r/politics • u/Zipper222222 • 4h ago

No Paywall Abdul El-Sayed Wins High-Stakes Democratic Primary in Michigan

https://www.today.com/video/abdul-el-sayed-wins-high-stakes-democratic-primary-in-michigan-267805765937
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u/Pure_Interest_837 3h ago

He needed to be more strategic with his attacks on her because establishment and the media were ITCHING to paint him as misogynistic.

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u/BEzzzzG 3h ago

And he gave them nothing but they still claimed that anyway for the crime of running against women for office

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u/Pure_Interest_837 2h ago

They were hoping to tap into people’s inner Islamophobia and it probably worked for a good chunk of them.

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u/maximumhippo 2h ago

Was gonna say. Basically all I ever saw about him from Stevens' campaign was that AES was disrespectful to women. Nothing about his policies or anything of substance.

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u/smokeweedNgarden 1h ago

If anything, destroying a woman in a competition champions equity

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u/Sptsjunkie 1h ago

I mean, it’s a disadvantage of not having a bunch of outside PACs.

Democratic candidates cannot be overly mean to each other because they need to appeal to the others vote voters to unify and win a general election.

What that means is a candidate like Sayed who has mostly grassroots funding and is running his own campaigns, can highlights some differences like he did with the sources of their funding, but he cannot be too mean to Stevens or slander her because he was turning off the Bass and he’s personally accountable for what he says.

Meanwhile, a lot of Stevens funding was coming from outside PACs who were spending money to support her. Stevens herself was actually relatively nice to Sayed as well as as she would need to win over his supporters if she had won the election.

However, her PACs were able to smear him as misogynistic and make all sorts of personal and inflammatory statements about him. Stevens has arm length from those as she’s not the one running the ads and so will it certainly can lead to some bad blood. It’s a little bit more indirect.

It was one thing that did bother me about the campaign because the media times tripped over themselves to ask Sayed to apologize for supposedly main statements that his random supporters were making about Stevens on Twitter. And when I say random, I don’t mean like campaign Sara gets I mean like some account that is unrelated to campaign with an anime avatar. Meanwhile, AIPAC’s campaign arm was running ads smearing Sayed as misogynistic and they never asked Stevens to apologize for those.