as she has throughout the campaign<\/a>, did not engage with questions about AIPAC support. She declared herself \u201ctransparent\u201d and sought to pivot to \u201cthe affordability crisis here in Michigan.\u201d<\/p>\nStevens criticized her rival as a celebrity candidate.<\/p>\n
There is little doubt that Dr. El-Sayed is a smoother talker than Ms. Stevens. While she sometimes meandered through thoughts and injected buzzwords into her debate responses, he spoke in the smooth cadence of a veteran podcaster \u2014 a role she attacked him for once having.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy opponent here, Abdul, he is such a talented guy,\u201d Ms. Stevens said. \u201cHe\u2019s written three books, he\u2019s had 300 podcasts. You know, he\u2019s had all this attention, but the deal is, is we don\u2019t need a celebrity candidate. We don\u2019t need a celebrity senator. We need somebody who is committed to six years of hard, unglamorous work.\u201d<\/p>\n
At one point, she accused Dr. El-Sayed of using the Senate race as a way station en route to running for president. And indeed, he has articulated big ambitions about changing the Democratic Party from a perch in the Senate, starting with the party\u2019s relationship with Israel.<\/p>\n
El-Sayed assured voters, \u2018I\u2019m not a socialist.\u2019<\/p>\n
Dr. El-Sayed is not a democratic socialist, and he is not endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America. And yet the debate\u2019s moderator asked him about accusations that he was a socialist \u2014 \u201cnot that that\u2019s a bad word.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr. El-Sayed parried the question and said that a larger threat than socialism was capitalism run amok, dominated by corporate monopolies and oligarchs.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not a socialist,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m just a capitalist who understands how capitalism works.\u201d<\/p>\n
Only one candidate would abolish ICE.<\/p>\n
Much of the debate was conducted on Dr. El-Sayed\u2019s terms. Discussion about AIPAC-tied funding and U.S. support for Israel left Ms. Stevens defending positions that have become broadly unpopular among Democratic primary voters.<\/p>\n
When it came to an exchange about Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Ms. Stevens spoke about her efforts \u2014 which were ultimately futile \u2014 to redirect funding for the agency that Republicans in Congress had approved.<\/p>\n
Dr. El-Sayed\u2019s message was more unequivocal. He would abolish ICE altogether \u2014 and he thought more Democrats should praise immigration in general.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need Democrats who are going to stand up and actually talk about the great good that immigration has done for our country in the first place,\u201d said Dr. El-Sayed, whose parents immigrated to Michigan from Egypt. \u201cThe idea that somehow we can\u2019t say \u2018abolish ICE\u2019 because we\u2019re so afraid of what they\u2019re going to say, when we\u2019ve seen ICE terrorize people in our streets, to me, it is exactly the kind of cowardice that we don\u2019t need from Democrats.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stevens repeatedly made appeals to Black voters.<\/p>\n
Ms. Stevens is counting on Black voters in Michigan to carry her to victory in the primary. Polls show her leading among them, and AIPAC-tied advertising features footage of former President Barack Obama praising Ms. Stevens at a rally when she first ran for Congress in 2018.<\/p>\n
Throughout the debate on Monday, she sought to emphasize her connection with and appeal to Black voters.<\/p>\n
She slipped a reference to her support for \u201cequity and inclusion\u201d into a response to a question about a recent rally that Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York held in Michigan for Dr. El-Sayed. And she sought to dismiss Dr. El-Sayed\u2019s populist appeal and large crowds by suggesting that she was spending her campaign time \u2014 which has included far fewer advertised public events \u2014 dropping in to speak with Black business owners.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know it\u2019s great to hold, host rallies and have these fun events,\u201d she said. \u201cBut everywhere I have gone in Michigan, I have taken the time to visit a minority-owned business.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stevens thanked El-Sayed for not calling her an ogre.<\/p>\n
In the final weeks of the primary, as some of Dr. El-Sayed\u2019s online supporters mocked Ms. Stevens for her accent and her speech patterns, he made a plea for kindness in the campaign.<\/p>\n
But his own colorful language in a leaked audio recording<\/a> reported by Politico, in which he suggested that if \u201cyou put one ogre on a pike, and then everyone else gets the message,\u201d briefly put him on the defensive during the debate. Dr. El-Sayed said that he had been speaking about a primary challenge to Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, the towering Democrat whose politics have swerved to the right.<\/p>\nMs. Stevens responded by reciting Dr. El-Sayed\u2019s attacks against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and former Senator Debbie Stabenow, who have both endorsed her. When Dr. El-Sayed then suggested that the debate should be less about their personalities and more about their politics, Ms. Stevens offered a mocking appreciation for his clarification.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, thank you,\u201d she said, \u201cfor clarifying that you didn\u2019t call me an ogre.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A week before Michigan\u2019s primary contest for Senate, the two Democrats seeking the nomination spent much of their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":307873,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[106482,104078,1253,651,106481,416,77250,9730,46937,9,11,10,1875,855,52643,1876],"class_list":["post-307872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-abdul","tag-american-israel-public-affairs-committee","tag-campaign-finance","tag-democratic-party","tag-el-sayed","tag-elections","tag-haley","tag-michigan","tag-midterm-elections-2026","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-primaries-and-caucuses","tag-senate","tag-stevens","tag-united-states-politics-and-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307872\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}