National
UPDATED: GLAAD’s communication breakdown; Barrios voted out
Media watchdog group dogged by allegations of dishonesty, incompetence
UPDATE: According to Politico, the Executive committee of GLAAD’s Board of Directors has voted to remove Jarrett Barrios as President of the organization.
UPDATE 2: According to both Michelangelo Signorile and the Bilerico Project, Rich Ferraro is confirming that Jarrett Barrios has stepped down as GLAAD’s President.
A former GLAAD board chair has called for the resignation of its president, Jarrett Barrios. (Photo courtesy GLAAD)
The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation raised eyebrows last week when the media watchdog group released a statement supporting the merger of telecom giants AT&T and T-Mobile. It marked the second time the organization, which was founded in 1985 as a grassroots action network, had weighed in on major business news. The prior statement had been released a year earlier objecting to the NBC-Comcast merger, due to concerns about negative portrayals of LGBT characters in the media.
The AT&T statement was curious, but attracted little media attention.
That changed on Tuesday, when former GLAAD board of directors co-chair Laurie Perper appeared on Michelangelo Signorile’s Sirius-XM OutQ show to sound the alarm on other alleged improprieties at the organization and questions facing its leader, Jarrett Barrios.
Since then, Barrios — who has been at the helm of GLAAD for 23 months — has granted a flurry of interviews to counter Perper’s claims. His responses, however, have only served to attract more scrutiny of the organization.
While speaking with Perper, Signorile pressed about why she left her position as board chair early. “You stepped down because you just thought he was not qualified. Obviously, as the months went on, others agreed with that assessment,” Signorile summarized. “I believe that over 14 board members have left, [since Barrios took over],” Perper relayed to the radio host.
Signorile continued, “Is it fair to say that most of these people stepped down because of the direction the organization was going, because of Jarrett Barrios?”
“Absolutely,” Perper said.
Reached by phone last week along with GLAAD director of communications Richard Ferraro and GLAAD board member and Florida PR consultant Gary Bitner, Barrios insisted that his short time working with Perper — only five weeks — was marked by a positive working relationship, and was focused on solving the organization’s financial problems.
“It’s perplexing and disappointing, considering that she worked for many years to help build this organization, but this happens sometimes,” Barrios told the Blade. “We form in our movement a circular firing squad, and we for whatever reason feel it’s necessary to hurt somebody else in the movement. [Laurie Perper and I] worked well together. Frankly the time we interacted was the time I was getting my feet wet, learning that the org at the time was running a rather large deficit.”
After booking Perper on the Signorile show, the producers reached out and arranged to have Barrios on the following day to respond to the statements that had been made. However, when GLAAD later attempted to arrange to have Bitner join him on the Signorile show, the show’s producers refused and the GLAAD team pulled out of the arrangement, opting to contact other media outlets and bloggers instead.
Barrios insists that the financial figures that Perper presented on the Signorile show were inaccurate and misleading, including a quote about a $14 million discrepancy after 2008, which Barrios says is the result of an IRS reporting requirement of a major multi-million dollar bequest by the late Ric Weiland of Microsoft that was dispersed over seven years. GLAAD insists that it has righted its financial footing thanks to cuts made early in Barrios’ term, though Ferraro also disputes Perper’s claim that six senior staff members left the organization since Jarrett’s start. GLAAD insists it was only three, with another just having left a few months ago.
“In 2009, there was a substantial deficit — I think it was like $1.2 million,” Barrios said. “Last year, we cut the operating deficit to $300,000 — shrunk it by about $900,000 — and this year, I’m happy to say, we’re running ahead of budget … most notably, our national presenting sponsor has already renewed for next year. That typically doesn’t happen until January. It’s already happened for next year. We’re very pleased. Our corporate revenues this year are substantially higher than last year, which were higher than the year before.”
Perper’s main purpose for appearing on Signorile’s show, however, was to question the reasoning behind GLAAD’s unexpected statement voicing support for the AT&T/T-Mobile merger. GLAAD joined unions, advocacy organizations and other LGBT-specific organizations like the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce and Out At Work in supporting the merger. These three organizations joined the NAACP, and the National Education Association in pushing the FCC for the merger.
Perper points to this as evidence that AT&T may have “bought influence with these” non-profits to advocate for the merger with the FCC.
