The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 6 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
After Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, Donald Trump uncorked a screed smearing him as crazy and a communist loser. And of course, that tweet previews what the GOP attack on him actually will be, only it’ll be backed by hundreds of millions of dollars. In the full expectation of this, El-Sayed delivered a victory speech and then remarks to reporters that framed the attack on Trump and on MAGA that seems likely to animate his campaign.
Can it work? Is it enough? How will El-Sayed overcome the other serious challenges he faces in this race? We’re really psyched to be discussing all this with Ron Brownstein, senior political analyst at CNN and columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, whose recent piece about the contest is a reminder that he’s the best in the business at explaining this stuff. Ron, great to have you on.
Ron Brownstein: Greg, glad to be with you.
Sargent: So Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official who was born in Michigan, the son of Egyptian immigrants, just won the primary by less than a point over the more moderate Haley Stevens. El-Sayed is harshly critical of Israel, is running a left-populist campaign for Medicare for All and targeting billionaires and the establishment. Ron, El-Sayed won big among young and college-educated voters, but Stevens won in the more rural and working-class areas. Can you explain why that portends a serious challenge for him in the general election against Mike Rogers?
Brownstein: Yeah. You remember, like, a phrase that I popularized about 15 years ago was that Democratic presidential primaries divide between the wine track—candidates who appeal to young people and college-educated whites—and the beer track—candidates who mostly appeal to working-class whites, Black voters, and seniors. That’s kind of gotten scrambled at the presidential level in the last few cycles, but it sure wasn’t in evidence in Michigan.
I mean, this was a pure wine-track, beer-track coalition. And the answer is that whether it was Stevens or El-Sayed who won, neither side of that is enough to win a purple state like Michigan. You need both. And in the first general election polling that’s out there, from EPIC-MRA, El-Sayed, not surprisingly, is underperforming among voters over 50, Black voters, and non-college white women. So he’s got to do some work to knit together the coalition the Democrat needs to win in November.
Sargent: Ron, so what does he have to do? Basically, the poll you’re talking about, or at least a number of public polls, if you look at them all together—basically what they show was that El-Sayed is running behind where Stevens is running against Mike Rogers.
So it depends on the poll, but it’s maybe around five points, six points, seven points—Stevens is running by that much more. So he has to win that chunk of voters, the voters who would vote for Stevens against Mike Rogers, but not vote for El-Sayed as of now against Mike Rogers, right? Who are those voters?
Brownstein: Well, I think they’re fundamentally Trump disapprovers. I mean, you know, as we’ve talked about before, in Trump’s first term, Susan Collins in 2020 was the only Republican senator or challenger who won a Senate race in a state where more people disapproved than approved of his job performance, according to the exit polls.
In that EPIC-MRA poll, 63 percent of voters in Michigan now disapprove of Trump. You know, basically an amoeba should be able to win in that environment. There’s just no precedent for Republicans winning a Senate race in a state where Trump is that unpopular. But in that poll, El-Sayed is way underperforming among the disapprovers. What the political strategists call double haters are probably the people who are going to decide this race.
I mean, the odds are high that there is going to be a big chunk of voters, maybe as much as 20 percent, who have an unfavorable view of El-Sayed at the end, after all this Republican money and after his own choices, but also disapprove of Trump.
So how do they vote in the end? In the past, double haters have tended to vote against the party in the White House. But Republicans hope that El-Sayed is such a reach for those voters that they can win more of them than they usually do. And I think that will be the pivot point of this race—people who disapprove of Trump and are somewhat hesitant about El-Sayed.
Sargent: Ron, who are those voters? Are those voters basically the same constituencies that essentially were more likely to vote for Stevens than for El-Sayed?
Brownstein: Logically you would say yes, but we don’t really have detailed enough evidence for that. You know, I suspect there are also some college whites in there beyond the Democratic primary. I think it’s going to be pretty broad-based.
I mean, I think, you know, El-Sayed has run kind of a factional campaign. I mean, he presents himself as the leader of a movement. He’s been really focused on Israel and AIPAC, which is of less interest to a broader general electorate. And so I think he’s going to face a fair amount of suspicion, or resistance at least, among the broad electorate.
