If Michiganders pull the lever for El-Sayed, they cannot say they didn’t know exactly what they were voting for.
It might be the political ad of the 2026 cycle, but in all the worst ways:
New @RebellionPac ad dropping in Michigan. We have to suffer here at home, so Israel can get all its wars. That’s why they buy politicians like Mike Rogers. He promised to serve Israel “unconditionally,” but never made that promise to you. pic.twitter.com/mtgVOyNczg
— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) October 24, 2026
The pro-Abdul El-Sayed ad, produced and released by the populist Rebellion PAC, became an instant viral sensation, generating millions of views in just a few hours. The 70-second web spot is not, however, earning much praise. Instead, the very Democrats it was supposed to boost have condemned it.
Anti-Defamation League chief Jonathan Greenblatt called it a “desperate” example of “scapegoating the Jewish state.”
“This type of fearmongering about Israel is wrong,” Michigan Congresswoman Haley Stevens wrote. “It is not a winning strategy for any state.”
It is possible, wrote Joe Biden’s former ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, to “oppose aid to Israel” without “promoting the fiction that such said, or Israel itself, is responsible for what Americans pay for their groceries.” That’s an overly flattering assessment of what motivates those who deploy this argument, but Shapiro isn’t wrong in theory.
It’s not just that this pro-El-Sayed spot is cartoonishly vile in its contempt for Israel and its supporters; it’s also impossibly dumb. CNBC’s Sara Eisen explains:
Some serious economic misinformation to go with the antisemitism in this ad that blames Israel for the rising price of American eggs, bananas, healthcare
– it falsely links American families’ grocery bills and healthcare costs to U.S. aid to Israel.
– Aid to Israel is… https://t.co/I1ImuxI8os— Sara Eisen (@SaraEisen) October 26, 2026
El-Sayed’s friends have handed him a priceless gift here. No other reason the Senate race in Michigan is as close as it is than El-Sayed’s inability to distinguish America’s allies from its enemies and his habit of surrounding himself with people who are similarly confused. He should find it easy to distance himself from this advertisement, its creators, and the bigoted, inane logic it seeks to popularize.
But he can’t. If he denounced this spot, El-Sayed might as well condemn himself as well. He, too, argues that the relatively modest aid Israel receives from America, which primarily takes the form of American-made products, contributes meaningfully to Americans’ cost burdens. He says he would rather keep that cash in America — at least, he does when he doesn’t more honestly confess his view that U.S. tax dollars should be transferred to groups like UNRWA despite (we might charitably assume) the organization’s admission that its employees participated in the October 7 massacre. He seemingly cannot talk about the cost of consumer goods without, in the same breath, implying or even claiming outright that those costs are inflated as a result of “the billions in tax dollars that we spend sending our money over there.”
El-Sayed is a sharp enough campaigner to know his position would improve if he distanced himself from toxic sentiments like those in this ad and, by extension, those in his orbit who promote them. Either he’s too proud or too honest to take the offer.
Michiganders can at least be grateful they have no excuses next week. If they pull the lever for El-Sayed, they cannot say they didn’t know exactly what they were voting for.