Abdul El-Sayed, a doctor of Egyptian descent, is running for the U.S. Senate in Michigan. His main message: spend money on local communities, not foreign wars. To win, he first has to beat Congresswoman Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary election in August 2026. Stevens has the backing of AIPAC — a powerful lobbying group that advocates for strong U.S.-Israel relations — which has spent more than $50 million to support her Al Jazeera.

El-Sayed has spoken out against Israel's war on Gaza, calling it a genocide. That stance has drawn intense financial opposition. AIPAC's spending was projected to exceed $30 million in this race alone, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact Bridge Michigan. Outside groups — organizations that spend money to influence elections without directly coordinating with the candidates — had reported spending a combined $36 million as of July 31, 2026 Ballotpedia.

El-Sayed's side has spent much less. He spent about $3.2 million from his own campaign on ads, plus roughly $1 million in outside support AP. A group called American Priorities added just over $350,000 to support him as of July 16, 2026, according to federal records OpenSecrets. Stevens, meanwhile, had raised almost $12 million as of the latest fundraising report, which was actually less than El-Sayed or another candidate, Mallory McMorrow The American Prospect.

This race is part of a bigger national trend. Outside groups had spent more than $330 million on U.S. Senate races across the country with over three months left before Election Day 2026 OpenSecrets.

On Friday night, El-Sayed held a rally in Dearborn, Michigan, at the Bint Jebail Cultural Center. Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit, is sometimes called the 'capital of Arab America' because of its large Arab American population — a group that naturally aligns with El-Sayed's message Al Jazeera.

At the rally, Abbas Alawieh — a candidate for Michigan's state Senate and former congressional staffer — spoke to the crowd. He said the Lebanese town of Bint Jbail is experiencing ethnic cleansing by the Israeli military, connecting what is happening there to the need for political action locally Al Jazeera.

El-Sayed has been here before. He lost an election in 2018, and that experience helped prepare him for this 2026 race The American Prospect.

The bigger picture is that this primary is testing two things at once. First, it asks whether AIPAC's enormous spending can defeat a candidate who holds views outside the pro-Israel mainstream. Second, it asks whether Arab American voters can come together as an independent political force. AIPAC's more than $50 million for Stevens is about ten times what El-Sayed spent on his own ads. Whether El-Sayed's supporters — organized around opposition to U.S. military spending abroad and recognition of Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide — can hold up under that financial pressure will become clear in the results from Dearborn and nearby areas.

The practical question is whether a candidate can win when outspent by this much. In a race where outside groups have already committed $36 million, the outcome may come down to turnout — getting supporters to actually vote — rather than changing minds. That is why the Dearborn rally matters. El-Sayed's campaign needs to turn the city's large Arab American population into primary voters. The venue itself carries symbolic weight, and Alawieh's speech about ethnic cleansing in Bint Jbail was meant to energize a group of voters that fundraising numbers alone cannot measure.

Stevens's lower fundraising total, compared with both El-Sayed and McMorrow, does not tell the whole story. AIPAC's outside spending fills the gap, so the real difference in spending between the two candidates is closer to $50 million than the fundraising reports suggest. The primary will show whether AIPAC's approach of spending heavily on behalf of a candidate can overcome weaker personal fundraising — or whether El-Sayed's community-level support can produce votes that money cannot suppress.