Inside Abdul El-Sayed's Improbable Michigan Senate Primary Win

Inside Abdul El-Sayed’s Improbable Victory

T here are many ways to tell the story of how Dr. Abdul El-Sayed defeated Representative Haley Stevens in the Michigan Democratic primary for Senate. We could start with AIPAC, Stevens’ viral stick-it-to-’em video, or an electorate frustrated out of their minds about the Democratic Party’s endless obsession with the mushy middle.

But let’s go somewhere else.

It’s a week before Election Day. The summer wind moves silently through the Michigan corn outside of Saline, about 20 miles southwest of Ann Arbor. A farmhouse is selling eggs on the honor system. Another one flies banners for America’s 250th. I am in the Platonic ideal of bucolic America, the one seen in a thousand Republican ads and squawked about by right-wing pundits dreamily — and not so dreamily — wishing we could return to this version of the U.S.A.

I eventually turn onto dusty Braun Road and hit a dead end after a mile. The cornfields are gone. Construction noise echoes through the fields. Behind a fence, 575 acres of blight — roughly the size of Princeton University — is rising out of the earth. Contractors in hard hats look at plans. Multiple cement trucks pass each other, their spinning drums painted red, white, and blue.

This is The Barn — an Orwellian euphemism if there ever was one — where Oracle is constructing a massive data center for its OpenAI empire. It is being built against the wishes of the locals — both citizens and the town board, which voted against the building plan. Oracle essential said fuck off and sued the board into capitulating. A groundbreaking ceremony occurred on June 1 and was attended by Michigan Governor Gretchn Whitmer and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

“This could very well turn into the site where cancer gets cured,” said Altman, pushing his self-serving myth that “as AI goes, so goes the nation.” Notably, Altman did not say, “This could very well turn into the site where OpenAI finally turns a profit.”

I am waiting here a week before the primary for Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. But let’s go back 24 hours before that.

Representative Haley Stevens, his opponent, is speaking at the Lansing Chamber of Commerce. Stevens has been criticized by El-Sayed, sometimes brutally, claiming she has an inability to string two sentences together. I didn’t find this to be the case. She is just a Michigan chatterbox — something I know a little about from going to high school in the state. Someone tells her I write for Rolling Stone and she insists on taking a photo to send to her dad. (I feel special until learning she has previously done this with another general interest magazine writer.) We share an elevator going up to a conference room and a late arrival is hit by the closing door.

“Geez, sometimes elevator doors are too vigorous,” says Haley to no one in particular. We reach our floor and she turns to me and asks, “Did you know there is an elevator union?”

I did not.

Stevens speaks and takes questions ping-ponging between her first Oldsmobile, a love of manufacturing, and — somewhat out of nowhere — the thought that “we are in a real Seneca Falls moment,” citing the 1848 meeting that began the women’s suffrage movement. It was an odd metaphor from perhaps Congress’ quintessential incrementalist.

Afterward, she takes questions from reporters. Detroit News political reporter Craig Mauger asks if she supports the Saline data center. Stevens pauses for a moment.

“What is the status of that?”

Mauger informs her that it is, uh, under construction. (We are six weeks out from the Whitmer/Altman groundbreaking.) She dodges with some mush about how the data center building process needs to be more transparent and is ready for a different subject. Perhaps not coincidentally, Whitmer recently endorsed her. Mauger has a follow-up, but Stevens moves on to a question about her LinkedIn profile before an aide ends the conversation.

Standing at the gates of The Barn the next afternoon, I suddenly become convinced Stevens is going to lose. There are 20 to 30 residents and their children sweating in the afternoon sun, waiting as I am for El-Sayed to arrive. Over the years, I’ve been to dozens of rallies like this where the mood is defiant, but all I find here is despair.

“We did things the right way,” says Naomi Ernest, a local artist and activist. “No one wanted this. They just did what they wanted and ignored us.” She wears sunglasses, but I can tell from her voice that she is on the verge of tears.

She isn’t the only one. Sarah Brabbs, a lanky local resident, lists all the potential downsides about living near a data center, from the endless white noise to initial studies that suggest the endless throbbing and energy suck has a damaging impact on farm animals and crops (not to mention the potential environmental disaster). The project is requesting that treated industrial water be allowed to be released into the nearby Saline River.

“This is a new type of monstrosity for Michigan,” says Brabb. “It’s a new type of monstrosity wherever it begins in whatever state, and you have local people who didn’t ask to be experts that literally have to become a pretend expert overnight.”

Eventually Abdul El-Sayed speaks. He wears a white shirt and on his wrist are a series of beady bracelets, one reads best dad and is from his daughters and another proclaims “Servant Leader,” an Arabic translation of his last name. El-Sayed is the first to admit that he is not tall but conveys a muscular energy — so muscular he allowed The New York Times to watch him lift weights — that sometimes borders on bro overload. Today, he’s in a white dress shirt, not his usual form-fitting black T-shirt.

He gives a quick lesson in how AI stocks now dominate the American economy and set up a potential “too big to fail” moment where the need for expansion and revenue supersede the desire of actual people. El-Sayed argues for federal legislation to place a moratorium on the building of data centers until there are laws in place protecting the rights of communities. He suggests already approved sites like The Barn — which Whitmer has proclaimed will bring thousands of construction jobs to the area — can be shut down if they do not meet environmental and safety standards.

A reporter notes that some Democratic politicians, both here and in Washington, are pro-data center and asks what he would tell them if he is elected.

“Talk to your people,” says El-Sayed with a smirk. “I mean, you might be a proponent. Have you talked to the people in your community? Are they proponents? I have got to tell you, there’s not an event that I’ve done where I haven’t gotten a question about a data center. It is never a positive one. … You’ve got to represent the public, and it’s exactly this problem where too often representatives don’t represent the public; they represent the people who pay for their campaigns, and that’s exactly why we’ve got to get money out of politics.”

Then, El-Sayed shakes some hands and heads to an SUV waiting to take him to the next campaign site.

“Too often representatives don’t represent the public; they represent the people who pay for their campaigns, and that’s exactly why we’ve got to get money out of politics.”

Can El-Sayed stop the data center invasion if elected to the Senate in November? Probably not, just like his Medicare for All demand is more a dream than a realistic political goal.

But then I look at Ernest and Brabb’s faces. Despair has, perhaps momentarily, turned to hope. In 2026, that ain’t nothing.

CAMPAIGNS OFTEN reduce states into one-dimensional characters, filled with the equivalent of background actors in the latest Spider-Man movie.

Here’s the thing: Actual people live here, not just voter targets on a canvassing list. I moved to the Flint suburbs in 1980 as a boy and Michigan has been in various stages of decay ever since. Since 2000, the state’s population growth has been stuck at 10 million while the rest of America has grown by 20 percent. The reasons are many.