Every election, we are told, is too important for principle.
That is essentially the argument Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel recently presented to Jewish Democrats as they wrestle with their party’s Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed. Nessel acknowledged concerns about forces within her party that, in her words, seek the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state and place the Jewish diaspora in jeopardy. Yet she urged Jewish voters to put the needs of the world above even their own “survival.”
It was an extraordinary formulation, but a familiar political temptation.
El-Sayed has now apologized more fully for his response to the March terrorist attack on Temple Israel outside Detroit. After saying that “hurt people hurt people” and invoking a cycle of violence, he now says he would take those comments “all the way back” and that terrorism is never justified.
That matters. But an apology is not an eraser.
The concern about El-Sayed never rested on one sentence alone. It includes his hostility toward Israel, his refusal to recognize it as a Jewish state and his continuing association with Hasan Piker despite Piker’s inflammatory rhetoric. The question is whether the larger record reflects attitudes Jewish voters reasonably find disturbing.
Nessel’s answer appears to be: perhaps so, but other things matter more. That is where the issue becomes national and bipartisan.
Republicans make the same calculation. Tucker Carlson gave Nick Fuentes, an unapologetic antisemite and white nationalist, a massive platform. Yet major Republican figures have resisted drawing a bright line around Carlson. Vice President JD Vance has faced pressure from Jewish conservatives over that reluctance.
The examples differ. The principle does not. Democrats cannot demand that Republicans reject antisemites and extremists while rationalizing ugliness on their own side because other priorities are more important. Republicans cannot condemn progressive antisemitism while overlooking antisemitism on the right for the sake of coalition building.
The real test of principle comes when enforcing it costs something. Nessel tried to frame that sacrifice through Queen Esther. She suggested Jewish voters should follow Esther’s example by giving up comfort, safety and even the future of their own people for a greater good.
But that is not what Esther did. Esther did not subordinate Jewish survival to another cause. She risked her own life and position precisely to save the Jewish people. To invoke Esther as authority for asking Jews to discount their own security turns the story on its head.
There will always be another supposedly existential election. Another Senate majority. Another reason to tolerate this compromise just this once. And once every election becomes existential, every principle becomes negotiable.
That is how boundaries disappear: this candidate is troubling, but the alternative is worse; this association is ugly, but the coalition is fragile; this rhetoric crosses a line, but the stakes are too high to enforce it.
El-Sayed’s apology should be welcomed. So should genuine repudiations of extremism on the right. But parties need more than apologies. They need boundaries they are willing to enforce precisely when doing so is politically costly.
Otherwise there are no red lines. There are only lines we call red until honoring them becomes inconvenient.
