There have been many changes in America’s political system in the last decade or so, but some things are perennial. If you would have told me in August 2015 that we would be in the middle of Donald Trump’s second term, in which he’s slapping his name on buildings all over Washington, building monuments to himself and declaring that the country is under attack by communists, I would have laughed out loud. But if you had told me instead that the media would be framing the upcoming midterm elections as a referendum on the Democrats going too far left and alienating the rock-ribbed Americans who matter, I would have shrugged and said, “What else is new?”
If there is one thing we have been able to count on for the last 30 years, if not longer, it is that it doesn’t matter how extreme the right wing might become or how far down the conspiratorial rabbit hole they go. The media interprets all political events in this polarized environment as validation of the belief that conservatives are always more in touch with Real America, and therefore more deserving of positions of leadership. According to this thesis, if Democrats want to win power, they will have to radically change their positions.
That’s the conventional wisdom when it comes to the Michigan Senate race. After Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s win on August 4 in the Democratic primary, an avalanche of articles, editorials and op-eds — not to mention analysis by television pundits and social media influencers — have appeared claiming that he is too far left for Michigan’s general election voters. Practically no one is doing the same for his GOP opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, who has tacked so far right that he has become a Midwestern hologram of the president.
This pattern is fascinating, especially considering the fact that in the last 35 years, Democrats have won the presidency five times to the Republicans’ four, a number that includes the two times (George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016) the party lost the popular vote but won the anachronistic Electoral College. Coupled with the fact that control of Congress has been evenly split, it’s not as though the GOP has had their fingers on the American pulse this whole time. Instead, they have built a massive partisan media infrastructure and stolen Supreme Court seats to further put their thumbs on the scale of the electoral system with big money and voter suppression.
With the deep unfairness of the Senate giving far more power to small, rural (and conservative) states, the institutional advantage held by Republicans is profound. And yet, according to conventional wisdom and the predictable knee-jerk reactions by too many establishment Democrats, when Republicans win it’s because conservative ideas have won over the people, and when the Democrats win it’s also because conservative ideas have won over the people.
This dynamic was on full display Sunday when CNN’s Fareed Zakaria analyzed the Michigan Senate race by saying that working class voters have abandoned Democrats as the party has moved left — even as they have tried to appeal to people on economic grounds and offer ideas that will help them materially. “The lesson is not that economics don’t matter,” he said, “but the Democratic Party’s problem is not that it is seen as too centrist on economics. Democrats routinely lead Republicans on issues like healthcare, and even now, the cost of living. Their liabilities are cultural and social issues — crime, immigration, the border and the so-called woke agenda.” In other words, Democrats must move right on cultural issues to win elections.
When Republicans lose — which, as we’ve seen, happens at least half the time — they aren’t harangued to take up diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, open the borders or clamp down on excess policing, even though their excesses on those issues could just as easily be seen as dispositive.
When Republicans lose — which, as we’ve seen, happens at least half the time — they aren’t harangued to take up diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, open the borders or clamp down on excess policing, even though their excesses on those issues could just as easily be seen as dispositive. The press will blame Trump or individual candidates for a lack of character, but they rarely apply the kind of analysis that Zakaria does, which essentially demands that Republicans abandon elements of their base to pander to Democrats.
The result is that only Democrats have agency to break the impasse.
When Bill Clinton won the presidency 34 years ago, Democrats had been in the presidential wilderness for 12 years. Their last two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson, had left office under the clouds of the Iran hostage crisis, in the case of the former, and Vietnam with the latter. The party decided to do just as Zakaria suggested, and Clinton won a plurality of voters in the 1992 general election on a platform of fiscal and personal responsibility, challenging the Democratic base on, you guessed it, culture war issues. Two years later, the GOP won the House majority for the first time in 42 years. So, that worked out well.
According to surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center, over the past 35 years, the public has actually moved left on culture war issues, following a progressive shift among Democrats, while the right has clung to its prejudices. (Republicans’ cult worship of Trump and conspiratorial thinking is hard to measure in these terms, but there is no doubt they have changed dramatically in this regard.)
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It should come as no surprise then that Democrats, feeling their strength in opposition to the extremely unpopular Trump, would see an opportunity to more explicitly push their message. Generally speaking, midterm elections are seen as a referendum on the party in power, and with the economy in an ongoing slump and Trump more polarizing than ever, you cannot blame them. As the New York Times reported, the party’s left wing has been energetically organizing all over the country, and it’s paid dividends in primaries in blue and purple states alike in the upper Midwest. And, once again, the media is falling back on the same old fear-mongering about the left alienating the Real Americans.
