Two years ago, Zainab Bibi Ahmed thought she had turned her back on the Democrats for good. Now, she is volunteering for the party’s US Senate nominee in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed.

Ahmed was one of 100,000 people to vote uncommitted in the February 2024 Democratic Michigan primary, in a bid to send a message to then US president Joe Biden about his support for Israel, as people watched what Amnesty International later called a “live-streamed genocide” in Gaza on their screens.

That November, Ahmed – a resident of Troy, Michigan, and an academic staffer at Wayne State University – opted to vote for the Green party’s Jill Stein amid calls to punish Democrats over the administration’s support for Israel.

“I did not think I would come back to the Democratic party after 2024. I really didn’t. But then when I saw [New York City mayor] Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed, of course, and Shereef Akeel and Amir Makled,” Ahmed said, referencing two university regent candidates in the state, “I was like, OK, I cannot not support these gentlemen just because they’re Democrats.”

A wave of progressive victories since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 has ruptured the Democratic party, from the unlikely victory last year of Mamdani to Peggy Flanagan’s nomination for Senate in Minnesota last week.

In Michigan, El-Sayed was joined by a slate of other progressives who secured the Democratic nomination at every level of government, including attorney general hopeful Eli Savit, US House nominees Will Lawrence and Donavan McKinney, state House nominee Chris Gilmer-Hill, and Ann Arbor mayoral candidate Yousef Rabhi.

This month, 2.5 million people voted in Michigan’s primary election – a significant jump from the 2 million who turned out for the 2024 state primary election. It’s a sign, some supporters hope, that El-Sayed’s progressive, pro-Palestinian politics will help bring back reluctant and disenchanted Democrats.

“If we keep going on this trajectory, I believe that the Democratic party will actually gain back a lot of support,” Ahmed said.

Reluctant and former Democrats backing El-Sayed

Like Ahmed, Waqas Sarwar, a Dearborn resident, voted for Stein in 2024, but he was excited to cast his primary ballot for Democrats El-Sayed and Representative Rashida Tlaib this month.

“I hate Democrats, but I love Abdul,” Sarwar said.

Sarwar believes that the party needs to bring “fresh blood” like El-Sayed and that it should pivot on Israel and Aipac to align with young voters.

Polling shows a majority of Democrats oppose military aid to Israel, a position that has slowly gained some traction in Washington. A similar majority of roughly 75% supports the Medicare for All proposed system of universal healthcare and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), three positions shared by El-Sayed.

Meanwhile, the Democratic party’s approval rating has reached historic lows, at times sinking lower than Trump’s favorability. “The party is totally lost right now,” Sarwar said.

Not everyone has been persuaded to return. Some, like Amin Hashmi, have pivoted to Trump. Hashmi, 63, a Pakistani American Muslim engineer in Troy, Michigan, described himself as a “solid Democrat” until 2024.

“I voted for Trump out of nowhere,” he said. “It was a desperate attempt for survival because I knew that Green party will not be a useful vote.”

Hashmi said he was angry at Biden over Israel and initially hoped then US vice-president Kamala Harris would be different. But Hashmi said Harris did not seem to differentiate herself on foreign policy, nor did she make a substantive effort to reach out to Arabs and Muslims.

In this month’s primary, Hashmi opted to vote on the Democratic side of the primary ballot and support El-Sayed over Haley Stevens, whose campaign was heavily backed by Aipac, the pro-Israel lobbying group.

But in the general election, Hashmi said he remained undecided. A Republican precinct delegate, Hashmi said he’s leaning toward the GOP nominee, former representative Mike Rogers, who ran unopposed in the party’s primary. But, Hashmi said, if the Trump-backed candidate aligns with Stevens on Aipac and foreign policy, and he does not have a plan for affordability or local issues like data centers, he could vote for El-Sayed.

“Mike [has] to offer better than what Abdul is doing,” he said.

Hashmi also voted for Aisha Farooqi, a progressive Democrat in the 11th district who was running against a pro-Israel candidate, Jeremy Moss, to succeed Stevens in the House. Farooqi lost the primary, but Hashmi said he would have voted for her in the general had she won.

“Being an old Democrat, the love is still there, but it’s kind of reluctant,” Hashmi said, who now calls himself a “reluctant Republican and a dejected Democrat”.

Samraa Luqman, a Yemeni American political activist in Dearborn who similarly voted for Trump and El-Sayed, said it’s not the first time Muslim and Arab Americans have changed parties over war.

