Israel’s war in Gaza has become a major dividing line in Michigan’s Democratic Senate race as more voters begin sympathizing with Palestinians.
Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive Democrat and former public health director in Wayne County, has consistently opposed U.S. military aid and criticized Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, calling the war in Gaza “a genocide.” Meanwhile, his opponent, U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, has embraced Zionism and received more than $1.2 million from pro-Israel groups. And state Sen. Mallory McMorrow traveled to Israel on a trip sponsored by a prominent pro-Israel organization and attended a private pro-Israel leadership event early in her Senate campaign, only to shift her rhetoric as public opinions change.
More than 72,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, according to Gaza health officials, with women and children accounting for nearly half of the deaths. Entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble, and humanitarian groups have warned of famine, mass displacement, and the collapse of the territory’s health care system.
The increasing death toll and graphic images from Gaza are changing how Americans view Israel’s actions. New Gallup polling shows that American sympathies are now roughly evenly split between Israelis and Palestinians, a major shift from just a few years ago, when support for Israel was strong. Among Democrats, about two-thirds now say they sympathize more with Palestinians, while only about two in 10 say the same about Israelis.
The shifting opinions have made Israel a fault line within the Democratic Party, and this U.S. Senate race has a lot at stake.
El-Sayed has not softened his stance as public perception changed. Beyond calling Israel’s assault on Gaza a “genocide,” he has also condemned what he describes as the “dehumanization of the Palestinian people” and argued that U.S. tax dollars should not fund foreign militaries.
“None of us pay our taxes to fund the killing of children anywhere,” El-Sayed tells Metro Times. “But that’s what our tax dollars were used for in Gaza. I oppose blank-check military aid to Israel, just as I oppose blank-check military aid to any foreign country. Every dollar spent on bombs abroad is a dollar we failed to invest in our own kids here at home. We have a responsibility to both invest our money in Americans and hold ourselves to international law.”
Stevens, a moderate Democrat, has taken the opposite approach. In May 2025, during a House hearing on antisemitism, she declared, “I am myself a Zionist, and I am not Jewish, and I am proud of that designation.”
Since 2022, Stevens has received more than $1.2 million in dations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group. She has described herself as a “proud pro-Israel Democrat” and has welcomed endorsements from major pro-Israel Democratic groups. In a statement after the Democratic Majority for Israel’s PAC endorsed her in November 2025, Stevens said she would “support Israel’s security” and “ensure the ceasefire holds in Gaza.”
In a statement to Metro Times on Friday, Stevens’s campaign defended her record and said she has been consistent in supporting both Israel’s security and humanitarian aid to Gaza.
“Haley has been clear and consistent on this issue: She is hopeful about the fact that we have seen an end to the war and are in the early stages of a ceasefire, that we’ve seen the return of all the hostages, that we can get food aid into Gaza, and that we are moving towards long-term peace in the region, so that Palestinians and Israelis can live with peace and dignity,” Arik Wolk, spokesperson for the Stevens’s campaign. “She has repeatedly voted for assistance to Gaza, and has continued to call for the U.S. and Israel to work together to make that happen.”
McMorrow’s message on the war in Gaza has been anything but consistent. In 2023, she traveled to Israel on a trip sponsored by a major pro-Israel organization and later attended a private pro-Israel leadership event shortly after launching her Senate campaign. At the time, pro-Israel groups considered her “a reliable ally” who aligned with the “party’s pro-Israel fraction.”
At the start of her Senate campaign, McMorrow “reached out to pro-Israel Democratic groups to underscore her support for the Jewish state,” which her campaign did not deny.
Then last fall, McMorrow said the war in Gaza met “the definition” of genocide, before later cautioning Democrats against turning the term into what she called a political “purity test.” She has since called for a ceasefire and long-term security for both Israelis and Palestinians.
During a donor call last year, McMorrow supporter Rob Kalman said McMorrow had prepared an “outstanding” position paper for AIPAC, though it has not been released publicly.
McMorrow’s campaign did not respond to Metro Times’s questions for comment.
With more than five months before the Aug. 4 primary election, a new Emerson College Polling survey suggests the primary remains wide open, with McMorrow narrowly leading Stevens and El-Sayed, while a large share of voters remain undecided. The Jan. 29 poll of likely Democratic primary voters found 22.4% backing McMorrow, 16.5% supporting Stevens, and 15.9% favoring El-Sayed, while 37.9% said they were undecided and 7.3% backed other candidates. With more than a third of Democratic voters still undecided, the candidates still have plenty of time to get out their messages.
The stakes are high. International human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have accused Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza. The International Court of Justice has ordered Israel to take steps to prevent acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention.
The issue is particularly salient in Michigan. The state is home to one of the largest Arab American populations in the country, as well as a significant Jewish community.
The war in Gaza became a flashpoint in the 2024 presidential election, when thousands of Democratic voters cast “uncommitted” protest ballots in the primary to signal opposition to President Joe Biden’s handling of the war. Activists have continued pressing candidates to call for a permanent ceasefire and an end U.S. military aid.
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Outside spending by pro-Israel political networks has played an outsized role in recent Michigan primaries. In 2022, pro-Israel PACs spent millions of dollars in metro Detroit congressional races, often backing more moderate Democrats and attacking progressive challengers without mentioning Israel in their ads.
El-Sayed says his opposition to U.S. military aid is part of a larger critique of American foreign policy and the influence of political money. He argues tax dollars should be invested in health care, housing, and education, not in foreign wars, especially one that is displacing, maiming, and killing innocent Palestinians.
“Genocide is the worst kind of crime against humanity,” El-Sayed says. “I don’t use it as a political signal like some do — I use it because words have meanings. And there’s no other word to describe the murder of countless children, women, and men, the destruction of their hospitals and schools, the use of food as a weapon, and the attempt to displace them into neighboring countries — all because of their ethnicity and where they live. I use the word ‘genocide’ because that’s what our country underwrote in Gaza — and I need us to stop. Moral clarity should be bigger than politics.”
El-Sayed is also the only Democrat in the race to support abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Whoever wins the primary will likely face Republican Mike Rogers, who has received more than $1.7 million in support from pro-Israel political networks over the course of his career, including roughly $880,000 in direct PAC contributions from groups aligned with AIPAC and similar organizations, according to campaign finance records and the nonpartisan tracker TrackAIPAC. Rogers has described himself as unequivocally pro-Israel, and he dismissed criticism of Israel’s actions as “short sighted and politically naive,” accusing his Democratic rivals of trying “to out-left each other” on the issue. He has also condemned pro-Palestinian events and activists.
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