By Nick Catoggio
Wednesday, August 05, 2026
Glass half full or glass half empty: Was Tuesday night’s
surprisingly narrow socialist win in Michigan’s Democratic Senate contest
encouraging or discouraging for progressives?
The last eight polls of Michigan voters taken before the
election had leftist darling Abdul El-Sayed winning by double digits over Rep. Haley Stevens, with
several projecting a landslide margin in the high teens. (Some of those surveys
were sponsored by outfits friendly to El-Sayed, but not all.) So confident was
the candidate about an easy victory that he spent part of Monday at a pool party with Maoist livestream chud Hasan Piker.
An operative close to him went as far as to tell Politico that he expected the race to be called
“almost immediately” after polls closed.
El-Sayed spent the afternoon of Election Day fantasizing
about the power he would wield over the 2028 presidential primary as a young,
far-left senator from a key battleground. “I’m going to dog you up and down the
state,” he warned prospective Democratic candidates, if they don’t
support Medicare for All and act to limit the influence of wealthy interests in
politics. Then he headed off to his election night party to watch the returns.
That party ended without a victory speech. Not until
after I began writing this column on Wednesday morning was the race finally
called. El-Sayed prevailed … by a point.
Glass half full or glass half empty?
The commentariat will spend days navel-gazing over that
question, but we needn’t overthink it. If the center-left establishment now
considers it a moral victory when it doesn’t get obliterated in a swing state
by the Democratic Socialists of America, that’s a pretty strong sign of which
way the wind is blowing.
On the other hand, overthinking things is what we do in
this newsletter.
Let’s consider why, in all but one respect, this was a
good-not-great result for the DSA. And why the one respect in which it really
was great is an awfully important—and awful—one.
Not great.
For leftists, the worst thing about last night was how it
confirmed the conventional wisdom about democratic socialism’s appeal. It’s a
movement that champions the proletariat yet is populated overwhelmingly by the
bourgeoisie—or at least those who’ve received a bougie education. If there’s such a thing as
“elite populism,” the DSA is it.
El-Sayed “performed best in the state’s wealthiest and
most highly-educated places,” Politico noted, “while Stevens outperformed him in
areas with lower average incomes and where fewer voters have college degrees.”
She also topped him among rural voters, a surprise given how well Bernie Sanders did with that cohort in winning Michigan’s
2016 Democratic primary over Hillary Clinton.
In hindsight, Sanders’ strong rural support appears to
have been less a harbinger of socialism sprouting among the common folk in the
countryside than rural Democrats simply hating Clinton. (Or, in this most
recent election, feeling comparatively skittish about backing a guy named
“Abdul El-Sayed.”) Overeducated white people remain the beating heart of
left-wing “people power,” a less than ideal launching pad for a faction that’s
supposedly set to conquer America. Speaking as an overeducated white guy myself,
I assure you that there aren’t all that many of us.
The unexpectedly narrow margin of El-Sayed’s victory also
carries various bad tidings for his fans. One reason that socialists yearned
for a big win last night was to keep pace, so to speak, with the gaudy polling
margins that center-left Senate candidates like
Jon Ossoff and Roy Cooper are putting up in battlegrounds like Georgia and
North Carolina, respectively. Granted, there’s an apples-and-oranges element to
that comparison: Ossoff is a sitting senator and Cooper a former governor, so
their name recognition vastly exceeds El-Sayed’s.
But El-Sayed got plenty of media exposure from his race
with Stevens and will get loads more this fall as the GOP turns him into a
national bogeyman. If, as seems likely after last night’s result, he badly
underperforms “normie” Democrats in November anyway—even in victory—it will
damage the DSA’s case that a progressive nominee for president in 2028 will be
as electable as a centrist would be. Margins matter, and socialists didn’t get
the margins they wanted Tuesday.
We’re also left to wonder about candidate quality. Would
an establishment opponent slightly less goofy than Haley Stevens have eked this out?
Would a leftist slightly less off-puttingly arrogant than El-Sayed have won
more comfortably? Even more so than before, El-Sayed now looks like a weak hand
to play against Republican nominee Mike Rogers, a strong GOP candidate by Trump-era
standards in that he’s well known (as a former House member) and neither
obviously crazy nor lavishly sycophantic toward the president.
Then there’s the polling. What lessons should leftists
take from the fact that forecasts of El-Sayed’s margin of victory were off
by—gulp—15 points or so?
Nate Silver has various
theories for why that happened. Maybe some Stevens supporters sheepishly
concealed their preference from pollsters amid the ecstatic left-wing hivemind
hype for El-Sayed. Maybe Stevens’ lower-earning nonwhite and rural supporters
were harder for pollsters to reach—or simply less willing to take a long survey
by phone than the average Hasan Piker fan was. Or maybe, as Silver notes,
congressional primaries are always harder to poll because turnout by key groups
is trickier to predict than in general elections.
