Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D-MI) offered a late endorsement of Abdul el Sayed, the Senate nominee whose views on Israel have polarized the Democratic Party and prompted blowback from the Jewish community.
Nessel, the first Jewish person elected to Michigan’s top law enforcement post, has been one of the loudest Democratic skeptics of el Sayed. She previously scrutinized him for campaigning with Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer accused of antisemitism, as well as rhetoric on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobbying group, that she said needed to be “toned down.”
But on Tuesday, Nessel set aside her criticism and announced that she would be backing el Sayed over Republican competitor and former Rep. Mike Rogers, who has actively courted Michigan’s roughly 100,000 Jewish residents by promising to be an ally in Congress.
“I don’t want to say the choice is easy, but I am going to say there is no choice,” Nessel said while sitting beside el Sayed for a podcast interview. The two shook hands after she explained to podcast host Lori Goldman that she could not, as a Democrat, vote for someone she said was too closely aligned with President Donald Trump.
“I can’t be true to my values if I even consider voting for Mike Rogers,” she said. “We have one candidate that I know is going to fight against the Trump administration, is going to fight to protect both our physical security, our safety, our health, and our futures, and then we have another canidate, Mike Rogers, who’s not going to do any of that and only cares about self-enrichment and how many pats on the back he can get from Donald Trump.”
Alongside Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-MI), Nessel was one of the final Democrats to stay neutral in the general election and spoke on behalf of Jewish voters who say el Sayed has been tone-deaf to their concerns of rising antisemitism.
Some of the fiercest pushback related to March comments that were interpreted as justifying the car-ramming of a West Bloomfield synagogue. El Sayed has since apologized for the remarks and has taken steps toward repairing his relationship with the Jewish community, although he has not disavowed Piker, who recently suggested that American Jews were “making antisemitism worse” through their support of Israel.
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If elected, el Sayed would join the growing number of Democrats who believe that the United States should cut off all military assistance to Israel, including funding for the Iron Dome missile defense system.
His views stand in contrast to Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), who lost the Michigan Senate primary despite tens of millions in AIPAC-linked spending. Nessel, whose term as attorney general ends in January, supported Stevens in the primary, going so far as to skip Democrats’ August convention in the state over the hostility of pro-Palestinian activists.