He Partied With Hasan Piker the Night Before Michigan Voted. Three Chances Later, He Still Won’t Distance Himself.
On the night before Michigan Democrats picked their nominee for U.S. Senate, Abdul El-Sayed (D) spent it poolside in Detroit with Hasan Piker, the Twitch streamer who once told his audience America “deserved” the September 11 attacks. Less than 24 hours later, on August 4, 2026, El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination anyway, edging Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) by 14,893 votes out of nearly 1.5 million cast.
The alliance had already alarmed Jewish organizations across Michigan for months before a single vote was counted — five months after a gunman whose brother was a Hezbollah commander attacked a West Bloomfield synagogue, and after El-Sayed’s own response to that attack drew a public rebuke from the synagogue’s rabbi.
Since his win, El-Sayed has been handed at least three separate, on-camera opportunities to put daylight between himself and Piker. He has taken none of them.
- 14,893 votes El-Sayed's final margin over Rep. Haley Stevens (D) in the Aug. 4, 2026 primary, out of roughly 1.5 million ballots cast — Washington Examiner
- 3 separate on-camera chances El-Sayed has had to condemn a specific Piker statement since winning — from Sen. John Fetterman, CNN's Kaitlan Collins, and his own election-night crowd — and took none — The Hill / CNN / RealClearPolitics
- $115,000+ raised by El-Sayed's Senate campaign from at least 41 donors affiliated with CAIR, named an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism-financing prosecution in U.S. history — Fox News Digital
- March 2026 when a gunman whose brother was a Hezbollah commander attacked Temple Israel in West Bloomfield; El-Sayed's response drew a rebuke from the synagogue's own rabbi — Jewish Insider / The Times of Israel
Hasan Piker built his following — roughly 2.9 million combined across Twitch and YouTube — on commentary that got him briefly suspended from Twitch in 2019 after telling viewers America “deserved” the September 11 attacks, and that he defended at length after calling Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel a “direct consequence” of American and Israeli policy. None of that kept him off El-Sayed (D)’s campaign trail. Piker rallied with El-Sayed and Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) at the University of Michigan in April, appeared at Michigan State despite the campus Hillel calling him a “known antisemite” and saying it was “deeply troubled” by the visit, and spent the night before the primary at a Detroit pool party with El-Sayed’s campaign — his last public act before Michigan voted.
Piker has said plainly why he backs El-Sayed. “Abdul El-Sayed doesn’t call himself a socialist, but I still like him quite a bit because I think he’s a fighter, and that’s what Americans need right now,” he told WDET, Detroit’s public radio station, in June.
“Abdul El-Sayed doesn't call himself a socialist, but I still like him quite a bit because I think he's a fighter, and that's what Americans need right now.”
Hasan Piker · WDET 101.9 FM interview · June 24, 2026
The unease predates the pool party by months. In March 2026, a man rammed a vehicle into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township and opened fire before dying by his own hand; his brother had been a Hezbollah commander killed in an Israeli strike in Lebanon. El-Sayed condemned the attack, then added that “hurt people do hurt people, and the circumstances happening 6,000 miles away can affect the lives that we live here.” Temple Israel’s own rabbi, Jen Lader, said the framing suggested the attack “could be understood through the lens of Israeli actions.”
The Anti-Defamation League’s Michigan director, Elyssa Schmier, called El-Sayed’s decision to campaign with Piker “yet another example of the growing normalization of extreme anti-Zionism in mainstream spaces.” ADL national CEO Jonathan Greenblatt went further after the win: “Throughout the campaign, ADL has called out nominee Abdul El-Sayed for peddling in antisemitic tropes… or for campaigning with notorious bigot Hasan Piker.” The Republican Jewish Coalition’s CEO, Matt Brooks, called El-Sayed “a direct threat to Michigan’s Jewish community.” Separately, El-Sayed’s campaign has collected more than $115,000 from at least 41 donors tied to CAIR — an organization named an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism-financing prosecution in U.S. history — including his father-in-law, a CAIR-Michigan board member.