Hours after his conversation with the Blade, Barrios appeared on Chicago’s “Feast of Fun” podcast with Marc Felion and Fausto Fernos. The issue of GLAAD’s curious support of the AT&T/T-Mobile merger and Perper’s statements regarding that merger soon came up, and Barrios seemed to change his story on a long-forgotten episode from more than a year ago when GLAAD released two letters regarding the principles of “net-neutrality” and expressed support for expanding Internet access. The second letter was later retracted.
At the time, Barrios wrote the FCC asking the letter to be removed from the public record, stating that he’d not given his permission for the letter to be submitted and that the signature is “not in my hand.” However, while speaking with “Feast of Fun,” his story seemed to change.
“It was like January of 2010. And it, it sort of supported the telecom industry’s position on net neutrality, which was not GLAAD’s position,” Barrios said. “In fact, GLAAD, at the time and still, doesn’t endorse bills and doesn’t endorse regulatory actions. So, it would have been impossible for us to do that.”
When reached by phone last week, Richard Ferraro explained why GLAAD cannot take a position on net neutrality.
“As a 501(c)3 there’s a question about whether or not we can,” Ferraro told the Blade. “It’s obvious where we stand [on universal access] … mergers are different.”
On “Feast of Fun,” Barrios shifted his story about the letter’s submission, after taking the position a year earlier that the organization had no knowledge of the letter prior to its submission.
“After an investigation, we determined that it was an administrative error, internally at GLAAD, and I’ll own that, and we withdrew the letter. At the time we withdrew the letter, we didn’t know that, so I was — you can imagine reading a letter in a public submission with your name on it that you had never seen, and it wasn’t your signature — after we did an internal investigation, we realized it was an internal error, an administrative error.”
“[The letter] was pulled, one, because it’s an anti-net-neutrality letter,” Ferraro clarified for the Blade. “Two, because at that point and currently, GLAAD does not take positions on legislation or regulation.”
In January, when the letter had been submitted and subsequently retracted, the narrative that emerged was that the letter had been forged. However, after the Feast of Fun statements, Bil Browning of Bilerico Project sought a clearer explanation about the letter.
In an interview last week with Browning, Barrios revealed his personal assistant — a woman Bilerico identified as Jeanne Christiano who has worked for Barrios consistently for seven years, and goes back to his days as a Massachusetts state senator — had called him while he was on the road, and in a hurry, he gave the letter his approval thinking that the two were discussing the previous letter with language Barrios had approved.
“We made a mistake. I authorized my assistant over the phone to sign and submit a letter that I understood to be a re-filing of the October letter in support of broadband proliferation,” Barrios told Browning. “When I realized she had inadvertently submitted an anti-net neutrality letter, I withdrew it … at the time, I had never seen the letter that was filed, and did not recognize the signature.”
Last week, after the story broke of the retracted letter to the FCC supporting the telecom’s position on net-neutrality, the Blade again spoke with Ferraro, this time about the new information emerging about the FCC letter.
“There’s an October letter that Jarrett wrote to the FCC that’s on the FCC site,” Ferraro told the Blade, “that very broadly talks about broadband proliferation, and speaks to our statement Friday about net-neutrality, which is that we don’t currently have a position, but we support universal access … we support the ideas behind, the principles behind net-neutrality – that we can do.”
According to Ferraro, GLAAD board member and communications law professor at American University, Anthony Varona, noticed the subtle pro-telecom messages in the letter after having served as a lawyer at the FCC in the past and immediately contacted the organization’s leadership asking why GLAAD was supporting the telecom industry’s anti-net-neutrality stance.
“When Tony Verona — who speaks FCC language — read this,” Ferraro explained, “he said ‘Why the heck did you send in a letter anti-net-neutrality?’ Jarrett of course said, ‘I never read that letter, I never said I’m against net-neutrality.’”
According to Ferraro, the suggested language is believed to have come directly from AT&T, and was copied verbatim by Barrios’ assistant, Jeanne Christiano.
Ferraro explained, “He was traveling, as he still does [a lot] … she’s more than an assistant — they’ve worked together for seven years. … I was not on the call, so can’t speak with certainty, but he said she called him and said something along the lines of ‘so I have the letter on broadband. They want the letter, do you want me to go forward with it?’ and he said, ‘yeah yeah,’ thinking it was the October letter.”
Ferraro agreed there must have been a major communication breakdown at GLAAD.
