Michigan’s marquee race, the Democratic Senate primary, turned out to be a nail-biter Tuesday. But one thing is clear in progressive Abdul El-Sayed’s surprisingly narrow win over Rep. Haley Stevens, the choice of the old guard: The left-wing insurgency is here to stay.
Because El-Sayed was comfortably ahead in the polls in the closing week, the temptation may be to view the tight result as good news for the establishment. But that’s way too myopic a reading. El-Sayed won a huge share of the vote, and he did it in the face of about $60 million in outside spending for Stevens. That dwarfed what El-Sayed and his allies could muster.
Moreover, he did it in a race that drew massive turnout. More than 1.5 million people voted in the Democratic primary. That’s close to the number that turned out in the sharply contested 2020 Democratic presidential primary. And yet it was still essentially a dead heat between the upstarts and a united establishment.
That’s a telling takeaway: Highly ideological candidates in both parties tend to do best in low-turnout races, not record ones. Yet time and again in recent cycles, progressive leftists have shown they can compete in sharply contested, high-turnout primaries, even when they are massively outspent. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani did it, and now El-Sayed has matched him. No serious Democratic strategist can say that there’s some slumbering Democratic majority that just needs to be awakened to hold back the insurgency at the gate.
Other progressives also did well Tuesday, showing El-Sayed’s achievement was not about his particular talents as a candidate or a judgment on Stevens’s particular weaknesses. William Lawrence won more than 40 percent of the vote in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, defeating two capable, well-funded foes. State Rep. Donavan McKinney narrowly defeated Rep. Shri Thanedar in the 13th District. Even an underfunded progressive who had never held elected office, Aisha Farooqi, won almost one-third of the vote in the 11th District, finishing second to establishment-backed state Sen. Jeremy Moss.
Critics may point to Rep. Wesley Bell’s easy win over former “Squad” representative Cori Bush in Missouri’s 1st District, but Bush is a special case. She ran an amateurish campaign, spending almost no money on television while Bell and his allies pummeled her with over $4 million in ads. And she had given them plenty to pummel her with, such as a 2024 interview in which she said that she was “seeing fascism” in the Biden-Harris administration. Most progressive candidates know not to say something so stupid on television.
The progressive insurgency creates huge problems for any establishment Democrat. There is now plenty of irrefutable evidence that the left’s power reaches beyond deep-blue urban enclaves. That means that every elected Democrat needs to think twice before taking a position on an issue that has passionate backers on the left. Anger them, and they might just primary you — and win.
And write it down: This calculation will dramatically shift the debate in the upcoming 2028 presidential primaries. The establishment would love for a nominee to do as little as possible to placate the left and rapidly shift to the center on hot-button issues such as immigration, transgender rights and support for Israel. But that’s a recipe for an early exit. Adopting that strategy will immediately make the candidate a target for a left that wants an unapologetic progressive. Triangulators need not apply.
Instead, the savvy establishment Democrat will want to prevent this insurgency from finding its voice in a true believer, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York). That means getting out in front of the progressive parade now. Taming the base, then trying to move slowly to the center may be a risky strategy. But the alternative is going down with the establishment Titanic.
Michigan’s early position on the 2028 primary schedule — it is set to be the fifth state to vote — also creates headaches. The establishment thinking surely must have been that putting a large, traditionally moderate state in that position would halt insurgents in their tracks. After all, it was Joe Biden’s decisive win in Michigan in 2020 that ended any hope that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) could win.
But now it appears that Michigan might be fertile ground for a charismatic progressive coming off primary wins in Nevada or New Hampshire. Oops.
There’s no easy way out of this box. In a democracy, the people rule. Republican voters broke with their establishment a decade ago when they embraced Donald Trump. Now many Democratic voters seem eager to make a similar leap of faith, believing that the powers that be haven’t stopped the slide of their country and may even have unintentionally helped it along. Telling angry voters to stop and think will have about as much effect now as the GOP elites’ efforts did then.
Michigan then confirms what has been increasingly obvious for a while: The left is here, it is powerful, and it wants to drive the Democratic bus. We don’t yet know how this story will play out — Trump won, after all — but it’s a safe bet that this struggle will be the defining feature of the 2028 campaign. Let the battle begin.
The post Michigan’s message: The Democratic insurgency is here to stay appeared first on Washington Post.