But Trump is not going to get much more popular between now and November in Michigan. And so that group of people who are dubious of both, I think, will be the tug of war in this race.
Sargent: Well, Donald Trump issued a tweet that said this, quote: “Great news for the Republican Party. El-Sayed, a communist loser who hates Jews in Israel, is the projected winner in his race with the socialist. Now the Dumocrats’ crazy policies will only get worse.”
I think by socialist he means Haley Stevens, which is utterly preposterous, but whatever. Ron, we’re going to see hundreds of millions of dollars put behind that precise message that Donald Trump put in that tweet. They’re going to paint him as a radical, a terrorist sympathizer, someone who pals around with far-leftists like Hasan Piker. They’re going to highlight his support for abolishing ICE, et cetera. That’s aimed at the landscape that you described before, right? In other words, they’re conscious of what you essentially said the challenge here is going to be.
Brownstein: Yeah. And, look, I mean, we have not had a Democratic nominee in a swing state try to defend Medicare for All, even, for example. Like, you know, the most striking thing—I was in Michigan over the weekend—the most striking thing I heard was in a Black church on Saturday afternoon, where the reverend, who is the statewide president for Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, described El-Sayed as a one-hit wonder who cares more about Palestine than Detroit.
I mean, so there’s a lot of pressure points here. But you can’t lose sight of the other side of the equation. You know, Greg, in 2024, 51 percent of Michigan voters had an unfavorable view of Trump, according to the exit poll. And Mike Rogers won only 10 percent of them. That’s about what every Republican candidate in Trump’s first term, except for Susan Collins, won among people who disapproved of him.
OK, in this election, it is likely that somewhere around 60 percent of Michigan voters are going to be unfavorable to Trump, which means that Rogers is going to have to win close to twice as many Trump disapprovers as anybody else did except Collins in the first term, or as he basically did in 2024. I don’t think that’s impossible against El-Sayed, but it is still a reach. And so it is possible that El-Sayed could way underperform the underlying environment and still squeeze by.
Sargent: Let’s talk a little bit about how El-Sayed talked about Trumpism during his victory speech late Tuesday night. Listen to this.
Abdul El-Sayed (voiceover): He can’t decide which era of Republican he wants to be from. On the one hand, he was from the neocon era that had us fighting unnecessary wars in Iraq, swore up and down he could never support Donald Trump, then went to Mar-a-Lago when he decided to run for Senate the first time, and licked all the boots until he finally got that Trump endorsement. So he’s both the worst of the neocon era and the worst of the MAGA era. And I just think that’s the worst of all. Because at least you should know who you are. But I promise you, Mike, by the time we are done with you, all of Michigan is going to know who you are.
Sargent: Ron, I like the way he depicts his Republican opponent as a Trump bootlicker, which indicts the deep corruption of that, and then goes after MAGA, which you don’t hear Dems do often in swing areas. The idea of the fusion of the neocon era and the MAGA era goes after what Trumpism really is, what Trump has created—a GOP that combines militarism and white nationalism and authoritarianism.
And yet, I’ve got to think, language like “neocon” doesn’t seem exactly like general election language. It’s online language a little bit. It shouldn’t be, but it is. What do you think of all that?
Brownstein: I think his description of Rogers is pretty effective, with the caveat that you mentioned about—look, this is a guy who in the first debate with Haley Stevens described childcare as a gender justice issue. I mean, he’s kind of got to get out of the library a little bit. And look, he has that experience, but you know, he does have that whiff of kind of the online self-closeted left, or self-reinforcing left. But I think that description of Rogers is effective.
But I think, like a lot of the Bernie-inspired candidates, he really doesn’t want to focus on Trump as a unique threat to the American system. At his rally Friday night in Dearborn, he said, as Bernie often did in his runs, Trump is a symptom. Trump is not the disease. Trump is a symptom of a corrupt system where special interests—in his case, symbolized by AIPAC—have too much influence.
I don’t think that is as much of a winning argument in 2026 as that Trump himself is taking the country in the wrong direction. And like a lot of the Bernie candidates, he doesn’t really want to lean on that. He wants to basically say the entire system is corrupt. Like many of the Bernie candidates, he often seems more energized criticizing the Democratic leadership than he does Trump.
