Van Hollen was the first sitting senator to back Abdul El-Sayed after Bernie Sanders. Raskin called his win proof of Democratic unity. What didn’t make either Marylander’s statement: El-Sayed’s answer on Israel’s right to exist, his “hurt people hurt people” response to a synagogue attack, his alliance with a streamer the ADL says traffics in terror propaganda — and the fact that El-Sayed had already told TIME he wants Van Hollen to run the Senate Democratic caucus.
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Maryland’s senior senator didn’t just cheer from the sidelines when Michigan progressive Abdul El-Sayed won his Democratic Senate primary this week — he helped build the win. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) endorsed El-Sayed and campaigned on his behalf; Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Maryland’s 8th District congressman, helped sell the result on social media. Both put their names behind a candidate whose record on Israel, alliance with a controversial streamer, and combative rhetoric toward Republicans has drawn condemnation from the Anti-Defamation League, a West Bloomfield rabbi, his own primary rivals, and, this week, the President of the United States.
The Endorsement, and What It Cost Van Hollen Politically
Van Hollen endorsed El-Sayed in late June, becoming the first sitting U.S. senator to do so after Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who backed El-Sayed shortly after he entered the race. The move broke publicly with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, who endorsed the more centrist Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), and Van Hollen framed it as a stand against “the establishment Democratic Party” being “too cozy with big money special interests.”
There’s a detail Van Hollen’s endorsement statement didn’t mention: El-Sayed had already told TIME magazine he wanted Van Hollen — not Schumer — running the Senate Democratic caucus. “You know who I’d really like to see as Democratic leader? Chris Van Hollen,” El-Sayed told CNN separately in April, months before Van Hollen’s endorsement became public. Van Hollen backing the candidate publicly promoting him for Schumer’s job is the kind of overlapping interest that would normally draw its own scrutiny; neither Van Hollen’s office nor El-Sayed’s campaign has addressed it directly.
El-Sayed won Tuesday’s primary by roughly one point — 48.6% to 47.3%, according to the Associated Press, with the race not called until Wednesday morning. After the result, Van Hollen told reporters the win “should be a wake-up call to the Washington Democratic establishment,” adding, “he was running against a lot of Washington insiders as well as parts of the Michigan Democratic establishment. And he won. That’s an incredible story.”
“Van Hollen didn’t just endorse Abdul El-Sayed—he endorsed a candidate who had already publicly said he wanted Van Hollen replacing Chuck Schumer.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) marked the win on X: “It’s been heartening to see how quickly Democrats have come together to rally behind @AbdulElSayed after a hard-fought primary. We’re the big-tent party of democracy and freedom for all, and we need everyone working together to defeat MAGA and the party of nihilists, authoritarians, and fascists. Congrats to both Abdul and Haley on their commitment to recapture Congress from Trump’s invertebrate enablers.”
What the “Big Tent” Includes
El-Sayed’s record on Israel was not a side issue in the primary — it was, by most accounts, the central one. He has repeatedly described Israel’s conduct in Gaza as a “genocide” and accused the country of “apartheid,” said he opposes unconditional military aid to Israel “or Egypt,” and told MS NOW’s Willie Geist after his win that Israel’s government has become “so bloodthirsty” under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In an April interview with the Forward, he declined to directly affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and stood by comparing the Israeli government to Hamas, calling both “evil.”
The clearest flashpoint came after a March 12 attack on Temple Israel, a West Bloomfield synagogue where more than 140 children were attending preschool. Authorities say the attacker, whose brother the Israel Defense Forces identified as a Hezbollah commander killed in a strike in Lebanon, rammed a truck loaded with fireworks and gasoline into the building and opened fire on security guards before being killed. A guard was wounded, and dozens of law enforcement officers were treated for smoke inhalation. El-Sayed’s campaign called the attack “vile” and “antisemitic,” but a follow-up video tied the attacker’s motive to the Lebanon strike and closed with the line “hurt people hurt people.” Temple Israel’s Rabbi Jen Lader publicly rebuked the framing in a Free Press op-ed, writing that it suggested the attack “could be understood, if not justified.” Asked twice more — once by CBS News after the primary — whether he regretted the comment, El-Sayed didn’t walk it back: “What I mean is that hurt people hurt people, and maybe if we’re serious about ending the hurt, we should stop hurting people. … I condemn the attack. It was a vile, antisemitic attack.” He then pivoted to calling the Republican Party “morally bankrupt” and “actively hurting people.”
