By Jeffrey Blehar
Wednesday, August 05, 2026
So, that was exciting, was it not? The Michigan primaries are over, and it was admittedly hugely
entertaining to watch the madness unfold last night: All eyes were fixed on the
Democratic Senate primary — and those eyes had widened to the size of dinner
plates by the end of a night when Abdul El-Sayed was expected to have blown
Haley Stevens’s doors off. Instead, he squeaked by with less than a percentage
point. (The 3.1 percent of early votes that Mallory McMorrow had banked before
she dropped out proved to be more than three times’ El-Sayed’s margin of victory.)
El-Sayed is now the winner, but at a surprisingly bloody
cost. No matter what his partisans might wish to think, he ran a cocksure and
arrogant primary against Stevens, talking trash about his “AIPAC robot”
opponent in a way that resembled a WWF wrestler (or perhaps a developer turned
president) more than a Democrat. His calls for unity are entirely one-sided: It’s
time for you losers to unite with me.
We’ll see how it goes.
In the primary for central Michigan’s seventh district,
based around Lansing, Democrats did exactly as I predicted they would at the
end of July, and jammed themselves up hopelessly: The two “establishment”
candidates, former ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink and retired Navy SEAL
Matt Maasdam, split the sane Democratic vote and received 29 and 28 percent
apiece for their troubles. Meanwhile, Democratic Socialist William Lawrence
shot through the gap and won with a plurality, garnering 44 percent of the
vote. Lawrence is a 35-year-old climate and housing activist who holds all of
the orthodox DSA positions and is running in an “even” congressional district
(according to the Cook Partisan Voting Index) against an incumbent. Outside of
activism, he has never held a job in his life. If he wins, it will be a
devastating comment on the political environment.
The march of the DSA continued apace in the Detroit area,
where state representative Donavan McKinney defeated incumbent Representative
Shri Thanedar 52–48. Thanedar is mostly known for repeatedly introducing
go-nowhere articles of impeachment against the president and for being
Indian in a 45 percent black district (John Conyers’s old seat, as it happens).
No more, as of January. The DSA data point is only nominally the reason this
race is worth mentioning. The real tragedy is that we’re losing the most improbable head of hair in Washington, D.C., and all
because of Democratic civil war.
And in the most amusing news of the night, Trump-endorsed
candidate Amir Hassan lost his primary race — to a noncandidate. In
Michigan’s eighth district — an R+1 eastern Michigan district held by
Democrats, not expected to be competitive because of this November’s
environment — Republican voters shocked Hassan and gave an outright 50.4 percent majority of the primary vote to Thomas J.
Smith. The problem is Thomas J. Smith was no longer a candidate for Congress in
Michigan’s eighth district. (He may be again now!) In fact, when Smith dropped
out of the race, back on July 18, he publicly endorsed another candidate,
pro-life activist Al Lemmo. And yet he won anyway, with zero name recognition
and without even campaigning during the past half month.
What happened? Why would a Trump endorsee do so poorly in
a Saginaw-based district? Perhaps the investigative journalists can answer that
question.
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