And so the job for a Democratic nominee in Michigan really isn’t that complicated. You don’t have to change the electorate. You don’t have to inspire a movement. You just have to win as many voters who disapprove of Trump as every other Democratic nominee did in his first term, except for Sara Gideon against Susan Collins. That’s it. That’s what you have to do.
And, I thought in his victory speech the other day, El-Sayed was talking about the movement that he’s inspired, how his election is going to change politics forever. Really? Like, you know, you won an election by 15,000 votes, and that’s going to change politics forever. There was a lot of “me,” not quite enough “you,” I thought, particularly for voters who are not tuned in politically. In a Democratic primary, railing against AIPAC is really powerful. For a swing voter who is worrying about paying the bills, it could not be less relevant.
And so I felt like, you know, watching him as a candidate, and even watching him on election night and the morning after, he seems to me like he has to broaden who he’s talking to and how he is talking to them. Like, as I said, this is a guy who called childcare a gender justice issue. I cannot imagine there is a working mom in small-town Michigan who has thought of it in exactly those terms.
Sargent: Right. I think the problem is that he is torn between, on the one side, going after the GOP-MAGA, which is something that is really ripe right now, especially in a place like Michigan where Trump is at sixty percent disapproving. And then on the other side of the equation, he wants to indict the whole system. And there’s sort of a strain in this type of left-leaning thinking that holds that if you’re talking too much about Trump and MAGA, you’re not talking about the more systemic problems.
Politically, I feel like he could go very hard at Trump and MAGA here, maybe harder. I do want to credit him, though, with going after MAGA the way he did. He gets that MAGA is the problem to some degree, right? He just has to centralize Trump a little more, I think. What do you think of that?
Brownstein: Well, no, I agree. I mean, I think that, like as I said, like many of—like Sanders himself and many of the candidates he’s inspired—he doesn’t really dwell on Trump. I mean, El-Sayed explicitly said on Friday night, in kind of a closing-argument rally, I view Trump as a symptom, not the disease. The disease is that there’s all this money corrupting politics, and it’s symbolized by all the money that AIPAC spent against me. And there is an audience for that, but the core—what is the tailwind for Democrats this year? What is the core argument? It’s that voters feel that Trump has not delivered on what he promised.
The swing voters feel that. And Democratic voters believe he is just out of control, threatening the fundamentals of the country, our values, our laws. And putting a check on Trump is really the core argument that Democrats have in ‘26. And I feel like a lot of the Sanders-inspired candidates—he kind of refuses to focus that, or is reluctant to focus that in the way that it would be most powerful, because, as you said, it gets in the way of this broader, somewhat more academic, I think, to many voters, arguments about how the system functions or doesn’t.
Sargent: Right. And underscoring your point, let’s listen to what El-Sayed said to reporters. It’s another rendition of the Trump bootlicker line. Check this out.
El-Sayed (voiceover): Mike Rogers is a guy who has never shied away from a corporation he could do a favor for. Mike Rogers is a guy who, believe it or not, went back to Florida so he could lick every single boot Donald Trump owns to beg for his endorsement. I’m so sorry—if you want a senator who’s going to lick some boots, fine, go vote for Mike Rogers. But if you want a senator who’s going to stand up to Donald Trump, then you’ve got your option right here.
Sargent: So, Ron, there he’s doing what I think we want to see more of, which is cast this race as a referendum, or a choice, between someone who will rein in Trump and stand up to Trump on the one hand, and someone who licks his boots on the other. And it also goes after Trump in a deeper sense. He’s essentially saying Trump requires Republicans to corruptly act as the servants of him and the servants of corporations. He should probably talk more like that, right?
Brownstein: Yeah, well, look, I’m not here to give him campaign advice, but I think it would—yeah, as I said, like many of the Sanders candidates, he is kind of pulling away from what is the strongest Democratic argument in 2026, because it interferes with this broader point that he wants to make.