We have article after article hand-wringing over El-Sayed’s primary win because he supports issues they consider beyond the pale, such as Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and ending unlimited support for Israel, even though each of these issues have majority support. His primary opponents are now holding unity rallies to bring the various factions of the party together after the bruising campaign, and the national party has mobilized in support of his candidacy, including former President Barack Obama and former Transportation Secretary — and current Michigan resident — Pete Buttigieg, both of whom carry serious clout among more conservative members of the Democratic base and independent voters. In other words, Democrats are doing everything they can to reach out to the broad middle of the state.
Rogers, meanwhile, is doing the opposite, tacking hard to the right and even going so far as to join the most noxious, destructive conspiracy theory of all: election denialism.
Rogers, meanwhile, is doing the opposite, tacking hard to the right and even going so far as to join the most noxious, destructive conspiracy theory of all: election denialism.
As a member of Congress between 2001 and 2015, Rogers was a standard conservative in the George W. Bush mold, voting for tax cuts and deregulation, and later chairing the powerful House intelligence committee in the last four years of his term. When he retired from the House, Rogers worked as a talk radio host and commentator for CNN. Although he supported Trump after he won the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, he refused to go down the road of the Big Lie following Joe Biden’s win in 2020. In an op-ed for the Washington Post — published the day before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol — Rogers called Trump’s call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he urged the secretary to find him additional votes, “more gangster than presidential.” Rogers wrote, “This trend of refusing to accept free and fair elections, without any proof of fraud, must end for the sake of our democratic republic.” A year later, he said Trump’s political career was over.
But times have changed.
In 2024, when Rogers ran for the Senate against Elissa Slotkin, who would go on to win the race, he needed Trump’s endorsement. He gave his in return. Rogers has also adopted the president’s Big Lie, which should be disqualifying among thinking people everywhere.
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I’m not seeing a lot of hand-wringing among the pundits about how Rogers is losing Real Americans with his extreme views; that criticism is being reserved for El-Sayed. Likewise, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is locked in a close Senate race against Democrat state Rep. James Talarico, isn’t being browbeaten to moderate his views.
The Democrats may very well lose those races. But in this closely divided electorate, they might have lost them anyway with more moderate candidates. After all, Republicans have been running on racism and left-wing hippies for decades, no matter what their views were. The very centrist Clinton was vilified 35 years ago because he played the saxophone with sunglasses on “The Arsenio Hall Show.” Barack Obama’s middle name — Hussein — remains an Islamophobic meme all these years later. So, it’s not as if Republicans wouldn’t deploy the same insults to other candidates, no matter their positions.
This year, Democrats are talking straight and taking it right to the people, and both El-Sayed and Talarico, with their populist messages, are powerful communicators. Maybe it won’t work. But it’s long past time for the Democratic Party to stop allowing candidates to be harassed by the conventional wisdom that says the only way to win is to run to the right.
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The road to Democratic control of the Senate remains steep, but Donald Trump’s historic unpopularity, the misbegotten war in Iran and a wobbly economy have opened a slender path.
The thinking goes that if Democrats can hold every blue seat, prevail in North Carolina and defeat Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, then they must take any two from a list of red states that could well be in some semblance of play: Texas, Alaska, Ohio, Iowa or Nebraska.
Imagine that almost everything goes right. Democrats hold Georgia and New Hampshire. They claim North Carolina, vanquish Collins, and spring upsets in Texas and Alaska. But the chamber remains in GOP hands because Michigan Democrats could not reunify after a bruising primary. Kick away a winnable race in Michigan and, in this scenario, Ohio, Iowa or Nebraska also becomes a must.
So don’t lose Michigan.
On Tuesday, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed defeated Rep. Haley Stevens to claim the Democratic nomination. All the instant analysis is true: This was a political earthquake and one of the biggest wins progressives have scored. Stevens was better funded and the candidate of the Democratic establishment. El-Sayed’s win is a sign of the importance of Gaza inside the Democratic coalition, and of shrinking support for Israel. Now, his ability to close the deal this fall will be a crucial test of progressive electability ahead of the 2028 presidential election.
