Voters shouldn’t have two bad choices. But in many cases, they do. In the new episode, I dig into why this keeps happening. The media plays a major role. (A transcript will follow for paid subscribers.)
Sometimes, that means voting for the lesser bad. That brings us to the Senate race in Michigan. The Republican there, Mike Rogers, has done bad things. But he’s a far better choice than Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed. A growing chorus of prominent Democrats are saying so.
Jason Turkish, fiancé of El-Sayed’s former opponent Haley Stevens, is one of them. The Washington Post quotes him discussing the dangers of El-Sayed:
“When he says ‘genocide’ over and over again, when he refuses to condemn an ad that says Jews are to blame for the price of bananas, he makes my community less safe.”
Comparing anti-democratic movements
Rogers, the Republican, is no perfect candidate. He has warmed up to election skeptics whom he once rejected. However, election deniers are not going around slaughtering, beheading, and raping people. They’re not launching terrorist attacks. They’re not shooting random people at events.
January 6, 2021 was a traumatic event for the United States. But our democracy survived it, and we’re coming up on nearly six years since it happened. Our elections remain intact.
The antizionist hate movement (AZHM) that El-Sayed aligns with is doing all of that around the world. Its violence includes attacks not only in the United States, but in Michigan itself. This isn’t a matter of opinion.
So it seems rational to vote against El-Sayed. Democrats who want a sane party should make its extremist candidates unelectable.
David Kramer was Stevens’ campaign chair in the primary race against El-Sayed and served as finance chair for Sen. Elissa Slotkin. He told Jewish Insider:
“It’s become clearer to me that Abdul is certainly not moderating at all, and I think really becoming more extreme and more dangerous… I have lots of issues with Mike Rogers, and I’m not even willing to use words like ‘support.’ But I’ve made peace with voting for him because I do think that he at least does care about Jews being safe and participating in public life, and he seems to know the difference between an enemy of ours in Iran and an ally of ours [in Israel].”
People who get “news” from the New York Times and other left-wing outlets have no sense of how dangerous antizionism is. AZHM activists are blinded by seething hatred, and divorced from reality. See my response to a deluded Pod Save America host here.
El-Sayed has led the race consistently in polls, and is favored to win. If he does, he’ll become the leader of AZHM in the Senate. If Rogers manages to win, then Michiganders and the rest of us should work to ensure that he returns to where he once stood, speaking out against January 6 and election denial, as he did in an op-ed at the time.
I don’t live and vote in Michigan. But in a time of massive media failure, clarity is desperately needed. Tell everyone you know in Michigan that if they care about building a better future, they should prevent the rise of El-Sayed.
JL
P.S. Latest on Instagram:
I just listened to the Pod Save America excerpt to which you linked. If they had any clarity (and if you credit their assumption about Republicans) and you take him at his word, the choice is “vote for El Sayed so things start with the Jews” or “vote for Rogers so things end with the Jews.” That argument is hardly compelling.
And, of course, why can’t the Democrats engage now in the discussion he’s so confident will occur once the Democrats have control of one or both houses of Congress? There will always be a reason for the Democrats to put off any honest discussion of the antisemitism within its ranks, especially where they owe their electoral success in part to those hiding behind reckless and malevolent anti-Israel rhetoric.
If Schumer, Sanders, Whitmer and Slotkin can’t bring themselves to denounce the “Israel’s need to kill Palestinians is why your groceries are so expensive”, what are the chances any good faith discussion will happen after-the-fact. Indeed, only a loss in Michigan might focus their minds.
If the Democrats win, the mantra will likely be, let’s be forward looking and not relitigate the past.
When I told Sen. Markey several months after Presjdent Trump was reelected that I had felt disenfranchised by the whole Biden to Harris handoff fiasco and that to regain my trust the party needed to be honest about what actually happened (who knew what when) so as to avoid a repetition, his answer was that we have to look forward.