Again, like, he can win. I mean, there’s no question he can win. Trump’s disapproval is at a point where he doesn’t have to do anything special to win. He only has to win somewhere a little north of 80 percent of people who disapprove of Trump, which should be very doable.
But there are a lot of reasons—not only in his argument, but also in his positions, and, let’s face it, in his background—that are going to create hurdles for him in doing that. And, you know, it’s going to be a tight campaign. I mean, it’s going to be a lot tighter, I think, than it would have been with Stevens.
Sargent: Yes, I fear that that’s the case. Agree that it’s totally doable. Let’s listen to one more stretch of El-Sayed talking here. Listen to this.
El-Sayed (voiceover): I look in front of me and I see all kinds of colors, all kinds of stories coming together around the idea that we can have nice things. We just can’t do it alone. That to have them, we’re going to need to reach across the divides they tell us we can’t breach—divides of race, of faith, of geography, of sexual orientation, gender identity. And so as we continue forward for the next 13 weeks, I am asking you to put your shoulder in the work to make sure that we defeat Mike Rogers, we defeat and send a blow to Trumpism, and we do the work of building that next 250 years that all of us deserve. Because at some point, whether you know them or you don’t, the future will ask you, what did you do in this moment? For me, it looks like two little girls, ethnically half Indian like their mom, ethnically half Egyptian like me, 100 percent American.
Sargent: Ron, I don’t think it’s an accident that he juxtaposed the need to go after Trumpism with this kind of rhapsodic take on the diversity of his audience and the Americanness of his two kids and of himself, despite his kids being half Indian and half Egyptian. That again kind of goes to the core of what people are angry at Trump about, which is that Trump is he’s essentially trying to wreck that aspect of what makes America great—diversity, immigration. He’s a white nationalist, in short.
And so I think he’s getting close to the type of indictment he needs of Trump and Trumpism, just not quite there. What do you think?
Brownstein: Well, I think that, you know, ultimately, the voters who are available to a Democrat, realistically, even in a state like Michigan, overwhelmingly believe that. I mean, that is the idea of the coalition of transformation—that Democrats ultimately rely on the voters who are comfortable with the way the country is changing demographically, culturally, and economically. The issue isn’t that message.
The issue is the extent to which other things he has said and done kind of belie that, or give Republicans ammunition. When he said “hurt people hurt people” about the synagogue attack, right? I mean, that’s—there is a kind of sectarianism about his campaign. And there needs to be—if he is going to win, he has to talk to people who are just either not interested in that argument, you know, or are somewhat leery of it, or somewhat concerned about it. And you know, you can’t win in Michigan just by unifying the Democratic base, even if he succeeds in doing that.
Sargent: I want to point this out, though, Ron. I think he’s talking about this idea of his kids being 100 percent American and himself being 100 percent American, juxtaposed with Trumpism, as the beginnings of a rebuttal to the attack he’s going to face.
So I think what’s going to happen here is those hundreds of millions of dollars are essentially going to try to do to him what they tried to do to Barack Obama, right? So I think Hasan Piker will sort of function as the Reverend Wright.
Brownstein: But Greg, think about the difference. That is the core. Obama directly dealt with it.
Sargent: Yes, I agree. I agree.
Brownstein: And El-Sayed is basically saying live with it.
Sargent: Right. I just want to get at what El-Sayed thinks he’s doing, though, right? Because I think what he thinks he’s doing is, OK, I’m about to face hundreds of millions of dollars, which cast me as an alien, threatening, anti-American figure, a terrorist, right? Basically. And so when he talks about how American he is, and unabashedly talks about his immigrant heritage, he’s sort of staking out the beginnings of a rebuttal to that attack on him. I don’t think it’s there. I agree with you.
I just want to sort of underscore that that’s where he thinks he’s going, and maybe ask your opinion on what he really needs to do with that.
Brownstein: Can he get there with Hasan Piker next to him? That’s the question. And you know, I think that, as I said, I think that argument is very appealing to—anyone who is open to voting for a Democrat would accept that argument. That my kids are the proof of what America is. I mean, that is the greatness of America. But that doesn’t erase Hasan Piker from the picture. And it doesn’t erase “hurt people hurt people” from the picture.
