El-Sayed, Israel-critical Michigan Senate candidate, hires Jewish liaison

DETROIT, Michigan (JTA) — Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign for Michigan’s US Senate seat has hired a Jewish outreach director in the final weeks of the election season, part of a new push to swing undecided Jewish voters as the contentious race enters its homestretch.

Lenore Goldman is a veteran political consultant with Michigan ties whose work has included One Fair Wage, a national movement to raise the minimum wage that has prompted years of back-and-forth in the Michigan state legislature and courts.

She also consulted on Voters Not Politicians, a 2018 Michigan campaign that successfully passed a ballot measure to create a nonpartisan redistricting commission in the state. She has also consulted for Jewish groups, including the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco.

Goldman confirmed her hire to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Wednesday and said she had been with the campaign since September. The El-Sayed campaign did not immediately authorize her to give further comment, but she has already been a presence at some local events staged by Jewish supporters.

The Democratic candidate’s campaign first told JTA in August they were interviewing for a Jewish liaison position.

Goldman enters the campaign at a precarious moment for El-Sayed, who has struggled to win over skeptical Jewish voters in his tight race with his Republican opponent, former US Rep. Mike Rogers.

Recent polls show a tight race, with El-Sayed holding a narrow advantage. A Marist poll released Wednesday put him ahead of Rogers, 50% to 48% among likely voters, within the survey’s margin of error.

Jews have bristled at the former county health director’s strong criticism of Israel, including when he stated earlier this week that the country is “not an ally.” They have also objected to his campaign’s prior association with left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, whose remarks about Jews have drawn accusations of antisemitism. El-Sayed has since distanced himself from Piker.

Some Jews have criticized El-Sayed’s initial remarks to this spring’s Temple Israel attack, which he has since apologized for. Rogers called his opponent “anti-Jew” in a JTA interview this week.

A new letter from El-Sayed to Jewish Michiganders is also being circulated as part of an effort to warm relations.

“I care deeply about the threat of antisemitism to our communities, and I am committed to protecting all Michigan Jews against hatred and injustice,” El-Sayed writes in the letter, which was shared on social media.

A spokesperson for the Michigan Democratic Party, which is named as a sponsor in the letter, did not respond to JTA requests for comment by press time. The El-Sayed campaign also did not respond to a request for comment about the letter.

In the campaign’s final days, Jewish surrogates for El-Sayed are hitting the pavement hard. A new Jewish canvassing initiative led by the progressive voter-mobilization group Seed the Vote hopes to engage voters in an effort to boost support for El-Sayed. Seed The Vote is working with the Jewish advocacy groups Bend the Arc Action and IfNotNow.

Most of the Jewish canvassers have come from out of state. One Jewish Michigander who is canvassing, Ronit Wagman, said the activists have sometimes experienced hostility from Jewish households.

“People just don’t want to put themselves on a limb and open themselves up to name-calling,” Wagman, who lives in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park and has canvassed in the nearby, largely liberal town of Huntington Woods, told JTA. “So I’m not too surprised that local Jews don’t really want to door-knock.”

In her own family, Wagman said she has been an El-Sayed supporter for a while but that her parents “took some convincing” to vote for him.

The argument that worked on them, she said, was pulling back from the candidate’s remarks about Israel and the Temple Israel attack. Instead, she asked them to consider the prospect of how Jews would fare long-term under what she described as continued Republican attacks on “constitutional democracy and civil rights.”

“Ultimately, we talked about how Jews have been able to enjoy so much safety and security in America because of the protections offered to all people by our constitution,” she said. “And when you start to erode that, nobody is safe.”

Conversations like the Wagmans’ could prove the tipping point for a Jewish population that largely considers itself liberal but has often been troubled by El-Sayed. Jewish organizers for him have also staged a series of small-room meet-and-greets with progressive politicians who are either Jewish, or who have close ties to the Jewish community. These figures have made their own pitches for the Senate candidate.

One of those surrogates, Jewish Illinois congressional candidate Daniel Biss, spoke at a Detroit private Jewish residence on Monday to about 50 people. Goldman was also present at the event.

Biss was targeted by far-left activists during his own primary this spring, some of whom accused the candidate of being AIPAC-aligned himself. In fact, he is backed by the liberal Zionist lobby J Street, and he fended off millions in spending that the pro-Israel group dropped in favor of an opponent.

Yet Biss told JTA he had no qualms about supporting El-Sayed, some of whose followers have targeted Jewish Democrats in the state in similar fashion.

“I don’t think it is ever healthy to associate any leader with the ugliest thing that anyone who supports them does,” Biss told JTA. “I absolutely never saw anything like that from Abdul himself.”

He continued, “It is possible to fight for Jewish safety in America with a variety of different positions on foreign policy. I think if we don’t accept that, we make ourselves vulnerable unnecessarily.”

To the group, he also argued that some Jewish concerns regarding El-Sayed were misplaced, particularly concerns about his language around AIPAC, which spent heavily against El-Sayed in his primary.

The lobbyists also spent heavily against Biss in his own primary, and, according to Biss, are fair game for criticism because they employed pernicious tactics in hiding their ad spending and paying for ads that often obscure their pro-Israel motivations.

“To be a little bit cheeky, I would say you can’t perform an antisemitic trope and then accuse me of antisemitism when I describe the thing you just did,” Biss told the Jewish crowd.

AIPAC announced Wednesday that it would cease endorsing and soliciting donations for its preferred candidates, though its associated super PAC, United Democracy Project, would continue operations. The New York Times reported Wednesday that the lobbyist planned to spend as much as $9 million in favor of Rogers in the race’s final weeks.

El-Sayed will campaign in Detroit this weekend with former President Barack Obama. He and Rogers face off in their final scheduled debate tonight.