Coming into Election Day, Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary was widely expected. A blowout seemed possible. Instead, his victory margin will likely be less than two percentage points. (NBC News declared him the winner early Wednesday morning but other outlets were still holding back.) But his triumph over Representative Haley Stevens, while far narrower than polls were predicting, is still a monumental event in both Democratic and national politics. And it sets up major tests for both the progressive and center-left wings of the party over the next three months.
El-Sayed did not deliver a resounding defeat to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and other parts of the center-left Democratic establishment who backed Stevens, as his supporters hoped. The election returns suggest that El-Sayed struggled with rural voters in particular. Looking forward to the general election, that data has to worry Democrats, who tend to lose elections to Republicans because they are blown out in small towns.
That said, stepping back from the last few weeks, when El-Sayed’s victory seemed certain, this is still a huge win for progressives and a major defeat for the center-left. AIPAC spent more than $30 million to boost Stevens, a massive outlay for a Senate primary. Whitmer and many other prominent Michigan Democratic officials implored the state’s Democrats to back Stevens.
The center-left both in Michigan and nationally leaned into the case it regularly uses to defeat progressive candidates: electability. Stevens, centrists claimed, would have a better chance of winning in a general election than El-Sayed. That that argument didn’t fully resonate in Michigan, the swingiest of swing states, is a huge setback for the center-left. If El-Sayed wins in November, that electability case against progressives will be even more weakened, perhaps easing the path to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the party’s 2028 nominee.
Speaking of November: As I wrote recently, Democrats with fairly progressive records (Barack Obama, Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin) have won in Midwestern swing states in the recent past. But what’s untested in swing states is 2020s progressivism that generally embraces the term socialist (although El-Sayed himself has said many times that he is not a socialist) and deep skepticism of American traditions and norms. It will be important for El-Sayed to emphasize populist economics and stances on other issues that most voters agree with, such as backing abortion rights and not funding Israel’s military. But this is not the time for either the candidate or his supporters to float more controversial ideas, like abolishing prisons or defunding police.
I was dismayed to see Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong, another progressive, fumble recently when asked about her past comments criticizing the Thanksgiving holiday. Can El-Sayed and his supporters discipline themselves, the way that Mamdani and his camp did in the months leading up to the general election in New York last year? They need to.
The party’s center-left needs to show some discipline too. Many centrists really disagree with El-Sayed’s stances on Israel and other issues. Others probably don’t want to see El-Sayed win in Michigan, thereby further emboldening the party’s progressive wing. But they must keep in mind that a Senator El-Sayed will vote against Trump’s agenda far, far more than a Senator Mike Rogers. That’s what’s at stake here. And those stakes are really high. So airing their frustrations about El-Sayed, particularly attacking him from the right, will only help Rogers. Don’t do it.
It’s an earthquake in Democratic politics to have Bernie Sanders’s candidate defeat Gretchen Whitmer’s candidate in Michigan. But the real goal must be to keep Donald Trump’s candidate from winning this seat. Haley Stevens could have done that. But Abdul El-Sayed will get that chance. He’s electable. He just won an election. Now, Democrats, center and left, in Michigan and beyond, need to do everything possible to get him elected in November.
