The New Way to Win

The New Way to Win

Money out of politics. Money in your pockets. Medicare for All. 

On April 17, 2025, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed launched his campaign with a different theory of how Democrats could win. Over the next eighteen months, he traveled to 125 cities across Michigan, held more than 750 public events, and built a grassroots army of more than 46,000 volunteers – all while overcoming one of the most expensive and vicious opposition campaigns in American political history.

The Many Beat the Money. 

A quarter billion dollars in outside money poured into Michigan’s primary and general elections from MAGA billionaires, AIPAC, Elon Musk, and corporate interests determined to elect candidates who would defend the status quo that had failed Michigan families. More money was spent trying to defeat Abdul than any other Senate candidate in Michigan’s history.

The spending disparity was staggering:

• Not once in six months did Team Abdul outspend our opponents.
• In the primary, Abdul was outspent 11 to 1 by dark money groups and special interests, which poured $70 million into the race.
• In the general election, Abdul was outspent by nearly $100 million, a nearly 2 to 1 disparity  

While Abdul’s opponents relied on billionaires, he relied on everyday Michiganders. More than 633,000 individual donors made 1.3 million contributions averaging just $44.17, with support coming from every single Michigan county and every state in the country.

46,620 volunteer sign-ups built the largest volunteer base for any Michigan midterm candidate in history. 

Despite it all, Abdul won. Twice. The many beat the money.

Abdul Won Over Trump Voters, Back Young Voters And Young Men, And Made Significant Gains In Rural Michigan and the Upper Peninsula

Abdul assembled a winning coalition that no one thought was possible. Despite the consternation among the chattering class, Abdul outperformed 2024, 2020, and 2018 Democratic Senate margins across the board, including a massive 15 point swing from Trump 2024 to Abdul in Wayne County. Abdul won every precinct in Detroit, receiving nearly 92% of the votes in the city. Rogers got just 5% and did even worse there than he did two years ago, while Abdul improved on both Elissa Slotkin and Kamala Harrs’s performances in Detroit.

In 2024, the Democratic ticket performed poorly with Arab-American voters in Dearborn. Abdul didn’t just make up those losses, but ran up the score. Record-breaking turnout in Dearborn was nearly 5% above 2024 turnout. While Harris lost the city by 6%, Abdul won by more than 65%. In Dearborn, nearly 3,700 more voters voted in the Senate contest than in the race for Governor. In Dearborn Heights, Abdul roughly doubled the vote share of the 2024 ticket. The Republicans made a targeted choice to use Islamophobia as their core line of attack against Abdul, and it backfired tremendously with one of the key constituencies that won Trump the presidency in 2024. 

Abdul also made enormous gains in rural communities with Trump 2024 voters, especially across Northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula. The campaign aggressively showed up in places other Democrats don’t show up, and talked about issues other Democrats don’t talk about—including his plan to put Farmers Over Billionaires and earning the endorsement of the Michigan Farmers Union.

In the counties where Abdul hosted rallies as part of his Shouldn’t Be This Hard bus tour through the Upper Peninsula, the campaign saw strong swings from Trump 2024 voters moving towards Democrats. 

• Dickinson County—where Abdul held a rally in Iron Mountain—saw a +10 swing towards Abdul
• Delta County—where Abdul held a rally in Escanaba—went from Rogers +29 to Rogers +23
• He won Marquette County by nearly 20 points following an enormous rally at Northern Michigan University. Kamala Harris won the county by just 9% in 2024.

With Jewish voters, analysis shows that Abdul virtually matched Senator Slotkin’s ‘24 totals. 

Bet on Your Candidate. Let Abdul Be Abdul.

The conventional wisdom was that a populist, anti-establishment Muslim candidate couldn’t win Michigan without sanding off his edges and moderating his positions. We took the opposite approach: we bet on Abdul.

From interviews with conservative voices like Jesse Watters to hundreds of town halls with unscreened questions, we put Abdul in front of everyone. He took questions from the press wherever he went, embraced skeptical audiences, never shied away from defending his beliefs. We trusted that the more voters got to know him, the harder it would be for our opponents to define him.

That philosophy extended to how we confronted an unprecedented barrage of racist and bigoted attacks. To counter, we showed voters his deeply American story: his Michigan upbringing, his grandparents Jan and Judy, and the values that shaped him. From American flags to home-video footage of his family, we embraced Americana to show voters who Abdul really was.

Abdul embodies what it means to be a…Millennial. Our digital team took that and ran with it. Millennials are fans of Love Island, we grew up on Blues Clues, and we can sing most words to most Taylor Swift songs. Abdul’s willingness to try a trend, lean into the right amount of cringe, and just have fun created the perfect conditions to generate over 1 billion views on social media in the past 11 months.

Economic populism as a message that resonates with the majority 

Our theory was simple: the divide that mattered wasn’t Democrat versus Republican, but working people versus the political establishment and economic elites that had failed them.

We maintained a relentless focus on costs, corruption, and the economic forces squeezing Michigan families. Ads like March and NAFTA highlighted Abdul’s UAW support and drew a sharp contrast with Rogers on trade, while Shouldn’t Be and 500 spoke to the hollowing out of the working class.

