For the second straight year, center-left Democrats have spent much of the campaign cycle attacking and undermining a compelling Muslim candidate who is also a target of the right. This is shameful and despicable. A Democratic Party that won’t fully accept Muslim candidates isn’t a party that actually practices the principles of democracy, diversity, inclusion, pluralism, and multiculturalism that it preaches.
After Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic mayoral primary in New York last year, he faced deep hostility from his own party. Longtime New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a member of the party leadership, falsely implied that Mamdani had spoken favorably about “global jihad.” Gillibrand, Barack Obama, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, New York Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs, Senator Cory Booker, and numerous other prominent Democrats refused to endorse Mamdani ahead of the general election, even though they usually back candidates who win Democratic primaries. Many of these Democrats either stated outright or leaked via their aides disagreements with Mamdani on Israeli-Palestinian issues and/or ridiculous claims that he was insufficiently concerned about antisemitism. Kamala Harris said she supported “the Democratic nominee” in the race, refusing to use his name.
A year later, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is facing a similar resistance. El-Sayed, unlike Mamdani last year, is running against a Republican in a state that Democrats desperately want to win. So Obama, Schumer, Gillibrand, and other party leaders are backing his candidacy. But some Democrats, such as Representatives Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Hillary Scholten of Michigan, are publicly refusing to back El-Sayed, again citing Israel and antisemitism concerns.
Others, such as Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and Representative Haley Stevens, who El-Sayed defeated in the Democratic primary, are offering mealymouthed support. Meanwhile, center-left Democratic politicians and pundits spent much of August and September attacking Hasan Piker and pressing El-Sayed to distance himself from the commentator who had endorsed the Michigan candidate during the primary.
I have no beef with center-left Democrats feeling lukewarm about progressive candidates. As a progressive, I often criticize centrist Democratic politicians, activists, and pundits. And for some centrist Democrats, supporting Medicare for All, joining the Democratic Socialists of America, and/or describing Israel’s conduct in Gaza as a genocide may be positions that they are so deeply opposed to that they cannot support anyone who holds them. I don’t believe anyone should actually “vote blue no matter who.”
But these center-left Democrats aren’t outright stating that they disagree with El-Sayed and Mamdani on Israel and can’t support them because of policy differences. That would violate the idea that the Democratic Party is a “big tent” of different views, a concept many centrist Democrats purport to agree with. Instead, the center-left demands Muslim politicians soft-pedal their views on issues particularly important to Muslim Americans—or have fellow Democrats hint that they have animus toward Jewish people. This tack turns policy disagreements into a vicious and unfounded character attack.
El-Sayed and Mamdani have repeatedly used the term genocide in regard to Israel, urged the U.S. to stop providing funding to Israeli’s military, and criticized the unequal, apartheid-like regime that Palestinians live under in Israel and the Palestinian Terrorities. Those positions are held by numerous human rights groups, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. They are also held by many Democratic voters.
And those stances are even more broadly held and important to American Muslims. There aren’t a ton of surveys of Muslim Americans, but the data we have suggest that El-Sayed and Mamdani are very much in the mainstream among their co-religionists. According to a 2024 Pew Research Center poll, among respondents who had an opinion on the issue, 87 percent of Muslim Americans felt Joe Biden favored Israelis too much in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. In the 2024 election, 35 percent of Muslim Americans said the war in Gaza was one of their top policy priorities, according to a postelection survey conducted by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. Just 4 percent of Americans overall ranked the war in Gaza as so important.
Only 12 percent of Muslim Americans have a favorable view of the Israeli government, according to a Pew poll earlier this year. Sixty-six percent of Muslims say they would not back a candidate who refused to call the situation in Gaza a genocide, according to a survey of Muslim voters in Illinois, Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina conducted earlier this year by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, and CAIR Action.
Considering that data, El-Sayed and Mamdani are facing a terrible choice: They can espouse views held by a wide swath of American Muslims–or be embraced by the Democratic establishment. But not both. It’s worth noting that the party’s center-left is also very hostile to two of the five Muslim Democrats in Congress, Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. Omar and Tlaib are also very vocal critics of Israel. Center-left Democratic antipathy toward Omar in particular has only made it easier for the MAGA right to persecute her, as they’ve been doing in recent weeks.
What’s happening to these Muslim candidates parallels the experiences of other minorities within the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party center-left embraces Black political figures like Obama and Booker who downplay racism and racial inequality. By contrast, Black Lives Matter activists were criticized and marginalized by the party, as Jesse Jackson was decades ago. Latino politicians face similar pressures. The boomlet about a potential presidential candidacy for Senator Ruben Gallego is very tied to him being a Latino politician who has embraced more restrictive border enforcement policies. But if Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez runs for president, I suspect she will be urged to make a “Sister Souljah” gesture to distance herself from Latino activists and immigrants.
The demand for these candidates, Black, Latino, and now Muslim, is to essentially silence a core part of their identity and distance themselves from their ethnic, racial, and religious communities to get the party’s support.
A New York Times columnist recently wrote a piece urging El-Sayed to publicly break with Piker in the way that Obama sharply criticized his once-pastor Jeremiah Wright during the 2008 campaign. To the writer, those are examples of political pragmatism. To me, they are painful instances of minority candidates being asked to attack people (Piker, Wright) who have taken principled stands on behalf of marginalized groups in order to appease Democratic Party elites and conservative white voters.
“Often when candidates break barriers to become the ‘first’ of their background or identity to hold office, the price of admission is to emphasize their ‘sameness’ to the majority group in order to make their minority status less central. Mamdani and El-Sayed have somewhat broken from that pattern by explicitly criticizing Israel’s government, rather than taking more centrist positions or de-emphasizing the issue altogether. They’re also implicitly challenging the assumption that this makes them less ‘electable,’” Change Research pollster Lauren Goldstein told me in an email message.
It’s not an accident that so many Black and Latino progressives are deeply invested in the success of El-Sayed and Mamdani. They are more likely to push policies that help Black and Latino Americans than many Black and Latino Democratic politicians, who have accepted the informal agreement of ignoring their ethnic groups’ interests in exchange for establishment support.
Gillibrand aside, the Democratic critics of El-Sayed and Mamdani are not engaged in the horrible Islamophobia that we see coming from the political right. But what they are doing remains deeply troubling.
The situation for Muslim politicians is not analogous to Jewish ones, for two reasons. Jewish Americans are far more divided than Muslims on the war in Gaza and Israeli policy, with many in the Jewish community sharing the view that Israel has committed a genocide. And Jewish candidates are not being asked to ignore an international consensus about the war in Gaza.
I have watched for decades as the Democratic Party establishment essentially announces, “We will support Black politicians, but only this kind.” (Obama and Booker, yes, Angie Dixon and Al Green, no.) We are now seeing the same dynamic with Muslims today. Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed are admirable people who have succeeded professionally and politically despite having a faith that many Americans are openly bigoted against. A Muslim man of Indian descent born in Uganda rising to become the mayor of one of America’s most immigrant-friendly and diverse cities should have been a cause for celebration. So does the potential election of the first Muslim U.S. senator, particularly from a state with a checkered history on racial issues.
Instead, many Democrats have hinted that El-Sayed and Mamdani are hateful men of whom the party should be ashamed. No. What is shameful is the Democratic campaign against Abdul El-Sayed and Zohram Mamdani. America already has one party where Muslims aren’t welcome. We don’t need a second.