The race was also closer than expected. With a small number of votes outstanding, El-Sayed’s lead is just under 16,000. He fell short of a clear majority, winning with 48.5%. And while both candidates continue to say all the right things about coming together for what will be a very close battle against an old-school conservative in former GOP Rep. Mike Rogers this fall, the tight margin, El-Sayed’s failure to secure a true majority and the nastiness of the race could make that difficult.
After all, El-Sayed recently had to plead with his backers not to take personal shots at Stevens and her accent online. The airwaves were filled with millions of dollars in negative ads, many of them determined to paint El-Sayed as unelectable in the general. He called Stevens “a suit with a large AIPAC bank account.” She retorted that “Everyone in America understands you want to blame all of your problems on Jewish Americans.” A unity breakfast might not be enough to paper all that over in a matter of weeks, especially if the super PACs that backed Stevens continue to spend millions to fan the flames against El-Sayed in the general election.
This race could have been run in a far different and more positive manner. If it had, both progressives and Democrats as a party would be in a much stronger position heading into what will likely be a very competitive general election that decides control of the chamber.
This race could have been run in a far different and more positive manner. If it had, both progressives and Democrats as a party would be in a much stronger position heading into what will likely be a very competitive general election that decides control of the chamber. The stakes are high and will determine, among other things, whether Trump can confirm Supreme Court justices over the next two years.
Imagine the difference that ranked choice voting would have had in the primary. A third Democrat, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, won over 4% of the vote despite dropping out of the race several weeks ago. She won 61,000-plus votes, almost four times the difference between El-Sayed and Stevens. If Michigan used RCV in its primaries — like Maine, New York City and dozens of cities nationwide — the winner would have been able to claim a majority, and an easier path to unifying the party.
Some $60 million of negative ads flooded Michigan’s airwaves over this primary. Ranked choice voting wouldn’t have stopped that entirely; important, contentious issues were at stake. Outside dollars were a given. Yet RCV has been proven to lower the temperature in races like this and encourage conversation, coalition-building and respect.
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It’s entirely likely that an RCV race would have looked quite different. McMorrow and other challengers — forced out to provide voters with a binary, two candidate contest without spoilers — would have been able to stay in the race. Then, El-Sayed, Stevens and the others would have had every incentive to build a coalition through second choices to reach 50%. That comes from finding common ground, not from scare ads and nasty attacks. The winner of a race like that would be in far stronger shape, and ready to focus on the Republicans. Instead, El-Sayed is stuck trying to rebuild an intra-party coalition after the primary.
Instead, as McMorrow faded, party leaders and donors leaned on the state senator, a promising, charismatic politician, to exit and reduce the field to two. But this strategy didn’t produce a majority winner. It just limited choices before voters, and the winner still fell short of a majority. Democrats look less unified in a must-win race as a result.
Ranked-choice voting doesn’t fix everything that’s wrong with our politics. It’s not a silver bullet that cures polarization, settles complicated policy debates or ensures that everyone gets along. But it’s such an obviously useful tool in races like this that it makes zero sense not to use it.
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Win or lose, progressives and centrists will debate the meaning of this race for some time to come. That’s fine. In some form, the party is endlessly re-fighting 2016 over and over again. The more immediate issue is that primaries like this are going to continue to be contentious. Democrats would be in a better position to win races they absolutely must win if they adopted ranked choice voting in primaries like Michigan’s this. (Republican primaries would benefit from this nonpartisan tool too).
This is a lesson that Democrats absolutely must learn ahead of the 2028 presidential primaries. Then, it won’t simply be a schism between centrists and the left, but between multiple candidates within each lane and others representing different perspectives, backgrounds and parts of the country.
It will be painful for Democrats if they fail to take the Senate because they lost Michigan. But if that happens, it might not be because El-Sayed was too progressive for a swing state — but because Democrats chose their nominee through a process that bloodied and embittered everyone with no hope of consensus, and no easy path to reconciliation. In Michigan, and in other bitter primaries to come, they are going to need one.
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Jon Cohn has a good piece in The Bulwark on the challenges ahead for Abdul El-Sayed. The “brutal path ahead,” Jon calls it. I’ll note here that Jon is based in Michigan, despite beginning his journalism career in the East Coast cities where most political journalists are based. (In other words, his report isn’t based on parachuting into the state for a few weeks.) He notes the two, equally accurate narratives coming out of this primary battle. El-Sayed built a potent and victorious movement. Sanders-style progressive Democrats seldom win these contests in purple states. El-Sayed did. And he did it in the face of concerted opposition from the state’s Democratic establishment, the national establishment and an ocean of outside money, mostly from AIPAC.
