This article is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

On August 4, Kansas voters will decide whether to replace the state’s longstanding merit selection system for Supreme Court justices with direct elections. Republicans want voters to believe the proposed constitutional amendment is just about transparency and giving the public more power over who sits on the state’s highest court, but the debate in Kansas is also part of a broader Republican push to inject more partisanship into state judicial elections. But the differences in where they want partisan elections and where they do not give the game away.

It looks like we are going to get a big test of some cardinal (possibly outdated) assumptions about American politics. I’m thinking first about the Michigan Senate race (though we might have something similar in the Wisconsin governor’s race). Several recent polls show Abdul El-Sayed holding a consistent, substantial lead over Rep. Haley Stevens. The primary is on August 4. This has been presented as a prototypical Democratic establishment vs Bernie progressive/insurgent race. And in key respects it is.

El-Sayed has all the Bernie/progressive positions. He’s run a campaign that places a heavy emphasis on the Israel-Palestine issue. And he’s centered AIPAC in his campaign in a way that even for many longtime critics and haters of AIPAC (including myself here) has a distinct whiff of antisemitic conspiracy theories. To wit, yes, AIPAC sucks. They’re a blight. They are functionally a Republican operation these days. But they are not the secret hand guiding things in the background every time there’s a bad news story or reverse of fortune for some progressive candidate, which is basically the role they’re playing in El-Sayed’s campaign.