Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are joining forces to elect an underdog but potentially history-making candidate on the ballot in Michigan next week: Abdul El-Sayed, a 33-year-old physician who would be the nation's first Muslim governor.

Sanders is spending the final weekend of the race in the state, and Ocasio-Cortez was there last week to campaign with El-Sayed ahead of Tuesday's Democratic primary. He also has a constellation of hard-left groups in his corner, including MoveOn.org, Justice Democrats and Our Revolution, the offshoot of Sanders’ failed presidential campaign.


After a July lull in primary season, the race in Michigan represents the first opportunity for insurgent liberals to shove Democrats leftward since Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory over Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) six weeks ago. Tuesday is also the first real test of the burgeoning alliance between Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, who have also campaigned for two congressional candidates on the ballot next week in Kansas.

El-Sayed, a first-time candidate who's trailed in public polls, has emerged as a threat to the front-runner, former state Sen. Gretchen Whitmer. Whitmer is a favorite of most elected Democrats as well as organized labor and women's groups such as EMILY's List, which backs Democratic women who support abortion rights.

Every public poll of the primary has shown Whitmer leading El-Sayed and entrepreneur Shri Thanedar, a self-funder who has blanketed the airwaves with television ads but hasn't caught fire. But with Sanders parachuting into Michigan this weekend, El-Sayed backers and Sanders allies see a parallel in recent history.

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“Bernie was written off" going into the 2016 presidential primary in Michigan, said Democratic strategist Julian Mulvey, whose firm worked for Sanders on that campaign. "I think Nate Silver predicted that Hillary Clinton had a 99 percent chance of winning in Michigan, and Bernie was able to pull it out. So the best thing you can do is have Bernie going in there to help try to close."

Attorney General Bill Schuette is the favorite to win the Republican primary and has been endorsed by President Donald Trump. Schuette has worked to distance himself from unpopular term-limited Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican. The state is seen as a prime pickup opportunity for Democrats.

According to a Democrat close to her campaign, Whitmer’s most recent internal polling showed her with a 16-point lead in the primary. She has raised more money than El-Sayed, and she has more institutional support: In addition to local politicians, unions and EMILY's List, Whitmer was just endorsed by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).

But El-Sayed, a former executive director of the Detroit Health Department and a public-health expert, has built a significant support base by presenting himself as a Sanders-aligned progressive alternative to the more mainstream Whitmer. Some of the same outside groups that backed Sanders in 2016 are behind El-Sayed, as are Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and grass-roots favorites like Ocasio-Cortez and activist Michael Moore. El-Sayed has also received donations from Ben Affleck and received praise from the hosts of the liberal podcast Pod Save America.

Sanders endorsed the candidate only this week, even though El-Sayed had embraced the Vermont senator and many of his core issues, like a $15 minimum wage, single-payer health care and tuition-free college for families making less than $150,000 a year. Sanders is planning to appear at two El-Sayed rallies on Sunday, in Detroit and Ypsilanti.

“Abdul has run a campaign — win or lose — that speaks explicitly to the policies that Bernie talked about during the 2016 campaign and continues to talk about in the Senate,” said Ari Rabin-Havt, a senior adviser to Sanders. “Abdul lines up so perfectly on these values that the endorsement is a testament to running a campaign based on that.”

El-Sayed hasn’t shied from his religion in the campaign, even as he's had to swat away rumors that he’s a George Soros plant sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood. He’s happily described the immigrant story of his father moving to the United States from Egypt and spending time with his stepmother, whose family history in Michigan goes back to before the Civil War.

But foremost, El-Sayed and his liberal supporters are betting that campaigning on a Sanders-style platform isn't just good politics in a primary: They're trying to prove that a candidate can tout these issues and win one of the three states that Trump flipped in 2016.

“Michigan is ground zero for the debate over how you win back power from Trump and Trumpism,” said Ben Wikler, the Washington director of MoveOn.org, which is backing El-Sayed. “And Abdul El-Sayed is the living avatar of the idea that to defeat Trump you don’t move right."

In addition to El-Sayed, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are backing two congressional candidates on the ballot Tuesday in Kansas. The two New York natives traveled last month to the state to stump with two candidates: Brent Welder, a former Sanders campaign staffer running for a battleground seat in the Kansas City suburbs, and James Thompson, a repeat, liberal challenger for a more solidly Republican seat.

Welder is running in a crowded, six-candidate Democratic primary for the right to take on Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.) in a district Clinton narrowly won in 2016. But in a sign that Republicans see Welder's ties to Sanders as a liability, a conservative group began running last-minute ads on Friday that appear designed to boost Welder in the Democratic primary, meddling that Welder's opponents decried, blaming Yoder and the GOP.

Back in Michigan, while El-Sayed is rallying with Sanders, Whitmer will be campaigning with prominent Michigan Democratic politicians, including Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and Rep. Brenda Lawrence.

Whitmer’s surrogates and supporters remain bullish about her chances but also are familiar with their state’s history of upsets in gubernatorial races. Democrat Jennifer Granholm wasn’t the front-runner when she ran for governor in 2002.

“There’s polling data, but primaries are tough to poll,” said former Gov. Jim Blanchard, a Whitmer supporter, adding that he still expects Whitmer to win.

EMILY’s List President Stephanie Schriock painted the primary as an ultimately constructive argument about how to win a general election fight in a battleground state. The differences between Whitmer and El-Sayed, Schriock said, pale in comparison to the contrast between either of them and Schuette, the front-runner in the Republican primary.

“The values all these Democrats share is the same,” Schriock said. “What we’re having is a very active debate on how to get there. I’ll take that. That’s what we’re talking about there. You’ve got Schuette on the other side, who wants to tear it all down.”

El-Sayed echoed that sentiment on Friday, promising that Democrats will come together, despite the intraparty battle playing out in the final days before the primary.

"Four days out, things can get heated," El-Sayed tweeted Friday. "I admire [Whitmer and] the vigorous debate we share. While I deeply disagree on health care [and] corporate money in politics, I admire her work [and] commitment to serve. We will walk in lockstep, whoever wins, to a blue wave in November."