“Raskin called Democrats a ‘big tent.’ Critics argue the tent now includes controversies many Jewish organizations have publicly condemned.”
About a month after the attack, El-Sayed campaigned alongside Twitch streamer Hasan Piker at rallies at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called Piker’s history one of “commending and excusing terrorism,” accusing him of using his platform to “spread anti-Jewish tropes, amplify propaganda from designated terrorist groups and promote toxic anti-Zionism,” and said El-Sayed’s decision to campaign with him “is not just alarming; it’s absolutely shocking,” particularly so soon after the Temple Israel attack. Piker has said he has no “issue with Hezbollah,” called Hamas “1,000 times better” than Israel, likened liberal Zionists to “liberal Nazis,” downplayed reports of mass sexual assault during the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, and once said the United States “deserved” 9/11. Stevens called Piker “the exact opposite of someone I’d be campaigning with”; rival Mallory McMorrow called him “somebody who says extremely offensive things in order to generate clicks”; the centrist group Third Way called the alliance a “disgrace to the Democratic Party.” El-Sayed defended the appearances by saying he and Piker agree on “the way that AIPAC has decimated our politics,” and later told Fox News that sharing a stage with someone isn’t an endorsement of everything they’ve said — the same defense, he noted, he’d extend to Donald Trump’s associates.
El-Sayed also drew criticism for declining to say whether the world was better off without Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, citing sadness in Dearborn’s Muslim community, and for standing by an August 2025 rally line about Republicans — “when they go low, we don’t go high, we take them to the mud and choke them out” — in a CBS interview months after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and the murder of Charlie Kirk. He said he wasn’t going to play “this funny gotcha game” over rhetoric.
The Money Behind the Race — and Who’s Using the Win Now
“The political fight wasn’t just over Michigan—it exposed a larger divide inside the Democratic Party over Israel, activism, and leadership.”
Israel policy also drove the primary’s financing. AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, spent just over $30.6 million opposing El-Sayed and boosting Stevens — the group’s largest single-race investment ever — while a dark-money group called the Center for Democratic Priorities added roughly $6.5 million more, pushing outside spending on Stevens’ behalf past $60 million combined. El-Sayed made that spending a centerpiece of his campaign, at one point posting that AIPAC had “spent a record amount in this race to elect my opponent because she’ll be a reliable vote to a foreign government that is aiding, arming, and abetting a genocide.” AIPAC’s spending failed; El-Sayed won anyway.
Republicans moved immediately to make El-Sayed the face of the 2026 Democratic Party. President Trump posted that the win was “great news for the Republican Party” while calling El-Sayed a “Communist loser who hates Jews and Israel.” Republican nominee Mike Rogers called the November choice “common sense or complete insanity” and released an ad built around El-Sayed standing next to Piker saying, “I’m not here to disavow people’s views,” cut against Piker’s “America deserved 9/11” remark. The National Republican Senatorial Committee and Senate Leadership Fund followed with ads calling El-Sayed “too radical.” Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, for their part, quickly issued a unity statement pledging to “work with Abdul and Democrats across Michigan to win this seat in November” — the same establishment El-Sayed, Van Hollen and Raskin had just spent weeks running against.
What’s New Since the Primary: CAIR Donor Network
Fox News Digital reported Wednesday that El-Sayed’s campaign has collected more than $115,000 from at least 41 individuals who currently work for, formerly worked for, or have held leadership positions with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — an organization federal prosecutors named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing case, and which Florida and Texas have formally labeled a terrorist organization and the United Arab Emirates designated as one in 2014. CAIR was never criminally charged and disputes the characterization, pointing to statements on its website condemning Hamas and other designated terrorist groups by name.
