Thirty minutes after being sworn in as president of the University of Michigan’s student government, Summit Louth was already back onstage campaigning for someone else.
The rising senior, a leading figure in the ascendant Human Rights Party, had just won office on promises to resist immigration enforcement on campus and force the university to divest from companies he says are “complicit” in genocide in Gaza. Now he was jogging across a stage to cheers beneath banners reading, “Abdul for U.S. Senate.”
Louth was there to speak at an April 7 campaign rally for Abdul el Sayed, joining socialist streamer Hasan Piker and Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA).
That night, Louth addressed the crowd in his “personal capacity as a student.”
“Abdul has been calling out corporations and oligarchs instead of taking money from them,” he said. “I need you to reach out to Abdul’s team and volunteer.”
Four months later, Abdul el Sayed won the Democratic primary for Michigan’s open Senate seat by a margin of just 1 point.
Young voters and students helped propel el Sayed over the finish line. He won 13 of the 15 counties with the highest share of degree holders. Yet the Democratic nominee for Senate lost all 15 Michigan counties with higher concentrations of working-class voters — the supposed recipients of his socialist campaign promises. In Washtenaw County, home to the University of Michigan, el Sayed trumped Democratic primary opponent Rep. Haley Stevens by 25 points. He beat Stevens by 23 points in Ingham County, where Michigan State University is located.
College campuses have become some of the most fertile organizing grounds for the country’s socialist insurgency. The same students driving hard-left campus politics are increasingly feeding directly into Democratic campaigns beyond the university gates.
The el Sayed campaign is even putting some of those activists on the payroll. Federal filings show that Human Rights Party co-founder Keshava Demerath-Shanti received five nearly identical weekly salary payments beginning in June, making him part of a broader cohort of student-age campaign staffers.
Demerath-Shanti and fellow graduate Sean Shelbrock founded the Human Rights Party in February 2025 after deciding that rival campus party Empower Michigan had been too timid on divestment and too cautious in confronting the Trump administration. Their answer was to build something more aggressive.
“Empower [Michigan] was so big it cast a pretty big umbrella,” Demerath-Shanti told the Michigan Daily. “It really wasn’t substantive when it came to fighting back against the Trump administration.… There was a lack of pro-Palestinian advocacy.”
A year later, his party’s executive slate won the student government election.
Its platform explicitly proposes using university and student-government dollars, communications systems, and legal offices to advance its activist priorities. Among other proposals, the party wants to expand “Know Your Rights” cards for migrant students in response to what it calls “the abduction of our University’s own students by Immigration Enforcement.” It also pledged to lobby city council members for rent control and to rename diversity, equity, and inclusion offices so they would be “less conspicuous to the federal government.”
The party holds the student government’s executive slate. Nineteen of its 28 endorsed campus candidates now hold student government positions. Before its electoral victory, HRP celebrated the passage of the Divest for Humanity Act after 1,700 students signed a supporting petition. It is unclear whether the student body shares HRP’s fervor for divestment — just 12% of eligible students voted in the winter election. That is about 7,000 out of a vast student body of over 50,000.
Typically, electoral parties dissolve after elections. HRP, however, started a separate voluntary student organization that could perhaps drive students to the polls for el Sayed in November.
“I’ve been at Michigan for three years — I’ve never really seen anything like that,” Torres de Navarra, a student government representative, told the Michigan Daily. “Obviously, student organizations support specific parties, but I’ve never seen a student organization that is essentially a political party in and of itself.”
The student organization endorsed Yousef Rabhi for Ann Arbor mayor and Dave Zeglen for City Council Ward 4. Ward 4 includes portions of the University of Michigan’s campus. The endorsements suggest HRP already tries to translate its campus organizing network into political leverage over Ann Arbor politics. Why wouldn’t it extend its organizing muscle to el Sayed’s campaign this November?
El Sayed’s campaign has solidified a direct pipeline from campus activism to professional political work by putting young organizers on the payroll after graduation. Demerath-Shanti’s payments closely match the structure of el Sayed’s 20-person fellowship program, which the campaign said is “designed to equip young organizers with the tools and resources they need to lead on the issues they care about most.”
Its paid fellows drum up “grassroots support” through Students for Abdul and affiliated chapters. A campaign press release on student protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not specify that the Wolverines for Abdul and Spartans for Abdul members it highlighted were also paid campaign personnel.
HRP’s student organization, campaign-sanctioned Students for Abdul chapters, and activists moving into campaign work form both an electoral network for el Sayed and an incubator for future socialist candidates.
Conservatives often criticize higher education for instilling hostility toward free speech, free markets, and American history. But el Sayed’s financial support for student organizers suggests the problem runs deeper. Universities do not merely shape students who later graduate and vote accordingly; they also produce the organizers, operatives, and future candidates who power socialist campaigns nationwide. Campuses are not just ideological incubators. They are training grounds for the socialist movement’s next generation of leaders.
Before defeating Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), Darializa Avila Chevalier helped organize pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia University, where student activists later became a key constituency in her campaign. Likewise, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani founded Bowdoin’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter years before becoming mayor of America’s largest city.
El Sayed’s campus operation opens a similar pipeline for Michigan’s young organizers: student activism first, paid campaign work next, and perhaps candidacies of their own later.
BELTWAY CONFIDENTIAL: UNIVERSITIES ARE FUELING THE RADICALISM IN AMERICAN POLITICS
“Thirty minutes ago, I was sworn in to be the University of Michigan’s next student body president,” Louth told the crowd. Minutes later, he asked students to volunteer for el Sayed. Louth may never work for el Sayed himself. But he embodied that pipeline before he had even settled into his new title.
College campuses such as the University of Michigan are more than hotbeds of student enthusiasm. El Sayed’s campaign shows that socialists are training — and paying — the students who may carry their policies into future elections.