It’s also true that Republicans will now run a viciously Islamophobic campaign against him, which will get extra traction from his association with the willfully inflammatory Hasan Piker. There’s another dynamic we’ve seen across numerous establishment-progressive battles. The Platner campaign pitched itself as appealing to working class or at least culturally working class voters who are usually unreachable by Democrats. But the polling showed that the demographic profile of Platner’s supporters looked pretty similar to what most Democrats have gotten over the last couple decades, and especially since Trump — the educated and affluent. The loose outlines of El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan look similar. Both make a pitch about young voters but they tend to appeal most to educated and downwardly mobile voters — so again, another version of standard early 21st century Democratic coalition.
On Wednesday morning, shortly after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won the hotly contested Michigan Democratic Senate primary in a slender victory, the Republican Party let slip the dogs of war. Barely 15 minutes after the Associated Press called the race for the unabashed progressive and first-time candidate for federal office over the centrist Rep. Haley Stevens, Donald Trump was crowing on Truth Social that the 41-year-old El-Sayed’s win was “great news for the Republican Party.” The newly minted Democratic nominee, he wrote, is “a Communist loser who hates Jews and Israel.”
As he has for 10 years, the president set the tone for the rest of the GOP.
By the noon hour, the National Republican Senatorial Committee had fired off an attack ad that led with Islamophobia and recalled the attempts from some quarters to define a certain Illinois senator who carried the name Barack Hussein Obama. “Abdulrohman Mohamed El-Sayed,” the ad began, making a point to use the candidate’s full name, an obvious move to launch the process of otherizing him to voters in Michigan and across the country, “[is] the most radical Senate candidate in America.”
But the day’s vilest moment came three hours later when Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who has always demonstrated a willingness to go there, invoked the T-word in a brief interview.
But the day’s vilest moment came three hours later when Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who has always demonstrated a willingness to go there, invoked the T-word in a brief interview as he boarded an elevator after voting to confirm Dr. Erica Schwartz, Trump’s controversial nominee to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The guy was basically a cheerleader for 9/11,” Tuberville told me, linking El-Sayed to a comment made by the popular far-left streamer Hasan Piker, with whom the candidate campaigned, that “America deserved 9/11.” (When asked in April by POLITICO about Piker’s remarks, El-Sayed characterized the question as a “gotcha game” and said “I’m not here to disavow people’s views”; Piker later apologized for the comments, calling them “inappropriate,” “messed up” and a failed attempt at satire.) “I mean, come on,” Tuberville continued, “the country’s changed, but it hasn’t changed this much to put people in [office] that are basically terrorists.”
When I asked if he was calling El-Sayed a terrorist, the senator replied, “I say he’s got the ability to become one.”
Tuberville has the political incentive to make such inflammatory remarks; they will play well to Republicans in Alabama, where he is running for governor, and he has no grand designs on national office. But they and the GOP’s larger response to El-Sayed’s win reflect another emotion that is running throughout the party. Although Republicans got the Democratic opponent they professed to want for former Rep. Mike Rogers, who lost a Senate race to Elissa Slotkin in 2024 only by the thinnest of margins, they are also scared — and with good reason.
El-Sayed has got game. When I approached his campaign for comment on Tuberville’s remarks, I was directed to an exchange he had on Wednesday night with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, in which he addressed the Republican onslaught.
“There are people like J.D. Vance or Donald Trump or Mike Rogers, who want to define America as being too small to include some kinds of people, and they point to my name, they point to my faith, they try to insinuate that somehow I’m less American because of those things,” El-Sayed said. “They want America to be small. I believe that America is big. It’s open-minded. It’s big-hearted. It can include any of us, regardless of how we pray, regardless of where our families come from, regardless of who we love or how we identify. That’s the America we’re building. And I think America, in Michigan in particular, has an opportunity to remind us just how big we are.”
Although El-Sayed has never run for federal office, these are not the words of a political novice. He is a gifted communicator, able both to make open-hearted, aspirational appeals and channel anger at billionaires and elites, a needle Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for all of his influence on the Democratic Party, has never quite been able to thread.