FIRST ON FOX: Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed collected more than $115,000 from individuals tied to CAIR — an organization named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing prosecution in U.S. history and designated a terrorist
Before the primary, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) — El-Sayed’s own primary opponent — told Fox News he should “distance himself” from Piker. He did not. Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) then warned publicly: “I can’t come together with someone if you are willing to embrace people that love Hamas, or that think America deserved 9/11.” El-Sayed’s response, delivered in Trump’s own cadence: “What a lovely gentleman.”
On election night, at El-Sayed’s own victory party at Detroit’s Majestic Theatre, Piker used his eleven-hour livestream to attack the Democrats who had criticized the alliance: “You are all unbelievably Islamophobic pieces of s—t.” He was talking about El-Sayed’s own party.
Hasan Piker’s message to Dems who didn’t vote for El Sayed: "You are all unbelievably Islamophobic pieces of shit."
i'm talking about you, and other dc elites who leaned into 60mil and smeared him only to demand fealty after he won, not the michigan voters shannon. ofc abdul should court every single michigan voter. eat humble pie and never endorse an aipac candidate ever again.
Three days later, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins gave El-Sayed a third chance, asking directly about Fetterman’s demand that he renounce Piker. “I’m less focused on folks who are campaigning with me, more focused on the folks I’m campaigning to,” he said. Fetterman’s reply was a dare: “You’re in a general election now, I dare you, I dare you.” Asked separately about Piker’s role in the race, El-Sayed reduced him to a job description: “He’s got his perspective on it and he’s welcome to his perspective. It’s not mine.”
El-Sayed’s defenders note, accurately, that he has never personally repeated Piker’s most inflammatory lines and has made his own appeals to Jewish voters directly. In his victory-night remarks, he said his “commitment to your safety, my commitment to Jewish safety, is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.” He told Fox News Digital separately: “I will always stand against antisemitism and stand with my Jewish brothers and sisters and their right to practice their faith safely, freely, and unabashedly.”
But his own record on Israel is not something reporters had to dig for. He has called the Israeli government “as evil as Hamas,” told CNN’s Inside Politics Sunday that Israel “is certainly a rogue state” that “did a genocide,” and called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal. Leaked audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon caught him telling campaign staff he would avoid commenting publicly on the death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei because “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad” — and that if reporters pressed him on it, he would pivot the conversation to Donald Trump instead.
President Trump posted twice about El-Sayed’s win on Truth Social, both archived in real time by the independent tracker Trump’s Truth.
Great news for the Republican Party. El-Sayed, a Communist loser who hates Jews and Israel, is the projected winner in his race with the Socialist. As usual, the Polls were way off on this one. She was not expected to do nearly as well as she did. Now, the Dumocrats crazy policies will only get worse!
Verbatim, via Trump's Truth (trumpstruth.org/statuses/40593)
Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed wants to terminate the Filibuster, and so do I — At least we have something in common!
Verbatim, via Trump's Truth (trumpstruth.org/statuses/40611)
El-Sayed now faces Republican Mike Rogers (R-MI) for the seat Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) is vacating — one of the most competitive Senate races in the country. Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, offered a carefully worded non-endorsement: “While we are disappointed in the final result of the Michigan Senate race, the razor-thin margin isn’t the resounding win for the far-left that was predicted.” Both the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Jewish Insider have reported Michigan Jewish Democrats actively weighing whether to cross party lines in November, and the Republican Jewish Coalition is urging them to do exactly that.
Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, and Hasan Piker helped get him there — rallying campuses, headlining a pool party the night before the vote, and spending election night attacking El-Sayed’s own skeptical Democrats as bigots. Three times since — from a sitting senator, from CNN, and from his own party’s unrest — El-Sayed has been asked to say Piker went too far. Three times, he has called him a streamer with his own perspective instead. Michigan’s Jewish Democrats are the ones now deciding what that answer is worth.