Whichever way you slice it, progressives now have reason
to be less confident about the landslide that’s supposedly brewing for socialist Francesca
Hong in next Tuesday’s Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary. If Hong
underperforms in that race, predictions about a DSA takeover of the party will
be seen as greatly exaggerated.
But still good.
Still, let’s not miss the big picture. Not only did
El-Sayed win, he overcame daunting disadvantages to do so.
The man was outspent 9-to-1(!) by Stevens and her allies. She was
endorsed by the sitting Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and brought
influential Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina out on the trail to help her
appeal to black voters. Stevens is a member of the House herself, of course,
with all of the name recognition and institutional credibility that entails.
And El-Sayed, as a socialist and a Muslim, somehow had to convince a primary
electorate that’s neither of those things (mostly) that he was more fit to
represent them and their state than the “normie” in the race was.
And he did.
In doing so, he and his supporters dealt another heavy
blow to progressives’ bete noire, the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel group. That outfit accounted for slightly more
than half of the $62 million in total ad spending on Stevens’ behalf, “the most
spent by a single group in a federal Democratic primary this cycle” per the New York Times. El-Sayed noted it in every other
sentence he uttered during the campaign too, betting that opposition to Israel
on the American left is now so intense that AIPAC’s spending would be more of a
liability to Stevens in the race than an asset.
There’s no way to tell whether she gained more votes than
she lost because of the organization’s support. But we’re surely nearing the
point where AIPAC needs to consider whether the best thing it can do to boost
the chances of a pro-Israel Democrat in a primary is to not get involved. If
that’s what ends up happening—a reduced AIPAC presence in American
elections—then even a 1-point win last night is a major victory for
progressives.
In fact, the surprisingly slender margin might turn out
to be a lucky break for them. Given his inclination toward cockiness, El-Sayed
might have foolishly treated a landslide as reason to lean further into
radicalism and arrogance on the trail, benefiting Rogers. As it is, having
barely survived Stevens, he’ll need to be less personally abrasive and to
moderate some of his cultural positions to make a play for the center. And his
socialist base, having suffered an electoral near-death experience, will now almost
certainly indulge him in that.
He’ll be a more electable candidate in November than he
would have been if the polls had been accurate yesterday. And even if he ends
up less electable than “normie” heroes like Ossoff and Cooper, he’s still a favorite to win.
There’s another bonus for progressives in his primary
victory, narrow though it was: It might end up chasing a few center-left voters
into the wilderness. “Hasan Piker and James Carville are not going to be in the
same political party,” Carville, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, recently assured Fox News. “One of us is going to leave. It might
even be me.”
Calling that a “bonus” for socialists sounds odd, I
realize, given that El-Sayed will need every center-left vote he can get to
beat Rogers. But remember that, for democratic socialists, Michigan is just one
battle in a wider war for control of the Democratic Party. The more liberal
Democrats leave the party in disgust at the viability of postliberal
candidates, the more postliberal the party’s primary electorate will become by
subtraction. And the more postliberal that electorate becomes, the more the Democratic
establishment will evolve to resemble it.
That’s been the story of the Republican Party since 2016.
The Trumpist right kept nominating nuts, even after some of them were crushed in general elections, because doing so cemented its
control over the GOP. Some classically liberal Republican voters drifted out of
the party as their contempt for the right’s postliberal direction grew, leaving
postliberal voters behind to dominate primaries.
And lo and behold, 10 years later, the Republican
establishment is now completely in hock to postliberalism.
Democratic socialists are playing that same long game,
prioritizing control of their party over control of the government as a
necessary step to lasting political strength. If El-Sayed loses to Rogers in
November but his nomination causes a chunk of Clintonite voters to quit the
party, abandoning it to radicals, I suspect the DSA would take that trade all
day long.
But it probably won’t need to.
The Flight 93 election, revisited.
The one truly great development for the far left in
El-Sayed’s victory is how quickly the center-left has begun uniting behind him
in victory.
Unlike Whitmer, Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin stayed out
of her home state’s primary. Slotkin is the epitome of an electable Democrat, a
former CIA analyst who won several tight House races before very narrowly
defeating Rogers for her Senate seat in 2024. As a Midwesterner who’s parlayed
moderate liberalism into an electoral winning streak, she’s one of the most
prominent and successful “normie” Democrats in the country.
And on Wednesday morning she wasted no time endorsing the
Israel-bashing
socialist loon her party has now nominated for Senate. “It’s been a long
primary, but now it’s time to gear up to beat Mike Rogers (again) and win up
and down the ticket,” she wrote,
congratulating El-Sayed. “There is nothing more important than the mission of
the next 90 days: uniting, keeping this seat blue, flipping the House and
Senate, and providing a real check on President Trump.”
We must come together behind this dangerous,
disreputable postliberal because the partisan enemy is a threat to the country.
