Over 400 Michigan Jewish Democrats signed a letter backing Mike Rogers, but former Rep. Andy Levin claims AIPAC is really driving the effort.
Page A7From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 2 September 2026
Right-wing outlets label El-Sayed's critics 'AIPAC insiders,' then run El-Sayed's old 'move to Canada' line the next day.
As it ran on the front
Watch how this works, because it's the same move every time a candidate to their left starts polling better than expected: first you find something adjacent to sling, then you find something old.
This week it's a two-parter. First, a Dem megadonor and a few hundred other Jewish Michiganders who came out against Abdul El-Sayed's campaign get themselves labeled "AIPAC insiders" — not by the campaign, not officially, just enough of a label floating around that Fox can run a story about how unfair the label is, which conveniently also runs the label past everyone who hadn't heard it yet. That's not reporting on a smear. That's laundering one.…
…(cont) Then, same week, out comes the quote: El-Sayed once told people to move to Canada if they wanted to live the American dream. Old line, pulled up fresh, no new context required, because it doesn't need context — it just needs to run next to his name in a headline until it sticks. That's opposition research doing what opposition research does, and there's nothing new about that on its own.
What's worth clocking is the timing. Two hits, same candidate, same week, from outlets that don't usually spend this much column space on a competitive primary unless something in it is starting to worry somebody. You don't run the insider label and the old quote back to back because you're bored. You run them because the poll numbers moved and somebody wants a headline ready before the next one comes out.
None of this requires a conspiracy meeting in a back room. It requires an editor who knows which two stories to schedule the same week, and a wire service happy to carry both. The candidate's actual platform — the thing voters might want to evaluate him on — doesn't show up in either piece. What shows up is a label and a decade-old line, both doing the same job: making sure the conversation is about anything except what he'd actually do in office.
That's the tell. When the coverage of a campaign is entirely about the candidate's associations and his old jokes, somebody decided the platform itself wasn't the safe thing to talk about.
“Two hits on the same candidate in the same week isn't coverage, it's scheduling — somebody decided the poll numbers moving meant it was time to run the insider label and the old quote back to back. Neither story touches what he'd actually do with the office, because that was never the point of running them. When the coverage is all associations and one-liners, that's the tell that the platform is the one thing nobody wants voters comparing.”
“We're simply reporting on legitimate concerns raised by members of the community about the campaign's associations, and separately, on public statements the candidate himself made, both of which voters have a right to — look, running them the same week wasn't coordinated, that's just how the news cycle — okay, it does look coordinated, but that doesn't mean it was.”
The receipts
WASHINGTON — Sounds like he wants the Canadian dream. Michigan Senate Democratic hopeful Dr. Abdul El-Sayed once suggested that people should move to Canada in order to live out the American dream — arguing that US citizens have more of a chance of achieving greatness in the Great White North.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.