Luqman said Muslims and Arabs used to vote Republican because of their alignment on social, and for some, financial, conservative stances. But former President George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 – a military offensive that eventually killed over half a million Iraqi people – prompted a seismic shift, she said, pointing to the “neoconism” and “warhawks that came out of the Republican party”.

In 2024, some Arabs and Muslims voted Republican after more than two decades of backing the Democratic party, again over foreign wars. In Dearborn alone, Trump was the first Republican presidential candidate to win since Bush in 2000. For Luqman, US support for Israel has pushed her to support the Republican party after previously calling herself a “staunch Democrat” until 2024.

“The Democrats became the George Bush of Gaza,” Luqman said.

But in November’s US Senate race in Michigan, Luqman said she is returning to the Democrats, to back El-Sayed. On top of foreign policy, Luqman said he appeals to her because he is “worried about Americans at home, and that to me is America first”.

Luqman said Israel policy was the top issue for her, and if the Republican candidate in this race had a similar anti-war stance as El-Sayed, then “I think it would have been a tougher decision for me in November”.

Dorian Sdunek, a resident of Howell, Michigan, who recently graduated high school, said he liked El-Sayed because of his commitment to campaign finance reform, a defining feature of the Democratic nominee’s platform.

Sdunek, 18, said he would have supported the uncommitted movement in the 2024 primary if he had been old enough to vote then. But for the general election, Sdunek would rather help elect someone who had “a chance of listening to us”, he said, rather than a conservative who is going to “blow the whole place to the ground”.

Sdunek said he was glad to see progressives such as El-Sayed gain momentum.

Rima Mohammad, an uncommitted delegate at the 2024 Democratic national convention and the co-founder of the People’s Coalition, said she ultimately supported Harris in the general election out of fear of another Trump presidency. But efforts to convince others were futile.

“I would try to explain why it’s important to support her at that point, but there was no saving that,” she said. “Even after seeing what Trump was doing, it was still hard to get people back engaged with the party, and back engaged with politics.”

Shortly after Trump’s victory, Mohammad co-founded the coalition to organize progressive and marginalized Democrats in Michigan. But she struggled to re-engage community members, including pro-Palestinian supporters, progressives, and, most of all, young people, who she said had “lost hope”.

This time around, Mohammad said El-Sayed’s candidacy has energized people, and she has received messages from community members asking for guidance on their ballots.

“There were brand new primary voters. They didn’t know what to do, but they came because Abdul was on the top of the ticket, and they would say: well, who else?”

From uncommitted to Abdul for Senate

The outrage over Gaza, which manifested in nationwide protests and boycotts, ignited a debate among some Democratic voters over whether they would support Biden a second time.

Uncommitted, a national protest vote movement, sprang up from Michigan in 2024. Biden was running largely uncontested in the primary, and pro-Palestine advocates used the otherwise inconsequential election to register their anger with the administration. The movement garnered about 13% of the Democratic primary vote in Michigan. In Dearborn, more people voted uncommitted than they did Biden, after he handily won the Arab-majority city four years earlier.

Lexis Zeidan, co-founder of the uncommitted movement and the director of engagement at Arab Americans for Progress, said the coalition “made it very clear that we were organizing under the Democratic tent”.

“We were trying to save Palestinian lives, while also trying to save the Democratic party against the Trump election.”

Ultimately, the uncommitted group declined to formally endorse Harris but implicitly encouraged people to vote for her. The leaders said in September 2024 to “vote against” Trump and “avoid” third-party candidates.

Zeidan, who is Palestinian Christian American, said the effort to make pro-Palestinian voices heard “fell on deaf ears at the time”, but candidates appear to be responding to the message now.

A separate group called Abandon Biden, which morphed into Abandon Harris when she became the nominee, urged people to oppose the Democratic candidate in an effort to punish the party over its support of Israel.

El-Sayed, for his part, backed uncommitted in the 2024 primary, then endorsed Harris in the general election the day after she announced her campaign. But Stevens and Aipac attack ads used his support for uncommitted against him. Zeidan called the effort “clear propaganda” used to disinform everyday voters. (After his primary win this month, Harris formally endorsed El-Sayed.)

She added that the uncommitted voting bloc was “incredibly diverse”, and young people in college towns made up a majority of the supporters.

Mohammad of the People’s Coalition said Gaza has become a litmus test in US politics.

“Palestine was like the moral compass,” Mohammad said. “If you were not with the people in Gaza … If you’re pro-war, you’re OK with the war, what else do you stand for?”