Something significant is happening inside the Democratic Party.
The latest evidence came from Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed defeated U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate.
This was not a victory in a safely progressive corner of New York City. It happened in Michigan—a presidential battleground—and it came despite the Democratic establishment largely lining up behind Stevens. El-Sayed overcame enormous outside spending against him and defeated a sitting member of Congress. The Associated Press described the result as a major victory for the party’s progressive wing.
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El-Sayed is Muslim. He is also a progressive, but he is not officially a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. However, lining up to support him were several DSA groups.
What is developing inside the Democratic Party is bigger than one organization. There are at least two increasingly visible forces reshaping Democratic politics: the rise of democratic-socialist candidates and activist organizations on one hand, and the growing political representation and organization of Muslims on the other. Sometimes those circles do not overlap. Sometimes they do.
But both are bringing new leaders and constituencies into positions of influence, while a more radical progressive coalition is challenging a Democratic establishment that once exercised much greater control over the party’s nominees and message.
The question is no longer whether these forces exist. The question is: How much of the Democratic Party will they eventually define?
El-Sayed’s Michigan victory deserves particular attention.
A graphic about Abdul El-Sayed shown during a Senate Judiciary hearing on the Muslim Brotherhood Network in America.
He campaigned on Medicare for All and ending allied status with Israel, and he received support from prominent progressive figures, including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. His victory over Stevens came after a costly and intensely contested primary.
Those positions and alliances place him firmly in the party’s progressive insurgent wing, even though he is not formally a DSA candidate.
Yet Democratic primary voters chose him over an established member of Congress.
And Michigan was not an isolated case. In the same primary, state Rep. Donavan McKinney defeated incumbent Democratic Rep. Shri Thanedar in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District.
Something is moving inside Democratic politics.
Perhaps no political figure better represents the convergence of these emerging forces than New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Mamdani is both Muslim and a democratic socialist.
His rise from the New York State Assembly to the mayoralty of America’s largest city made him one of the nation’s most prominent democratic-socialist politicians and the first Muslim mayor of New York City.
The significance extends beyond one candidate. The political organization and coalition surrounding Mamdani became a force in subsequent Democratic primaries, providing another test of whether the movement could reproduce its success.
That is the key distinction: a movement becomes politically consequential when it can recruit candidates, organize voters, defeat incumbents, and repeat its victories—not merely when one charismatic candidate wins one election. The differing values and boldness to legislate them grow with each victory.
It would be easy to dismiss democratic socialism as a New York phenomenon. Increasingly, that is difficult to do.
DSA-backed and democratic-socialist candidates have competed and won in state and local contests outside New York as well. The movement’s strategy has emphasized building a pipeline through city councils, state legislatures, and congressional races.
Not every progressive is a socialist, and not every DSA-backed candidate succeeds. But it is hard to ignore the growing trend and momentum these two ideologies have within the Democratic Party.
The shifting infrastructure on the left is real: candidate recruitment, volunteers, small-dollar fundraising, unions, activist organizations, and an increasingly recognizable political message.
A second development deserves examination on its own terms: Muslim Americans are winning elections at increasingly significant levels of government.
The red/green alliance is growing and many of these candidates who are Muslim are also supported by DSA organizations. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” as the Marxist saying goes.
Virginia provides an important example. Ghazala Hashmi won the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor in June 2025, won the general election that November, and was sworn in on January 17, 2026. According to the Commonwealth of Virginia, she is the first Muslim woman elected statewide in the United States.
Mamdani’s election in New York and El-Sayed’s Senate nomination in Michigan add to the visibility of Muslim political leadership within the Democratic coalition.
That represents an undeniable change in America’s political demographics. The important question for voters is the same one that should be asked of every candidate and every political movement: What ideas and policies will they advance once they have political power?
That is where the changing Democratic coalition becomes especially important.
Democratic-socialist organizations advocate policies that go substantially beyond the center-left politics that characterized much of the Democratic establishment in previous decades. Their candidates frequently emphasize expansive government economic programs, stronger organized labor, higher taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations, changes to policing and criminal justice, and a substantially different approach to Israel and U.S. foreign policy.
El-Sayed, although not officially a DSA member, shares several priorities with the broader progressive movement, including Medicare for All and opposition to continued allied status with Israel.
For voters evaluating these developments from a biblical worldview, the analysis should remain focused on what candidates actually advocate: the dignity of human life, religious liberty, family and parental authority, justice, stewardship, the proper role of government, support of Israel, and the protection of innocent people.
And that is why El-Sayed’s victory matters beyond the fact that he is Muslim. It demonstrates that ideas once situated farther from the Democratic establishment can now defeat an establishment candidate in a major Midwestern battleground state.
For decades, Americans generally knew what the Democratic establishment sounded like.
Since Barack Obama combined progressive social policy with many conventional Democratic economic and foreign-policy institutions, the door has been open to more far-left-leaning values to enter the party.
Listen to where some of the Democratic Party’s greatest organizing energy is coming from today.
It is coming from candidates speaking about democratic socialism, Medicare for All, embracing loose immigration and rejecting policing, dramatically expanding government programs, Marxist redistributing of wealth, and rejecting America’s longstanding relationship with Israel.
It is also coming from younger politicians and newly empowered constituencies that are openly impatient with the Democratic establishment.
That does not mean these movements are in the majority, but political movements do not have to control a party to change it.
Perhaps the most significant development is not simply how many democratic socialists or Muslim Americans hold office today.
It is an open and effective pipeline.
Organizations recruit candidates. Local candidates become state legislators. State legislators become members of Congress. Mayors build political organizations. Activists become candidates. Candidates become national political figures.
That is how political movements grow.
Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan is therefore more than one candidate winning one primary. Zohran Mamdani’s rise is more than an unusual New York political story. Ghazala Hashmi’s statewide election in Virginia is more than another political first. And socialist-backed candidates defeating established Democrats cannot simply be dismissed as political curiosities.
Together, these developments raise a much larger question:
Who will define the values and message of the Democratic Party five or ten years from now and control significant parts of our elected government? Will groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Democratic Socialists be given a “mainstream” home in the Democrat party ushering in far radical ideas that Americans never thought would take root?
Will they be Marxists who espouse an antichrist worldview and who, in every culture, have removed the fingerprints of God on society and government? Or will they be Muslims who hold the values of Sharia, the Hadith, and represent a whole civilizational change, which is not compatible with our Constitution?
Intercessors, we must pray that those on the left pay close attention not merely to the religious identity or demographic background of those gaining power, but to the ideas they are bringing with them.
Because elections do more than choose people.
They legitimize ideas.
And the ideas winning today’s primaries may become the governing philosophy of tomorrow’s Democratic Party. The battle has shifted. Years ago, it could be said that both parties wanted the same result for our nation—each party just had a different way to get there. Today, it is more evident than ever that the path being offered by the newest radical candidates of the Democrat party will not take us anywhere that most Americans want to go, but far away from our founding principles and biblical values.
How are you praying for what is happening within the Democrat party? Share your prayers and scriptures below.
(Kris Kubal is IFA’s Chief Program Officer. Photo Credit: U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions)
