Below my scattered thoughts on this week’s primary results and this year’s Democratic Party primary in general:
The big headline this week was that Abdul El-Sayed beat Haley Stevens to become the Democratic Party nominee for Senate in Michigan. Often the “moderate vs. progressive” framing that gets applied to primaries is only half-right, but this was a pretty clear-cut case. El-Sayed supports abolishing ICE, instituting Medicare for All, and ending U.S. aid to Israel. Because AIPAC spent heavily to try to elect Stevens, the race became unusually focused on Israel and the role of AIPAC in U.S. politics. And the fact that this is Michigan rather than Manhattan makes this win the most significant for progressives this cycle.
There’s a long-running tension in progressive politics. On the one hand, progressives claim that they hold the key to winning elections because they are able to mobilize infrequent voters who are ordinarily “fed up of politics”. On the other hand, the progressive movement devotes a lot of its energy to trying to win blue-on-blue primaries in areas in which the winner of the primary is always going to win the general election anyway. For instance, if you’re running in Manhattan, the Democratic Party primary is the election, because Republicans are never going to win that seat.
This means that the progressive claim to be able to win through mobilization rarely gets tested in practice, much less in a purple swing state. Michigan in November is now going to be that test. On this basis alone, El-Sayed’s victory is very significant, and it will inform how the party feels heading into the 2028 presidential primary.
I'd be a bit more cautious about saying his victory is already proof that things they are a-changin' in the heartland, though. Progressive primary victories in the Midwest are not unheard of. Bernie Sanders won the 2016 Michigan presidential primary, after all. Nor was El-Sayed’s coalition particularly novel. He did very well with younger voters and OK-ish with the higher-educated/wealthy in general. But where he really struggled was with black voters, working-class voters, and rural voters. Insofar as he expanded the electorate by mobilizing new voters, they were college students - a finite resource, especially when you’re struggling with other groups.
Separately, I think that part of what makes the narrative of this primary season hard to untangle is that “moderate”, “establishment” and “progressive” are all very vague terms.
“Progressive”, at the least the way that it is used in media discourse, is the clearest of them all. In this cycle, it has generally meant somebody backed by the Bernie Sanders-AOC-Justice Democrats wing of the party, someone who is highly critical of Israel and AIPAC, and someone who puts forward a message about “the billionaires” or “oligarchy”. It also comes with a host of policy positions such as Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and opposition to data center construction.
“Establishment”/“moderate” are more complicated, and you can see straight away by the way that people conflate the terms. “Establishment” is a statement about how long someone has been around. It makes us think of some old guy who has held the same seat for decades and become complacent. “Moderate”, on the other hand, is a set of policy beliefs - basically opposing the stuff “progressives” support, as per my last point.
The problem is that these two things don’t always overlap. Many of the “establishment” candidates who were beaten by “progressives” this cycle were also extremely progressive themselves in policy terms. Some, of course, were not. But the point is that we have to be cautious about interpreting how much this is about the rejection of a particular set of policies versus a general desire to throw the bums out and get a new set of leaders.
If you can find one major and fairly consistent dividing line between the “moderates” and the “progressives” this cycle, then it’s over Israel and AIPAC. Yet what this means in the general election is unclear. American public opinion towards the Middle East is undergoing a sea change, with many more people becoming skeptical of Israel. At the same time, the issue is of much, much lower importance for the general electorate than it is for particular slices of Democratic Party primary voters. It’s not clearly a disadvantage to be Israel-skeptical anymore - in fact it’s probably an advantage - but it’s also by no means some sort of massive vote-winner.
So what’s going to happen in November? The political environment hugely favors Democrats, which means that the party should make gains across the board almost regardless of the results of these primaries. Candidate selection matters somewhat in close races, and more so for Senate than for the House, but it also doesn’t matter that much. Partisanship is so strong and politics so nationalized that just wearing the blue shirt when Donald Trump is in the White House is going to be the thing that makes most of the difference.
That means that the midterms will probably give us a messy set of signals, with both moderates and progressives claiming strength heading into 2028. On the other hand, the implosion of a high-profile candidate could have a big impact. It strikes me that with Graham Platner gone, El-Sayed is now going to be the guy whose fate does the most to influence the future of the party. If he achieves a massive win in Michigan, that’s going to be a big signal for progressives. If he fails, barely scrapes through, or implodes beforehand, then that’s going to be a really big problem for them.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.