The donor list Fox identified includes CAIR’s national board chair, national board treasurer, national vice chair, and CAIR-Michigan board member Jukaku Tayeb — El-Sayed’s father-in-law, who Fox and the Washington Free Beacon reported is also a top donor to a super PAC supporting El-Sayed’s campaign and a founding committee member of the Islamic Society of North America, a group the Free Beacon has tied to Muslim Brotherhood-linked funding networks. Another donor, CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad — listed in FEC records under a variant of his name — said in October 2023 that he was “happy” to see Hamas break out of Gaza on October 7 and argued Israel “does not have the right to self-defense” as an occupying power; CAIR has since pointed to a 2023 statement from Awad condemning attacks on civilians. El-Sayed has his own history with the group, having been a paid speaker at a 2022 CAIR event where he compared an Oklahoma ban on Sharia law to the Trail of Tears, per the Free Beacon. El-Sayed’s campaign did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
None of this establishes that El-Sayed personally shares Awad’s or any donor’s views — campaign contributions from individuals are not endorsements running in the other direction, and El-Sayed has not been asked directly about Awad’s donation as of this writing. But the scale and leadership depth of the CAIR-linked donor network, combined with a family financial tie running through his own father-in-law, is a fact pattern that Van Hollen and Raskin — both of whom vouched publicly for El-Sayed — may reasonably be asked to address directly rather than leave to campaign silence.
Also New: Van Hollen Isn’t Backing Off, and the “Next Leader” Pitch Was Public Before the Endorsement
Video from a campaign rally weeks before the primary shows El-Sayed introducing Van Hollen to the crowd as the next Senate Majority Leader — not a passing aside to a reporter, but a stump-speech line delivered with Van Hollen present. Van Hollen has continued to promote El-Sayed since the primary, telling MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt this week that El-Sayed is “the stronger candidate” for November and framing the roughly $60 million in outside spending against him as proof that “the folks at the very, very top” wanted to “protect the status quo.”
The Maryland Thread
“Maryland’s influence reached beyond its borders: one senator helped build the campaign, another helped legitimize the victory.”
Van Hollen’s rhetoric on Israel and Gaza has drawn separate scrutiny in Maryland before this endorsement. MDBayNews has previously reported on backlash from state Republicans after Van Hollen accused Israel of responsibility for a starving Palestinian child’s death, with critics arguing his language crossed from oversight into inflammatory territory. His and Raskin’s embrace of El-Sayed extends that pattern onto a national stage: Maryland’s senior senator is now the most prominent Senate Democrat to have tied his political capital — and, per El-Sayed’s own comments to TIME and CNN, potentially his leadership ambitions — to a candidate whose approach to Israel, and to a synagogue attack in his own state, drew comparable criticism from Jewish organizations and his fellow Democrats.
Neither Van Hollen’s nor Raskin’s office responded to the controversies over the Piker rallies or the “hurt people hurt people” comment before or after the primary; both statements focused entirely on the primary as a victory over the party establishment. Raskin’s “big tent” framing — posted the same week critics were re-litigating El-Sayed’s handling of the synagogue attack — did not address the substance of that criticism.
El-Sayed now heads into a general election Democrats consider essential to retaking the Senate majority, against Rogers, a race both parties expect to be shaped as much by the primary’s unresolved fights over Israel as by Michigan’s economy.
Sources: The Associated Press; Al Jazeera; Reuters via ABC affiliates; The Hill; Roll Call; TIME; the Forward; the Detroit Jewish News; the Free Press; the Jewish Telegraphic Agency; the Jerusalem Post; CBS News; Mediaite; Fox News Digital; the Washington Examiner; the Washington Free Beacon; Responsible Statecraft; CBS Detroit; C-SPAN; Grabien News (MSNBC transcript); and Rep. Jamie Raskin’s post on X, reviewed directly by MDBayNews. MDBayNews previously reported on Sen. Van Hollen’s remarks regarding Israel and Gaza. This story has gone through two fact-check passes; each quoted statement was checked against at least one independent outlet where possible. AIPAC/United Democracy Project spending figures were corrected from an earlier estimate to the confirmed $30.6 million reported by the Associated Press and Al Jazeera. The CAIR donor reporting originates with Fox News Digital and the Washington Free Beacon; CAIR’s response is included per its public statements. As of publication, El-Sayed’s campaign, and Sens. Van Hollen’s and Raskin’s offices, had not responded to the CAIR-donor reporting, the Piker alliance, or the “hurt people hurt people” comment.
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