The rise of Limbaugh and his ilk worked out quite well for Republicans, helping them to wrench the country to the right. But it’s far from clear that Democrats either can or should follow the same template. The Republican Party is more homogeneous than the Democratic Party, so there’s less need to accommodate cultural difference within it. There are more conservatives than leftists in America, and in our system, conservative, rural areas of the country have more electoral power. Democrats will have a far harder time than Republicans building power with a stridently sectarian message.

But, of course, the debate over Piker isn’t just about tactics — it’s about control of the party’s future. Piker, an avatar of the Democratic Party’s insurgent left, is hostile to other parts of the Democratic coalition. He doesn’t just want to make room for anti-Zionism in the Democratic Party — he wants to make Zionism anathema. He once said that any “Zionist tendency” should be treated the same way as “rabid” neo-Nazism, and that no one who’s ever expressed “positive feelings about the State of Israel” belongs in public office.

My own feelings about the State of Israel have become decidedly negative, but it’s easy for me to see why Piker’s rise panics some Jews. For most American Jews, the land of Israel is bound up with their faith. That alone doesn’t give them the right to any particular piece of real estate; the Bible is not a land deed. But many are deeply threatened by what they see as a left-wing drive to drum Zionists out of public life. To them, the victory of El-Sayed, who campaigned with Piker during the Senate primary, would open the door to their own ostracism.

It’s a measure of Jewish anxiety that Michigan’s Jewish attorney general, Dana Nessel, speaking privately to Jewish Democrats this past weekend, urged them to sacrifice their own “comfort, safety and security” to stand with a party some feel betrayed by. I hope they listen; to me there’s no question that Trump and his villainous menagerie are infinitely worse than Piker. But telling people to ignore their own perceived self-interest is a hard sell, and El-Sayed should try to make it easier.

He’s already taken one important step to reassure Jewish voters. A few weeks ago, Jordan Acker, a Jewish Democrat who has known El-Sayed for years, told me that for much of Michigan’s Jewish community, the problem with El-Sayed was not his foreign policy, but his response to the attack on the Temple Israel synagogue near Detroit in March. (El-Sayed condemned the attack, but also noted that the attacker had lost family to Israeli bombs in Lebanon, saying, “hurt people hurt people.) Speaking to Jewish Democrats this weekend, El-Sayed offered a sincere apology. “It moved the people who wanted to be moved,” said Acker, who spoke to several people who were there. El-Sayed is also reportedly planning to hire a Jewish outreach director.