Branded a jihadist by the president, El-Sayed is defended by his party, then corrected by its own elder.

…(cont) Here is where the filing should have moved and didn't. El-Sayed answered for himself, telling the crowd he'd be "Senator Mohamed" to them, which is one man carrying a charge alone that an entire party apparatus exists to help carry.

Then, with six days left before the vote, the column finally moves. Representative Haley Stevens — who ran against El-Sayed in one of the bitterest Democratic primaries of this cycle — agreed to campaign with him in the race's final stretch. The Guardian's own word for the turn was "finally." That word is doing the job a press release usually does: marking the gap between when help was needed and when help arrived.

And in that same window, Representative Nancy Pelosi, one of her party's longest-serving power brokers, did not spend her capital closing that gap. She spent it rebuking El-Sayed's refusal to affirm that Israel should exist, calling the position "wrong." Trump had just called the nominee a "jihadist" on national television. The most senior Democrat to weigh in that week was not answering that charge. She was filing a different one, against her own side's candidate, six days before Michigan votes.

The receipts don't say why the help was late or why Pelosi chose that week to break from her party's closing argument. Reconcile that against what a party is supposedly for, hon, and the gap is the story.