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Longtime Democrats Break With Their Party Over Michigan's Senate Nominee - But the Bigger Fight Is Over What the Party Is Becoming
Michael LaRosa and Julian Epstein are openly refusing to support Abdul El-Sayed, turning one Senate race into another test of the Democratic Party's ideological divide.
The Democratic Party's argument over its future is no longer confined to policy papers, activist meetings, or primary campaigns.
For some longtime Democrats, it is becoming a question of whether party loyalty still outweighs their objections to the candidates now winning nominations.
Two Democratic veterans are making clear that, at least in Michigan's closely watched Senate race, their answer is no.
Former Jill Biden press secretary Michael LaRosa has said he will not support Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, while veteran Democratic attorney Julian Epstein has gone further and endorsed Republican nominee Mike Rogers.
Their decisions have become part of a broader fight between the party's moderate and progressive wings after El-Sayed's narrow primary victory over establishment-backed Rep. Haley Stevens.
That divide is real.
But some of the labels being used to describe it require an important distinction.
El-Sayed is a progressive Democrat backed by figures including Sen. Bernie Sanders. He does not identify as a democratic socialist, and he was not formally endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America in the 2026 Senate race.
The controversy surrounding him instead centers on his progressive platform, his criticism of U.S. policy toward Israel, and his willingness to campaign alongside political streamer Hasan Piker.
For LaRosa, that last relationship has become the breaking point.
LaRosa first framed his position as a refusal to defend a Democratic candidate simply because of the letter next to the candidate's name.
“I refused to defend or support anyone with an SS Totenkopf tattoo, simply because they had a ‘D’ next to their name,” LaRosa wrote on X, referring to former Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner.
Platner drew national controversy after a chest tattoo was identified as resembling the Totenkopf, the skull-and-crossbones symbol associated with Nazi Germany's SS. Platner said he had not understood its meaning when he got it and later moved to have it covered or removed.
LaRosa then turned to Michigan.
His objection was not simply that El-Sayed occupies the party's left flank.
It was El-Sayed's continued association with Piker after Piker's notorious 2019 statement that “America deserved 9/11.”
Piker later said the remark was inappropriate and described it as a failed attempt at provocative commentary about U.S. foreign policy. The statement nevertheless remains one of the most controversial remarks attached to his public career.
El-Sayed has campaigned with Piker and has resisted calls to sever ties with him. More recently, he called the 9/11 remark “dumb” and argued that Piker had disavowed it.
For LaRosa, that was not enough.
“I won’t defend or support anyone who is too cowardly to stand up to extremists who think the mother of my best friend, who jumped from 95 stories because the alternative was worse, deserved what happened to her,” he wrote.
“Her only crime was showing up to work that morning.”
LaRosa said the victim was the mother of his best friend and died during the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.
He then accused El-Sayed of failing to stand up to “the guy who says she ‘deserved’ what she got that morning she showed up for work.”
That is a deeply personal reason for breaking with a party nominee.
Epstein's break is broader and more explicitly ideological.
The longtime Democratic attorney served as chief legal counsel for House Democrats during President Bill Clinton's impeachment proceedings and later worked in connection with Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
After El-Sayed won the Michigan Democratic primary, Epstein published a New York Post opinion article announcing his support for Rogers.
He then described the decision to Fox News Digital as “jumping ship.”
“The Democrats have gone off the deep end,” Epstein said.
He argued that the party had become too tolerant of forces he associates with constitutional hostility, antisemitism, radical political movements, and an economic agenda focused more on redistribution than wealth creation.
“I think the lunatics are in charge of the asylum,” Epstein said, before arguing that there should be no room in the Democratic coalition for people who want to “destroy our Constitution,” align with antisemitism, or tear down the free market.
Those are Epstein's political judgments, not neutral descriptions of every progressive Democrat or of El-Sayed's stated beliefs.
That distinction matters because the fight now unfolding in Michigan is partly a battle over definition.
Critics such as Epstein see El-Sayed's victory as evidence that the Democratic Party is moving outside the political mainstream.
El-Sayed and his supporters see something different: a progressive candidate who defeated a better-funded establishment favorite by campaigning on healthcare, economic inequality, corporate influence, and a more critical approach to U.S. policy toward Israel.
The primary result gave the progressive wing a high-profile victory.
It did not make the Democratic Party uniformly socialist, and it did not end the argument over which faction is more electable.
That argument now moves into a general election with unusually high stakes.
El-Sayed faces Rogers for the open Senate seat being vacated by retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters.
Michigan is a battleground state, and the contest could matter to the balance of power in the Senate.
That gives Republicans an obvious incentive to appeal directly to Democrats and independents who are uncomfortable with El-Sayed's politics or associations.
Rogers has already begun making that case.
Epstein's endorsement gives him a useful example: a Democrat with long ties to the Clinton-era party who is willing to cross the aisle rather than support the current nominee.
Epstein predicts he will not be alone.
He warned that a “large number” of Democrats could eventually leave the party if its leftward movement continues.
“I have been criticizing the Democratic Party for a long time as being far to the left of the median voter,” Epstein told Fox News Digital.
He said the problem was no longer only practical politics.
In his view, the party had also “lost its moral center.”
Epstein described Rogers as a “practical, middle-of-the-road normie guy” and argued that the Republican would have fit comfortably with much of the Clinton-era Democratic coalition.
Whether other Democrats reach the same conclusion is the part that matters politically.
One former Biden-world spokesman refusing to support El-Sayed does not prove a mass Democratic exodus.
One Clinton-era attorney endorsing a Republican does not prove the party's center has collapsed.
But the defections are evidence of a real tension that Democratic leaders cannot dismiss simply as Republican messaging.
The Michigan primary itself already showed a divided coalition: El-Sayed narrowly defeated an establishment-backed opponent, and Democrats now have to reunite those voters for November.
That is the narrower and more useful way to understand the dispute.
The question is not whether every Democrat has suddenly become a socialist or whether every moderate is preparing to vote Republican.
The question is how much ideological distance Democratic voters will tolerate inside the same coalition when the nominee comes from a different wing of the party.
LaRosa has drawn his line around political associations and rhetoric connected to 9/11.
Epstein has drawn his around a much broader judgment about economics, Israel, antisemitism, constitutional politics, and the direction of the party itself.
El-Sayed's supporters, meanwhile, are betting that progressive policies and grassroots enthusiasm can bring together enough Democrats, independents, and younger voters to win a statewide battleground race.
November will provide a much harder test of that theory than the primary did.
So the public breaks by LaRosa and Epstein settle one point: some longtime Democrats are now willing to cross party lines rather than automatically support the Democratic nominee.
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What they do not settle is whether those defections represent a small protest from the party's old guard or the beginning of a larger political realignment.
Michigan's Senate race may be one of the first places voters give an answer.
