On the same night centrist Rep. Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel favorite of Michigan’s Jewish community lost her high-profile U.S. Senate Democratic primary against pro-Palestinian progressive Abdul El-Sayed, a Jewish LGBTQ Democrat easily picked up the party’s nomination for her House seat.
Michigan state Sen. Jeremy Moss, who has spoken out against antisemitism from the state house floor, netted the Democratic nomination for the state’s 11th District. The seat has a history of GOP representation but has been held by Democrats for the last several cycles.
Moss won with 49.5% of the vote after 97% of votes were counted by Wednesday morning, far outpacing his next-closest rival, pro-Palestinian attorney Aisha Farooqi, at 31.8%. The district is located in Oakland County, a suburban Detroit region with a high concentration of Jews, and includes Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, which was heavily damaged in a car ramming attack earlier this year.
On Tuesday night, Moss expressed appreciation to his supporters via X. “Thank you Oakland County! It’s the honor of a lifetime to be your Democratic nominee.”
Many of Stevens’ most prominent Jewish supporters — some of whom vowed to fundraise for Republican candidate Mike Rogers if she lost her primary race — also expressed their support of Moss.
While Moss did not make Israel a central issue of his candidacy, he has in the past supported liberal pro-Israel positions, including a two-state solution. “The overwhelming majority of American Jewish voters believe that both Israel has a right to defend itself from terrorism & Palestinians have a right to self determination in a peace-seeking state,” he wrote on X in 2024.
Moss highlighted a range of other liberal issues throughout his campaign, and received comparatively little campaign funding from pro-Israel groups. Yet his opponents tried to link him to the lobbying powerhouse AIPAC, whose outsized spending in the Senate race became a central issue there. Moss told Jewish Insider he believed some of those attacks “touch many people’s ears as if it’s trafficking [in] antisemitism.”
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