Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Michigan's open US Senate seat who said earlier this week that Israel is “not an ally,” has hired a Jewish outreach director in the closing stretch of a race that remains too close to call, according to The Times of Israel.
The hire, veteran political consultant Lenore Goldman, joined the campaign in September and confirmed her role to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Wednesday. She is part of a late push to win over Jewish voters who have bristled at El-Sayed's record of harsh criticism of the Jewish state.
Who is Lenore Goldman and what is her role?
Goldman is a Michigan-connected operative whose past work includes One Fair Wage, a national campaign to raise the minimum wage, and Voters Not Politicians, the 2018 Michigan ballot effort that created a nonpartisan redistricting commission. She has also consulted for Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that the campaign did not immediately authorize her to comment further, though she has already appeared at local events organized by Jewish supporters of El-Sayed. The campaign first told JTA in August that it was interviewing candidates for a Jewish liaison position.
A tight race with a Jewish voter problem
El-Sayed, a former Detroit-area county health director, is locked in a narrow contest against Republican former US Rep. Mike Rogers. A Marist poll released Wednesday put El-Sayed ahead 50% to 48% among likely voters, within the margin of error.
The problem for El-Sayed is that Michigan's Jewish community has not forgotten his record. Beyond his remark this week that Israel is “not an ally,” Jewish voters objected to his campaign's earlier association with the left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, whose remarks about Jews have drawn accusations of antisemitism. El-Sayed has since distanced himself from Piker. He also faced criticism for his initial response to this spring's attack on Temple Israel, for which he has since apologized.
Rogers, for his part, did not mince words. In a JTA interview this week he called his opponent “anti-Jew.”
A letter to Jewish Michiganders and a canvassing blitz
The campaign is now circulating a letter from El-Sayed to Jewish Michiganders, an effort to warm relations damaged by months of rhetoric. “I care deeply about the threat of antisemitism to our communities, and I am committed to protecting all Michigan Jews against hatred and injustice,” El-Sayed writes in the letter, which was shared on social media. The Michigan Democratic Party, named as a sponsor, did not respond to requests for comment, and neither did the campaign.
A parallel ground operation is underway. A new Jewish canvassing initiative led by the progressive group Seed the Vote, working with Bend the Arc Action and IfNotNow, hopes to engage Jewish voters door to door. Most of the canvassers have come from out of state.
One local participant, Ronit Wagman of Oak Park, told JTA the activists have sometimes met hostility from Jewish households. “People just don't want to put themselves on a limb and open themselves up to name-calling,” she said. “So I'm not too surprised that local Jews don't really want to door-knock.”
Wagman, a longtime El-Sayed supporter, said her own parents “took some convincing.” The argument that won them over, she said, was not a defense of his Israel record but a pivot to warnings about Republican attacks on “constitutional democracy and civil rights.” “Ultimately, we talked about how Jews have been able to enjoy so much safety and security in America because of the protections offered to all people by our constitution,” she said. “And when you start to erode that, nobody is safe.”
Progressive Jewish surrogates make the case
Organizers have also staged small meet-and-greets featuring progressive politicians with Jewish community ties. One surrogate, Jewish Illinois congressional candidate Daniel Biss, addressed about 50 people at a private Detroit residence on Monday, an event Goldman also attended.
Biss, who is backed by the liberal Zionist lobby J Street and fended off millions in spending by AIPAC during his own primary, defended his support for El-Sayed. “I don't think it is ever healthy to associate any leader with the ugliest thing that anyone who supports them does,” he told JTA. “I absolutely never saw anything like that from Abdul himself.”
He added: “It is possible to fight for Jewish safety in America with a variety of different positions on foreign policy. I think if we don't accept that, we make ourselves vulnerable unnecessarily.”
Biss also argued that criticism of AIPAC, which spent heavily against El-Sayed in his primary, is fair game. “To be a little bit cheeky, I would say you can't perform an antisemitic trope and then accuse me of antisemitism when I describe the thing you just did,” he told the crowd.
AIPAC's final-week spending
The Jerusalem Post reported that AIPAC announced Wednesday it would cease endorsing and soliciting donations for preferred candidates, though its associated super PAC, United Democracy Project, would continue operating. The New York Times reported the same day that the lobby planned to spend as much as $9 million in favor of Rogers in the race's final weeks.
El-Sayed will campaign in Detroit this weekend alongside former President Barack Obama. He and Rogers meet in their final scheduled debate tonight.
For Jewish voters in Michigan, the choice now sits on their doorsteps, literally, as out-of-state canvassers knock and a candidate who called the Jewish state “not an ally” asks for their trust with two weeks left on the clock.