“He never saw the letter, and he said, ‘yeah, send it in.’ And obviously he didn’t mean to send it in, because as soon as the board member [questioned the letter], he said, ‘huh? I never saw that letter. I didn’t sign that letter. That’s not my signature.’ and he didn’t authorize it. The thing that he’s been trying to do is he doesn’t want to throw her under the bus. This was his mistake. He should have read the letter — he didn’t.”
The controversy raises the question: will GLAAD start weighting in on other FCC-related matters if a business has any ties to the LGBT community?
“One thing that has happened since Jarrett came on board, is that we’ve been more engaged with the FCC, which is a government agency that needs to hear more from the LGBT community … since then, you did hear us weigh in on the NBC merger, you did hear us weigh in on AT&T and we did file an FCC complaint about ‘Jose Luis Sin Censura,’ which is the most anti-gay program on television today,” Ferraro said.
Some activists argue there are larger issues at play than GLAAD’s support of the AT&T merger, or whether or not GLAAD can take a position on net-neutrality. Some leaders in the community are wondering if GLAAD is ready to unravel. Laurie Perper herself called for the dissolution of GLAAD, and discussed it with Signorile when she appeared on his show.
When the Blade asked Perper if GLAAD could survive this controversy, she said it would require a massive change in personnel and makeup of the board.
“One of the things that has come forward is GLAAD’s brand name has been heavily tied to the media awards and people feel that GLAAD is owned by the broadcasters,” Perper said. “The word transparency gets thrown around a lot and unfortunately I found in trying to manage Jarrett that he was far from transparent. So I was actually there for five months with him, and that was long enough for me to see that he was going to make decisions against the board, without consulting the board, the co-chairs and against their will.”
Perper also believes a narrower focus would help GLAAD recover.
“I think that they’ve expanded their programmatic work too much and therefore don’t have a solid impact in any one area, so I think they need to retract a little bit in this difficult economy, decide where they want to make an impact, and truly come out with thoughtful statements, rather than the flip-flopping I’ve seen them do with Adam Lambert, with the AT&T situation. … So they just need a consistent message and vision that they can put forth, that people can understand, and then they need to act on it as hard as they can.”
She continued, “I’ve had a lot of discussions with people who happen to be aware of a lot of the situation that’s going on with GLAAD and a lot of the controversy,” she continued, “and they all feel very strongly about the GLAAD brand name and that it still has tremendous value in the marketplace. So when I talk about the dissolution of it, I do it with a really heavy heart, not ‘how do you ever rebuild a brand name like that,’ but thinking ‘how do you get rid of a president and half of the board members who have helped enable him to bring such tarnish to the name?’”
Barrios, however, sees the organization heading in the right direction.
“We’ve enjoyed some of our highest profile victories ever in the last 18 months,” said Barrios. “So where we’re going is down that path … we’ve had some major victories with the ‘Today’ show, the marriage contest last year. A number of victories with our ‘no two sides’ campaign last year … Mostly that work is happening behind the scenes.”
When members of the media continued to pursue answers to the questions left unanswered at the onset of last weekend, GLAAD tried to shift attention to the Tracy Morgan scandal on Friday. GLAAD backed off from a promise to have Barrios chat on the phone with the Blade in regard to the new confusion brought about by the Friday morning Bilerico report and the Thursday morning Feast of Fun interview.
What’s still unclear is how the suggested language ended up in an official letter on GLAAD letterhead. GLAAD would not comment on whom from AT&T delivered the suggested language, noting only that “AT&T is the source.” However, with a former AT&T lobbyist on the board of directors, who now consults for telecom companies including AT&T, some wonder if Troupe Coronado was the conduit for this “suggested language” that turned GLAAD into an anti-net-neutrality advocate for the telecom industry.
Also unanswered is how unauthorized language was allowed to be submitted by an assistant to a government agency. If this specific language was not approved, why was there no protocol in place to prevent a scenario where an employee of the organization can sign the president’s name to an official document and send it as an agent of the entire group?
There are also nagging questions about Troupe Coronado’s influence and role in the controversy. In January 2006, the Washington Post’s Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Thomas B. Edsall investigated Coronado for allegedly exceeding the gift-giving limits on lobbyists when schmoozing lawmakers. He was still with BellSouth at the time. BellSouth is now part of AT&T. In addition, OpenSecrets.org lists him as a “revolving door personnel,” someone who has bounced from industry lobbying jobs, to government jobs and back again.