I mean, he is not running as Barack Obama did in 2008, as many people have pointed out to me, who I’ve talked to in the last couple of weeks. And I think he will try to get there. But this is not that. This is, like, this is a very different—this is a more narrow-casting kind of political strategy. And it proved to have a lot more limits. It proved to be a lot more narrowly cast, even in the primary, than they expected.
Again, having said all this, Trump is unpopular enough that he might be able to win. But whether this is a model that other Democrats should be following—I would submit to you that the issue is not only whether he wins. The issue is, compare him to Jocelyn Benson, a more centrist candidate. If he runs seven, eight points behind her and wins, is the message of that that a Bernie-style candidate can win Michigan in 2028? Or is it that if you have an environment that is less advantageous for Democrats, this is just not sellable to a majority?
Sargent: Right. I agree. I think, though, that in his head he’s moving beyond the Bernie campaign, at least to some degree. I think he thinks he’s doing that with the paeans to Americanism and so forth. I guess what you’re saying here is there’s going to have to be some sort of very clear articulation of something much more Obama-like than he’s doing right now. Is that the essence of your point?
Brownstein: I think so. I mean, I don’t know if it’s essential—like I said, he might be able to win without it, because of the environment. But I do think that he has anchored himself in a way. There’s not been a Reverend Wright speech here at all. I mean, there’s been nothing like that. In fact, there’s been defiance.
There are reasons why there are a lot of voters, including on the Democratic side, who worry about him appearing with Hasan Piker. I don’t have a huge opinion on that, but it’s clearly something that is troubling for a lot of even Democratic voters. And his instinct is to say you’re wrong. That’s his instinct.
Sargent: Right. What he’s saying is, they’re going to say Hasan Piker, Hasan Piker, Hasan Piker, and I’m going to say, well, I’m fully American and my immigrant heritage makes me American.
Brownstein: There’s only so far you can move. There’s only so far you can move with him still in the picture.
Sargent: You think that there’s got to be some sort of more comprehensive and thought-through rebuttal to the Hasan Piker attacks?
Brownstein: Yeah. Well, but it’s not just that, right? I mean, I think he very much in his campaign—whether it’s on the foreign policy stuff with Israel, or the way he frames the domestic political situation—he identified very much in that Bernie lane.
And it was just enough, as it was in 2016, for Bernie barely beating Hillary in the Michigan primary. It was just enough to get the nomination. But it’s hard to imagine, even in this year, that’s enough to win in Michigan.
Sargent: OK, Ron. So what does the winning coalition look like in granular terms?
Brownstein: Yeah, I mean, I think usually Democrats have to get to somewhere in the high thirties among non-college whites, or the low 40s, to win in Michigan. And we’ll have to see how well he does among college white men as well. I mean, you know, the winning coalition for Democrats in a Rust Belt state like Michigan—non-college whites are about half or more of the electorate. Democrats no longer have to win most of them, but they can’t get annihilated among them.
If he only wins 35 percent of non-college whites, he is not going to win. I mean, he’s probably got to win a little more than that. He’s got to win north of 85 percent of Black voters, and he’s got to turn them out. And then he’s probably got to win a majority of college whites. I mean, that would be the winning coalition, I think, for him. And all of that is doable in this environment, but none of it will be easy, especially with the way he has presented himself to this point.
El-Sayed’s victory is the most important win for the left in this primary season. I mean, the left has won some big primaries, the center has won some big primaries. This, without a doubt, is the biggest win for the left. But it instantly becomes the biggest test for the left. Because I think if he wins the nomination but doesn’t win the general election, the message and the momentum going into ‘28 for the left looks very different than if he does win the general election. And the same thing with Francesca Hong in Wisconsin.
If she wins the nomination but doesn’t win the general election, I think the interpretation of Democrats in states they absolutely must have to get the White House back in ‘28—I think the interpretation of their experience is going to be very different than if they do win. So this is like the undercard. The main event is still to come.
Sargent: It’s going to be really tough, but as you say, doable. Ron Brownstein, thanks so much for coming on. As I said before, you’re really showing here why you’re the best at this stuff.
Brownstein: Always great to be with you, Greg.