That sounds familiar.
An even more startling example of normie Democrats
warming up to El-Sayed came from Stevens herself, who assured voters a few days
ago that she’d support him if he won the primary. Nothing strange
about that in the abstract; losing candidates do it all the time after
contentious primaries. What losing candidates don’t typically do, though, is
level the sort of hair-raising charge at their opponent that Stevens threw at
El-Sayed less than a week before.
“Everyone in America understands you want to blame all of
your problems on Jewish Americans,” she wrote
on Twitter, addressing him directly. How does one accuse a politician of
something as disqualifying as Jew-baiting—and then turn around days later and
promise to work toward his election?
Something similar happened with Mallory McMorrow, the
state legislator who challenged El-Sayed and Stevens in Michigan’s Senate
primary before dropping out a few months ago. McMorrow attacked El-Sayed in
March for appearing alongside Piker, “who says things that are misogynistic and
antisemitic, and said that the United States deserved 9/11,” as she told Jewish Insider. “That is not somebody that you
should be campaigning with at a moment when there is clearly a lot of pain and
trauma across our state.”
As of this morning, McMorrow is a proud member of Team
Abdul. The new nominee has “my full endorsement and support as we head to
November together as a unified party,” she said in a statement,
because “whatever differences there were between the candidates in this race,
those differences are nothing compared to the contrast in November.”
One of El-Sayed’s sharpest critics in the party was Rep.
Hillary Scholten, a fellow Michigander and Stevens supporter. Last week she
vowed to Semafor that “I will not stand beside someone who
has allowed distinctly anti-American sentiment to enter our public dialogue,”
causing the publication to wonder if a “Never El-Sayed” movement was afoot on
the center-left mirroring the “Never Trump” faction of the Reaganite right
circa 2016.
Today, without naming any names, Scholten issued a statement
promising to “work with anyone committed to lowering costs, expanding
affordable health care, creating more opportunity, and fighting corruption.”
Amazingly, it appears “Never El-Sayed” rolled over even faster than “Never
Trump” did.
All of this is happening, mind you, days after Michigan’s
Jewish attorney general said that she won’t attend her state’s Democratic convention this month out
of fear for her own safety. “I feel like my presence isn’t going to be
welcome,” she worried. “I don’t want to get chased around. I don’t want to get
harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at. I don’t want to get booed
off the stage, irrespective of what I’m saying.”
“Some things have changed,” she said of the state of her
party. No kidding.
A postliberal party?
For 10 years, conservatives have had to wonder whether
Democrats would have surrendered to postliberalism as pitifully as the
Republicans did. I won’t draw sweeping conclusions from one race, but let’s
just say the scene today in Michigan isn’t the first time in recent memory that a party’s normie
establishment properly identified a primary candidate as a poisonous cretin and
then meekly and dutifully endorsed him once the party’s chances depended on his
success.
The last time it happened, the opposing party licked its
chops at the thought of facing that candidate in the general election,
foolishly believing that he couldn’t win. We’ll know in three months whether
history has repeated in that regard as well.
If you want to believe that the center-left will do
better at resisting postliberalism than the center-right did, there are reasons
to take heart. (Besides “how could they do worse?” I mean.) Neither El-Sayed
nor any other Democrat is the sort of charismatic colossus that the celebrity
Trump was when he galvanized the right in 2016. Centrist liberals might
plausibly prove more allergic to postliberal demagoguery about Jews than
conservatives were to demagoguery about immigrants and Muslims. Factional
rivalries between the DSA and other essential Democratic constituencies
such as African Americans could limit radicalism’s ambitions within the party.
And the reality of negative polarization during the Trump
era may create a problem for socialists. The broader left has spent a decade
positioning itself as a bulwark of liberal values against a fascist onslaught;
having invested so heavily in that identity, it won’t be able to abandon it as
painlessly as the right did when it ditched zombie Reaganism for an ideology of
“whatever Mr. Trump wants” in 2016. Overcoming the Democratic instinct to favor
the opposite of whatever the postliberal right favors will be a challenge for
the DSA, as its, er, huge
free-trade contingent might tell you.
Then again: How else can one understand the preference in
Michigan for El-Sayed over Stevens than as a partial abandonment of that
identity?
If Democratic voters there agreed with Elissa Slotkin
that “there is nothing more important than … providing a real check on
President Trump,” they would have opted for the candidate who’s most likely to
win this fall. They didn’t. Stopping Trump from wrecking the country is no
longer their highest priority—which is ironic, as Slotkin, Stevens, McMorrow,
Scholten, and every other normie liberal in existence will go on disingenuously
pretending that it is to convince swing voters to hold their noses for El-Sayed
in November.
Checking right-wing postliberalism is now less important
than advancing left-wing postliberalism. Some things have changed, as Dana
Nessel put it, and in America 2026 they seldom change for the better.
