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The Democratic nominee for a House seat in Michigan was in talks to endorse his party’s Senate nominee in the state, Abdul El-Sayed, before a flap on Monday over left-wing streamer Hasan Piker derailed those plans, a source familiar with the talks told Semafor.
State Sen. Jeremy Moss instead issued a statement on Monday that pointedly declined to back El-Sayed and criticized his association with Piker.
The streamer showed an image of Moss onscreen during a broadcast last week. “If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there, that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action,” Piker said. “Not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.”
Piker’s comments have thrown Democrats off-course in Michigan, weeks after El-Sayed’s narrow victory in a bitter primary against Rep. Haley Stevens — whose seat Moss is vying to keep blue. Rep. Hillary Scholten, D-Mich., joined Moss in airing frustration with El-Sayed’s lengthy denunciation of the “scourge” of antisemitism, which contained no criticism of Piker.
“Piker is a hack who thrives on hate, shock, and awe because he lacks substance,” Scholten said in a statement.
Moss, who is Jewish, took a lighter touch in a statement on Piker’s remarks, saying that Jewish Michiganders won’t be “gaslit that we’re responsible for the antisemitic harm upon us.”
El-Sayed’s GOP opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, reveled in the disunity across the aisle.
“Conman Abdul El-Sayed doesn’t have the guts to disavow his running mate,” Rogers said in a statement, referring to Piker.
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Moss has faced weeks of attacks over claims, amplified online, that he’d admitted he was running for Congress only to strengthen US ties to Israel. Last week, Moss said that an alleged recording of him making those remarks had been faked.
Piker was commenting on that story as he told viewers of his Twitch stream that overly pro-Israel sentiments put “American Jews” at risk.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, without mentioning Piker by name, denounced his remarks as “dangerous and antisemitic.”
It’s not clear whether Moss has entirely ruled out an El-Sayed endorsement as a result of the controversy. El-Sayed alluded to Piker, though not by name, in his statement responding to the controversy.
“While politicians and pundits try to make this race about a Twitch streamer, we’re going to be talking about gas, groceries, good schools, and healthcare,” the Senate nominee wrote.
El-Sayed appeared on Fox News for a 30-minute interview on Monday night, but the Piker incident did not come up.
Notable
- New polling for the IMEU Policy Project, conducted by YouGov, suggests that cutting off military aid to Israel is a popular position in the six states that will vote first in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary.
- “[M]y argument against the dangerous false conflation between [Z]ionism and [J]udaism which in turn increases antisemitism is now turned on [its] head,” Piker wrote Monday in response to the dust-up.