democratic coalition”? This, as I documented last week for TRNN, was a popular trope pushed out by US media that turned out––as I predicted it would and as all evidence at the time indicated it would––to be entirely false. NBC News exit polls make clear that El-Sayed received 95% support from Democrats, which was two points higher than the 93% support Republican Mike Rogers received from Republican voters. Yet, as I detailed, we had nonstop reports highlighting the former and literally zero reporting on the latter. Why?
The answer is because the “El Sayed is dividing Democrats” narrative was a fiction pushed out by pro-Israel groups (always framed as “Jewish Democrats” or “Jewish groups” or some other such sectarian euphemism) both nationally and in Michigan to sow division, drive up negatives, raise doubts about El-Sayed’s “electability,” and push Democrats into either not voting or voting for AIPAC’s other preferred candidate, Mike Rogers. There is, it’s worth emphasizing, no division among Democrats on the subject of Israel. It is, at most, a 80/20 issue. Support for Israel, now sitting at 13% among Democrats, is a fringe right-wing preference on par with support for school prayer, opposition to gay marriage, and belief in young earth creationism. And, despite the millions of dollars and countless articles promoting this myth and the myth it was “dividing” Michigan Democrats, this propaganda campaign likely ended up only shaving a couple of points from El-Sayed’s otherwise dispositive electoral victory.
And the attendant narrative El-Sayed was “struggling with Black voters” also, as predicted, turned out to be totally bogus, as he saw the same percentage of support from Black voters that Harris did in 2024 and performed better in the largely Black Detroit than he did in the Arab-majority Dearborn. Indeed, El-Sayed did 11 points better with Black voters than he did with Arab/Middle Eastern voters, according to exit polls. The other narrative, that El-Sayed was “dividing” Jewish Democrats, was at least partially true but was massively overblown and ended up being an electoral nothingburger. An analysis by Millions of Michiganians of 72 precincts with the highest number of Jewish voters “showed El-Sayed receiving 60% of the vote, a shift of just 1.3 percentage points from Elissa Slotkin’s share in 2024.” In other words, Jewish voters did what Jewish voters always do: they voted for the Democratic nominee, albeit at a slightly less rate than usual.
Despite the millions of dollars and countless articles promoting this myth and the myth it was “dividing” Michigan Democrats, this propaganda campaign likely ended up only shaving a couple of points from El-Sayed’s otherwise dispositive electoral victory.
So what is the lesson in El-Sayed’s victory? Pro-Israel propagandists are, predictably, rushing to downplay its significance and, in doing so, relying on a typical self-reinforcing logic of these zionist smear campaigns: Driving up negatives, spending millions attacking and then pointing to an alleged “underpreformance” as evidence not that Demcorats shouldn’t bash their own candidate and lend credence to bad faith zionist smear campaigns, but evidence that his policies, namely his anti-zionism, are not electorally popular.
But it’s clear all evidence indicates otherwise. And this, despite all the sloppy and unrigorous “Democrats are divided over Israel” fictional worldbuilding in our media, is something that everyone knows is the case, and is so with increased salience. That Israel is, as noted above, a 80/20 issue with Democratic voters is well documented and established. But it’s increasingly a major selling point for the vaulted independent swing voter. A June 2026 Institute for Global Affairs/YouGov poll shows that 44% of independents say the “US relationship with Israel does more to hurt the US than help” and only 12% think it does more to help than hurt.
Even reliably pro-Israel outlets like CNN have to concede that El-Sayed’s position on Israel helped him in the election, with CNN poll guru Harry Enten noting last week that, “Israel is an issue that actually is more likely to help El-Sayed than it is to help Mike Rogers because simply put, in Michigan––and we’ve seen this nationally as well––voters think that we give too much money over to Israel, especially when it comes to military aid.” Indeed, this is why, as I also detailed for TRNN last April, the pro-Israel lobby (and even now Donald Trump) are getting ahead of this talking point by calling for an “end to aid” to Israel while further integrating military technology and codifying long-term arms sales and transfers. The pivot now is to neutralize the talking point with a semantic cup-and-ball game and hope the American public, increasingly outraged and angry at Israel, will be sufficiently tricked into thinking “ending aid” will end support when it will, in fact, do the exact opposite.
Yet Democratic party leaders, media owners, and top media editors remain largely pro-Israel. Thus the worry that the manifest and obvious tension between voter preferences and elite consensus will continue to “create divisions” in the run up to the 2027-2028 Democratic primary. Wednesday, Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid made the subtext text, writing on X/Twitter in his post-election analysis that the rise of anti-Israel electeds Tuesday won’t cause much political harm to Israel because, ultimately, what matters is political power, not public opinion. “Hakeem Jeffries will lead the House of Representatives. Chuck Schumer will run the Senate,” he wrote, “Both are my friends; both voted with Israel this year even when the majority of their party caucus voted otherwise.”
The ability of Democratic Party leaders to maintain The Narrative is at stake, and their ability to do so depends on obscuring how disconnected they are from their voters over support for Israel. Opposition to Israel, in the midst of an ongoing genocide that killed over 21,000 children and a catastrophic, unpopular attack on Iran, is now a consensus opinion among the electorate. But Israel, and liberal zionism within the Democratic party, is simply too big to fail. So the El-Sayeds of the world, who refuse to recite the “two state solution/condemn terrorism” script, are vilified, flooded with millions in attacks, undermined by their own party and––in the event they defy these forces and actually win office––it quickly becomes priority to downplay, ignore, and give no broader meaning for the 2028 primary for this victory. Make no mistake this will be The Narrative pushed out by mainstream media and party elites over the coming weeks and months. What’s important to keep in mind is that––like with the bogus “Democrats divided on El-Sayed” nonstory––it is a narrative without a shred of empirical support.
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