Michigan is a very American place. Yes, the Muslims dominate Dearborn but, by and large, it’s a place of hunting, car making and good schools.

Unlike California or (it pains me to say it) my home of Colorado in recent years, Michigan is still a place of ordinary Americans. It’s the heart of America, though a bit to the northeast.

Those ordinary Americans are frustrated this election year by another Mideast war, President Trump’s motorized mouth, higher gasoline prices (but still not high by world standards), President Trump’s motorized mouth, the remnants of President-ish Biden’s senility (for which we should sympathize), the radical policies implemented by Biden’s handlers who cravenly exploited that senility (and deserve no sympathy), and President Trump’s motorized mouth.

Michigan is a good proxy for America in weighing how America “feels” about those issues. I use the word “feels” quite deliberately. We ordinary Americans vote our feelings, not our analyses. We’ve been taught from a young age, after all, that feelings are never wrong. If my feelings on a given issue differ from yours, then we’re both right!

Everything on the Michigan ballot this year is dwarfed by one monumental issue of feelings. The feeling is this:

Do you hate the Jews?

The question is not phrased that way, of course. But almost.

The Senate candidates in Michigan are a solid, well-respected mainstream Republican – think Gerry Ford from Grand Rapids – and a Muslim named Abdul El-Sayed who has advocated the usual panoply of socialist solutions such as punitive tax rates, freebies for everyone except those who deserve them, defunding the police, and so on.

In the minds of ordinary Americans, the socialist solutions are, unfortunately, mistaken but not disqualifying. In fact, this election will produce a number of candidly socialist winners, including in Colorado.

Socialism is a fashion. It will sometimes be all the rage, much like bell-bottom pants, and then it will fade to the status of a joke. Rinse, repeat.

But El-Sayed in Michigan has another policy which is timeless and troublesome. He hates Jews.

El-Sayed’s hatred is often in the guise of hate for the Jews’ nation, Israel. And hate for their defense. And hate for their money. And hate for their culture. And hate for their religion.

He’s fine with Jews so long as they disclaim all that, maybe.

Most tellingly, El-Sayed collaborates with people not running for elective office who are more forthright, such as Hasan Piker. He has unequivocally refused to condemn their Jew-hate.

El-Sayed finds solace on the other side, as well. Known Jew-hater and demagogue-for-all-seasons Tucker Carlson slithers to the front of the line. 

El-Sayed won his Democrat primary by beating a Democrat with a track record as an ordinary politician who appealed to ordinary Americans, albeit mostly Democrat ones in view of her vote to impeach Donald Trump and to codify Roe v. Wade. It was a hard-fought primary, and El-Sayed won by much less than the polls predicted. As losing primary candidates do, El-Sayed’s opponent endorsed him for the general election.

Then Jew-hater Hasan Piker published yet another antisemitic video. It went so far as to blame Israel for the price of American bananas and to blame America for “killing Palestinians.” El-Sayed refused to condemn it or even distance himself from it. Citing El-Sayed’s “hate,” the Democrat who lost the primary to him withdrew her endorsement and replaced it with an endorsement for the Republican. This was a Democrat who voted to impeach Doanald Trump, mind you.

When a Democrat beats another Democrat in a primary, and the week before the general election the beaten Democrat withdraws her endorsement of the winning Democrat and replaces it with an endorsement of the Republican, something is amiss.

What’s amiss is what his primary opponent alluded to: El-Sayed’s hate for Jews.

It’s troubling that his primary opponent is about the only Democrat to condemn El-Sayed’s antisemitism, at least publicly. Then again, I’ve noticed Democrats have gone quiet on their decades-long obsession with the epithet “Nazi” in their name-calling of Republicans. I wonder — truly — if “Nazi” has become a term of endearment to them. Indeed, that has happened in parts of Europe.

We’ll see tomorrow how this plays out. Will El-Sayed gain enough votes among people on the left and the right who hate Jews to offset his loss among those who don’t? Will this bigotry – the world’s oldest, most destructive and cruelest – become socially acceptable again, and then societally destructive again?

As Michigan goes, so goes America – and the world.