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But unlike eloquent politicians known to be showhorses, enjoying the social media clips from their media hits, El-Sayed is a workhorse, and this combination makes him formidable. One reason for his primary win is that he simply outworked Stevens, visiting over 110 cities, according to his campaign, holding over 500 public events and, in the process, building a genuine movement. This tenacity, along with rallying cries of “Medicare for All” and getting money out of politics, helped him overcome the opposition of the Democratic establishment and over $60 million in spending by super PACs supporting Stevens.
Nevertheless, after the race was called for El-Sayed, the Democratic Party quickly coalesced behind him and he was reportedly fielding calls from former Vice President Kamala Harris, former Transportation Secretary — and Michigan voter — Pete Buttigieg and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
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The stakes are high. Polls taken before the primary showed El-Sayed trailing Rogers by a larger margin than Stevens. Democratic control of the Senate runs through Michigan, and as many have pointed out, El-Sayed’s win has teed up a first-of-its-kind test: whether a progressive can win in a swing state that narrowly voted for Trump in 2016, went for Biden four years later and returned to Trump in 2024. El-Sayed will need to be even more nimble than he already is and avoid giving the GOP talking points.
Despite generous overtures to Stevens and assurances to the Jewish community El-Sayed made in remarks on Wednesday morning after the race was called, there are intraparty divisions left to heal. He must set to work convincing centrist and moderate Democrats, Black voters in urban areas and suburban voters, all of which Stevens carried, as well as disaffected independents, that he is worthy of their vote. The race will be tough, but it is winnable, even as he continues to face GOP efforts to define him on their terms.
Responding to a reporter who asked about how Republicans are deploying his name in their attacks, El-Sayed said, “That’s the only play they got.”
Whether that’s true or not, between now and November, we’ll see if it works.
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The post Abdul El-Sayed’s win in Michigan causes a GOP meltdown appeared first on Salon.com.
Abdul El-Sayed isn’t worried about Islamophobic attacks on the campaign trail.
The progressive Democrat who just won a hotly contested primary in Michigan told reporters on Wednesday that he’s willing to take smears on the chin, saying that name-calling and bigotry is “the only play” in his opponents’ playbook.
“That’s the only play they got,” he said. “They’re going to point at me. They’re going to point at my name like, ‘Well, he’s different.’ That’s the best you got?”
The former public health director has stuck to a platform centered on affordability at home and an end to foreign entanglements. He said that Islamophobia is a cop-out because his opponents don’t want to debate substantive issues.
“You can’t actually talk about what you want to do?” he said. “My name is not raising your gas prices. My name is not taking us to war. My name is not the reason you can’t afford groceries.”
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El-Sayed will face Former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers in the upcoming midterms. He encouraged Rogers to come up with a better line of attack than his identity, because he doesn’t think his Michigan voters will bite.
“I’ve been an Abdul in Michigan my whole life. This is the best place in the world to be Abdul,” he said. “Michiganders are big-hearted, they’re open-minded… [They’re] sick and tired of BS politics coming in to divide us.”
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The post “That’s the best you got?”: El-Sayed brushes off right-wing Islamophobia after Michigan primary win appeared first on Salon.com.
Three Republicans were running in Michigan’s 8th Congressional District primary. Trump in June endorsed Amir Hassan, a Navy Veteran, former Guantánamo guard, and Department of Homeland Security official. Hassan was up against Thomas Smith, a retired engineer, and Al Lemmo, an anti-abortion activist. In July, Smith suspended his campaign and endorsed Lemmo, who had decried Hassan as a “possible Trojan Horse candidate and lifelong Democrat.”
On Tuesday, Smith, who was no longer running, won a pretty clean victory over his Trump-endorsed former opponent.
Though the AP called Abdul El-Sayed the winner of the Democratic nomination for Senate in Michigan as I went to publish this post, this race turned out to be much, much closer than people expected or what polls predicted. The margin ended up being just under 1% or about 15,000 votes. We become so entranced by polls that we often fall into thinking that a candidate like El-Sayed bobbled the race at the end or Stevens mounted a comeback. There may have been some late movement. But it’s important to remember that our narrative of the race was built around polls that were simply wrong. Very wrong. It was probably always much closer than people realized. Indeed, the margin is close enough that those polls might actually have shifted the outcome of the race by depressing Stevens’ turnout or juicing El-Sayed’s. It’s a good reminder that whether you’re a volunteer, a voter, an activist, or a campaign worker you play these things out till the very end. Polls are usually right. And they’re a good guide. Except when they’re not. And this was a big “except.”
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.
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