Coronado’s connections to the telecom industry and GLAAD’s subsequent misfires in the field of telecom regulation and corporate dealings is troubling for many activists, even if those connections are tenuous and possibly only coincidental.
Federal Government
Todd Blanche’s record on LGBTQ issues comes under scrutiny as he takes over DOJ
Blanche was confirmed by the Republican controlled Senate 50-49.
Todd Blanche, President Trump’s former personal lawyer, was sworn in as attorney general of the United States on Monday.
Blanche secured the position as the country’s 88th chief law enforcement officer on Sunday night after a contentious Senate confirmation process, ultimately ending with a 50-49 vote in his favor. All Democrats, as well as Republican Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, voted against him.
The confirmation hearing — and subsequent vote — brought questions surrounding Blanche’s credibility and integrity, as well as concerns about Trump’s ethical dilemmas surrounding cronyism, to the forefront.
The attorney general acts as the head of the Department of Justice, responsible for enforcing federal laws, representing the U.S. in court, and advising the president.
Blanche has a long history in Washington, beginning when he attended American University for his undergraduate education, like fellow former Trump attorney Michael Cohen. He began his legal career as an intern in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, which eventually became a full-time position.
That job eventually led him to work as a paralegal in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York while attending Brooklyn Law School at night. Blanche graduated cum laude in 2003.
Blanche left the public sector in 2014, taking a job in the Manhattan office of the law firm WilmerHale. In September 2017, he moved to Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, where he was a partner in the White Collar Defense and Investigations practice.
There, Blanche represented several figures associated with President Donald Trump, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.
In 2024, Blanche switched from Democrat to Republican and moved from New York City to Palm Beach, Fla., where he would be closer to Trump’s primary legal residence at Mar-a-Lago.
He then served as Trump’s personal defense attorney in the New York state case that led to Trump’s 2024 conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
While serving as acting head of the Department of Justice before his official confirmation, Blanche played a central role in overseeing the department and was involved in leadership decisions tied to several controversial actions affecting LGBTQ people.
One of the first issues was transgender rights and gender-affirming care, particularly for minors — an issue the White House and Republican Party have made a key part of their broader cultural agenda and federal policy efforts.
In a letter to New York Attorney General Letitia James, Blanche declared that the Justice Department “will not sit idly by while you attempt to use your office to force harmful procedures on our most vulnerable population.”
The letter came before NYU Langone ended its gender-affirming care at the behest of the president, forcing the hospital system to stop prescribing puberty blockers and hormones to minors.
The hospital’s change in policy came after the Trump-Vance administration threatened to pull all federal funding if it continued providing the care.
Blanche wrote that “the Justice Department believes the law is clear, and anti-discrimination laws cannot be used to force NYU Langone to perform sex-rejecting procedures on children.”
“As just one example, your office’s position would require a hospital to prescribe certain medications for certain diagnoses, regardless of the hospital’s or its doctors’ independent medical determination about the propriety of such treatment,” he continued in the letter.
In addition to his anti-transgender positions, Blanche also echoed his predecessor, Pam Bondi, in taking a public stance on limiting LGBTQ-related protections at the federal level.
He aligned with Bondi’s sentiments in June 2025 regarding the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision that restricted LGBTQ history lessons in schools and limited lower federal courts from issuing nationwide injunctions — rulings that have often blocked Trump administration policies.
Blanche called it “another great decision that came down today,” arguing the ruling “restores parents’ rights to decide their child’s education.”
“It took the Supreme Court to set the record straight, and we thank them for that,” he said. “Now that ruling allows parents to opt out of dangerous trans ideology and make the decisions for their children that they believe is correct.”
In December 2025, a Justice Department memo stated that, “effective immediately,” prisons and jails would no longer be held responsible for violations of standards meant to protect LGBTQ people from harassment, abuse and rape under the Prison Rape Elimination Act.
The law, passed unanimously by Congress in 2003, requires that incarcerated people be screened for their risk of sexual assault, including consideration of LGBTQ status, and applies to all correctional facilities.
Additionally, when the Justice Department, under Blanche’s deputy leadership and at Trump’s behest, attempted to force Children’s National Hospital in D.C. to turn over medical records related to gender-affirming care, U.S. District Judge Julie R. Rubin ruled that the effort “appears to have no purpose other than to intimidate and harass.”
Blanche also faced scrutiny over a slew of other issues surrounding his leadership during his tenure as acting AG.