We didn’t expand Abdul’s appeal by moderating or softening his message. We expanded it by connecting his populist principles to frustrations that transcended party lines. Voters didn’t have to agree with Abdul on every issue to recognize that he was fighting for them.

Perhaps most importantly, we broadened our coalition without forgetting where we came from. We launched our TV campaign with Chorus, an ad featuring Bernie Sanders and the campaign’s three core principles: money out of politics, money in your pocket, and Medicare for All. Our closing ad, Finale, kept the same core themes of Chorus with new additions of Barack Obama and Jesse Watters. The message was deliberate: we could speak to a broader coalition without abandoning the people, principles, or politics that got us there in the first place.

For too long, Democrats have been afraid to embrace progressive ideas, challenge corporate power, or engage voters outside their traditional coalition. Abdul’s campaign demonstrated a different approach: stay true to your values, go everywhere, talk to everyone, and trust voters to recognize whose side you’re on.

Go Everywhere, Talk to Everyone.

From day one of the campaign in April 2025 until Election Day, Abdul didn’t shy away from a single interview. He talked to every single outlet, doing sitdowns with not just Fox News, but The Daily Wire, and The Dispatch. He went to every place Democrats aren’t willing to go to and answered questions no other Democratic candidate in the country would be willing to answer. 

Our team earned praise from the Michigan and national press corps for our consistent media availabilities – at almost every public event, Abdul gaggled with the press taking questions from outlets ranging from The National Review to Zeteo to NewsMax. He laid out his final closing argument of the race in an op-ed exclusively in Fox News. He sat down with Beri Weiss’ CBS after revelations that she was personally pushing false, bad-faith right-wing conspiracy theories to influence the race. 

Our campaign saw our biggest and most surprising victories in Michigan’s rural counties, including the Upper Peninsula. Three rural counties saw some of the biggest swings toward Democrats anywhere in the state, including two of the counties Abdul visited with AOC in the UP during the bus tour. 

And every time he went into the lion’s den and went toe-to-toe with Fox News’ biggest blowhards, the outcome was overwhelmingly positive. Even if he got a question on tricky political terrain, the interview got historic ratings. Donations surged, volunteer signups boomed, social media engagement went sky-high. While calling out hypocrisy and bad-faith questions, Abdul drove his core message in clips that reached every corner of the Internet. 

Winning The Attention Economy

Abdul did hundreds of interviews with over 200 different content creators from Michigan and around the country. In addition to the regular questions about his platform and the campaign, content creator topics included fashion, coffee, sports, desserts, relationship advice, cat dad life, lifting, parenting, his skincare routine, and book recommendations. A dedicated creator program allowed the digital team to reveal a side of Abdul other than being a candidate, public health official, or a doctor. Creators experienced a regular person, not a celebrity doing an orchestrated PR campaign. The resulting authentic, raw interviews reflect that. Creators had regular, consistent access to Abdul through campaign events, scheduled interviews, and an open line of communication with the team.

We also spoke to key issues by connecting Abdul with people who are most deeply impacted by those policies in their daily lives – whether it be access to reproductive and rural health care, cost of living increases, insurance prices and medical debt – and filming these interactions in  documentary style pieces.

We regularly captured informal, real conversations man-on-the-street style, impromptu interactions with voters that were genuine and unscripted, filming moments showing Abdul when he’s at his most natural, with community members, local business owners, workers, students — real Michiganders. We created moments through which we could portray Abdul as exactly who he was – someone voters could see themselves sitting down and having a cup of coffee with – and someone relatable – a girl dad who is as Michigan as it gets. 

Lean Into the Tension, Unafraid To Take a Stand

Abdul never hid from his faith, even as the conservative echo chamber and the President of the United States himself sought (and failed miserably) to weaponize it against him. He never minced words about his views on foreign wars, he shared his positions confidently and firmly on some of the most contentious issues, and he never missed an opportunity to call out hypocrisy or both political parties that have stymied change for too long. 

On digital, we proudly shined a bright light on it. It is no secret some voters may feel uncomfortable or are simply uninformed about the Muslim or Arab-American community. They said as much to Abdul on the campaign trail, and we took the opportunity to showcase these important conversations online and communicate openly about questions people may have.

BOTTOM LINE: 

For years, Democrats have followed a playbook for winning elections. Conventional, mainstream candidates pivot straight to the center after a primary. Abdul won and won big because he was the exact same candidate on the day he launched his campaign as he was 565 days later when he won.

He talked about big, bold solutions to get money out of politics, put money in pockets, and pass Medicare for All. He did not cave to demands from Washington and the establishment to become a cookie-cutter, status quo Democrat who shied away from any environment that carried risk. 

That kind of campaign would never have won the most expensive Democratic primary in American history, and it would never have overcome hundreds of millions in vicious, dog-whistle, fearmongering attack ads. 

Abdul won because he was himself, because this campaign was unflinching in leveraging his authenticity on every single platform and in every single arena. 

That is how the MANY beat the MONEY.