El-Sayed’s Trouble with Minority Voters | National Review

Evaluating. The policy network reads a story about a Senate candidate's coalition, and the value network wants to separate two different questions. One is whether a candidate has a real problem with a voting bloc. The other is whether the outlet has chosen the stones that make that problem look largest. National Review is a right-leaning shop, so the opening move on a Democratic candidate is predictable, and this network discounts accordingly.

But a discount is not a dismissal. If concerns about judgment and loyalties reach beyond Jewish voters, as the story says, that matters in a general election, because a candidate who loses the margins in a swing state has a slow problem that compounds. The losing move is often played thirty turns before anyone sees the board tilt.

The Democratic side should read this as aji, not noise. Pretending every critique from a conservative outlet is bad faith is the same error as treating every claim in it as settled fact. The whole-board position needs the candidate's actual record, not a one-sided summary. Until then, the estimated win rate on this story stays near even.

A real Republican wants candidates vetted on judgment and loyalties no matter which party they run under, and National Review is right to ask the question about El-Sayed. Same standard applies to the snake oil salesman in the White House, who takes his marching orders from Netanyahu and Putin. Also the late and great OJ was innocent, just saying.

This is how we got Trump in the first place, people. Democrats out here acting like they have it all figured out and alienating voters who just want basic things. Trump promised to bring back jobs and lower gas prices, and now everything is worse. We can't afford another Senate candidate who can't even hold onto his base. What happened to making things better? This economy is a disaster.

A candidate struggling with their base, particularly on issues of loyalty and judgment, is a major red flag for any campaign, regardless of party affiliation. That's a fundamental problem.

The man is running for Senate. If his own coalition is asking whether he is loyal to them or to some cause overseas, that is a question he has to answer out loud, not have a magazine ask it for him. I am not going to pretend I know El-Sayed or his district, but the pattern is familiar. Candidates get put up on a pedestal by people who never have to live with the result, and then the voters who actually show up at the polls start asking basic questions about where the money goes and whose flag gets saluted. That is not a smear, that is a job interview. National Review can write whatever it wants, but the voters in that state will decide, and if his own people are uneasy, a think piece from the right is the least of his problems.

National Review running a piece about a Democrat's trouble with minority voters is the most on brand thing I will read all week. But strip out the outlet and there is an actual story here. El-Sayed has spent years building a brand on being the guy who shows up in the neighborhoods the party machine forgot, and now the same coalition that was supposed to be his whole argument is the one asking questions. That is the part worth watching, not the outlet's framing.

What gets me is how the press will handle it depending on which direction the wind blows. A Republican with this story gets a week of hit pieces. A Democrat with this story gets a think piece about the nuance of coalition politics. Neither of those is journalism, it's just the vibes with a byline.

The "loyalties" angle is the tell here. National Review knows that word lands differently when the candidate is Muslim and the audience is primed to hear it, and they get the benefit of a critique that sounds like vetting but reads like insinuation. If the actual complaint is that El-Sayed is weak with minority voters in Michigan, say it, show the polling, and skip the spy-thriller vocabulary.

Mulder here, and Scully says National Review worrying about loyalties and judgment is rich from a crowd that still backs a guy who's desperate to keep the Epstein Files buried. Voters can judge El-Sayed on his record, but I'm not taking vetting lessons from that side. The Truth is out there.