The Justice Connection, a watchdog organization that works to protect current and former civil servants working in the U.S. Department of Justice, called his work so far “devastating.”
The organization said Blanche “harmed the department’s workforce, advanced the politicization of the department, undermined the rule of law, and threatened public safety.”
The group cited several issues, including what it described as Blanche minimizing the violent reality of the January 6 insurrection led by Trump supporters; investigating and attempting to prosecute President Trump’s perceived political enemies; the botched release of the Epstein Files to Congress and the public, including the release of victim and witness details and censorship surrounding the scope of Trump’s relationship with the convicted sex trafficker and pedophile; and the expansion of federal immigration enforcement in Minnesota which lead to the death of two U.S. citizens by federal officials.
Sharon McGowan, senior vice president of Policy & Litigation at the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ advocacy group in the country, provided a statement to the Blade about Blanche’s confirmation calling it “chilling.”
“The last thing Todd Blanche deserves is a promotion,” McGowan said via email. “For months, Blanche has used his position as Acting Attorney General to advance President Trump’s personal and financial interests and to weaponize the Justice Department against the President’s enemies, whether they be transgender kids or civil rights organizations trying to help people vote. His notion of justice is warped and dangerous, and LGBTQ+ Americans deserve better.”
National
HRC condemns DoE removal of LGBTQ bullying data from federal survey
Organization cites rise in homophobic, transphobic policies, worse mental health outcomes
The Human Rights Campaign is slamming the White House — and the Department of Education — following their removal of some LGBTQ bullying data from federal data collection.
The Civil Rights Data Collection is a mandated survey of all public school districts that collects figures on a wide variety of statistics about students — including demographics that include race, ethnicity, sex, disability status, and English learner status; course-level enrollment data, such as how many students are enrolled in advanced placement or honors classes; and school climate information, such as rates of bullying, harassment, suspensions, and expulsions.
That data collection has been ongoing since 1968 — nearly six decades — but now has a major change in what questions are being asked, or not asked, that advocates are largely attributing to the Trump-Vance administration’s culture war fight on LGBTQ children in the country.
Changes to the 2025-2026 survey questions — approved by the Office of Budget and Management in July — eliminated a space for schools to report how many students identify as nonbinary, how often those students are victims of harassment and bullying, and whether school districts have policies prohibiting gender identity-based incidents.
K-12 Dive, a publication that focuses its reporting on news related to K-12 education, first published a list of these data collection changes from 2024-2025 to 2025-2026.
These questions, as well as others that included LGBTQ student topics on treatment in schools, were added to the CRDC under the Biden-Harris administration. By including these questions, policymakers hoped this would lead to increased investigations into discrimination complaints, initiate compliance reviews, and provide policy guidance to districts, according to Education Department documents.
The CRDC also eliminated the mention of “gender identity” from the definition of rape and sexual assault. The prior collection of data (before the Trump-Vance administration changed it) defined rape as something that could be done to “all students, regardless of sex, or sexual orientation, or gender identity.” Now, the new data collection questions say, “All students, regardless of sex, or sexual orientation can be victims of rape,” removing “gender identity” from the new definition.
By removing and changing definitions, this could have a real-world impact on some of the school’s most vulnerable students. According to CRDC data from 2021-2022, more than 1,800 school districts reported enrolling one or more nonbinary students.
Additional data also shows that the changes to data collection is harming public school students. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee released a report in April finding that the Trump-Vance administration’s efforts to all but close the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights has left students facing discrimination and harassment throughout the country without the federal recourse they are entitled to under federal law.
The Williams Institute, a think tank that collects data and conducts research on issues related to sexual orientation and gender identity, has data indicating the true number of nonbinary and transgender children is much higher — they estimate that for children ages 13 to 17, nearly 724,000 identify as nonbinary or trans.
This is in line with a slew of policies pushed by the Trump-Vance administration since their federal takeover. Within his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14168, titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” This directive attempts to make the federal definition of gender unchangeable, determined by sex assigned at birth alone.
Within his first month of his second term, Trump issued Executive Order 14187, titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” The order directs federal agencies to restrict gender-affirming medical care — including puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgeries — for individuals under the age of 19.
He also pushed multiple anti-trans executive orders, including Executive Order 14201, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” and Executive Order 14183, “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” targeting trans athletes and military members, respectively.
These policies have a real-world impact on trans people.
The Trevor Project, a nonprofit dedicated to crisis and suicide prevention for LGBTQ people under 25, reported that, for the seventh year in a row, LGBTQ youth are at higher risk for suicide as a result of mistreatment and stigmatization.
Trevor Project data showed that nearly 60 percent of LGBTQ young people ages 13-17 said they were bullied in the past year, and that 36 percent of LGBTQ youth seriously considered suicide in the last year. The data shows a bigger discrepancy for trans youth, with that number hovering around 40 percent considering suicide.
HRC President Kelley Robinson issued a statement following the approval of the new data collection questions that leaves LGBTQ students’ bullying statistics under — if not completely unreported.
“If there was even a shadow of a doubt, this latest move by the Trump administration makes it abundantly clear they do not care about the safety of LGBTQ+ students, and trans students in particular,” Robinson said. “These are adults who should be protecting our kids. And instead, they are making sure bullying and harassment are not tracked. If they are not tracked, bullying and harassment cannot be prevented or stopped — which is exactly what the Trump administration wants. Parents deserve to know their kids are safe at school, and every single young person deserves dignity and safety at school. Anything less is plain evil.”
HRC has a “Welcoming Schools” initiative that they say is the “most comprehensive” bias-based bullying prevention program in the nation. The program includes LGBTQ and gender-inclusive resources for schools, help navigating special education and disability resources for LGBTQ-identifying students, and other tools to help schools become more inclusive.
This program has been in effect for nearly two decades and, according to HRC, reaches nearly 750,000 students.
The Washington Blade reached out to both the Department of Education and Office of Management and Budget for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.
Michigan
Progressives score victory as El-Sayed wins Mich. Senate primary
Democratic newcomer will face Rogers in November
Michigan held its primary on Tuesday, allowing the two major political parties to select their nominees to go head-to-head for the state’s U.S. Senate seat.
NBC News called the Democratic race early, giving the victory to physician Abdul El-Sayed over incumbent U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) in an extremely close primary. El-Sayed won 48.5 percent of the primary vote, with Stevens trailing by just one percentage point at 47.5 percent.
Both candidates have campagined on supporting the LGBTQ community through different avenues— for El-Sayed he focused on his past promoting HIV and PrEP funding and research. Stevens focused on her legislative history working to support transgender rights in the state.
This is a major win for progressive Democrats, who have been bearing the brunt of political attacks from President Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and centrist Democrats.
El-Sayed, a former health director in Detroit, ran his campaign largely on making life in the Great Lakes State more affordable amid rising costs. His policies include promoting “Medicare for All,” pushing health policy that targets the regressive efforts of the Trump-Vance administration that rolls back funding for both Women and LGBTQ people, minimizing the growing amount of money in politics, and he was very vocal in his criticism of Stevens for supporting aid to Israel. He was endorsed by two major progressives — U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.).
Stevens, the four-term congresswoman, is much closer to establishment Democrats on policy than El-Sayed.
During her time in the federal government, she has consistently supported the Equality Act, which would add sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. She has also emphasized supporting local manufacturing and lowering housing costs in the state.
She was named to Advocates for Trans Equality’s 118th Congressional Champions list for her pro-trans policies and was endorsed by establishment heavy hitters Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
The contentious race boiled down not only to Michigan affairs but also extended to international conflicts — namely Palestine. (South Africa has filed a case in the International Court of Justice in The Hague that accuses Israel of committing genocide in the Gaza Strip after Oct. 7.) This primary also acted as one of the first major races that pushed back against AIPAC, a lobbying group that works to promote pro-Israel candidates in U.S. elections. The group has been involved in domestic politics since 1954.
AIPAC devoted a massive amount of money to this race.
The Associated Press reported that the pro-Israel lobbying group spent more than $30 million on ads against El-Sayed because of his vocal denunciation of Israel and his continued criticism of its policies towards Palestine.
Michigan has a large Muslim and Arab American population, which could, in part, explain how El-Sayed was able to win.
The Republican side was far less competitive. Former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) ran unopposed and clinched the GOP nomination. He has consistently held anti-LGBTQ positions, going as far as voting multiple times for a federal constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, voting against repealing the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, and supporting efforts to directly target the attempted expansion of Title IX protections to include trans people.
El-Sayed will face off against Rogers in November for Michigan’s Senate seat — one that could have lasting impacts not only on the state’s politics but also on the Republicans’ narrow Senate majority and Trump’s political agenda.
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