Quality Control

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, August 12,2026

 

Last night was a rough one at the polls for socialists. In both parties.

 

The socialist in chief is forever boasting about the power of his endorsements, but he took an embarrassing “L” in one major race and scored an ominously underwhelming victory in another. The defeat came courtesy of former pillow maven Mike Lindell, who stepped down as CEO of his company last week to focus on becoming governor of Minnesota. Which is a bit like a middle-aged accountant quitting his job to focus on trying out for the NFL.

 

Lindell is one of Trumpworld’s most hallucinatory “rigged election” cranks and Minnesota is a reliably blue state, especially in a national environment as anti-Republican as the present one. His realistic best-case scenario was winning his party’s nomination before getting annihilated in the general election; in the end, GOP primary voters chose to put him out of his misery early, handing him a double-digit defeat. “Republican gubernatorial nominee Mike Lindell” is beneath the dignity of even the deeply undignified modern right, it seems.

 

The candidate is processing the people’s verdict just as you’d expect.

 

The president had better luck in South Carolina, where Sen. Darline Graham “won” the race to replace her late brother as the GOP’s nominee for Senate this fall. But as wins go, it wasn’t much of one: Despite Trump’s backing and public sympathy for the Graham family, she took less than 33 percent against a crowded field of conservatives that included former Gov. Mark Sanford, Rep. Russell Fry, and Rep. Ralph Norman, whom she’ll face in a runoff in two weeks.

 

Most of the two-thirds of Republicans who couldn’t bring themselves to support Graham are likely to favor Norman in the next round, one would think. (“The long and short of it, she’s got a pretty low ceiling,” one operative told Politico before the vote.) If she loses, it’ll be the second time in two months that a Trump endorsee was defeated in a statewide primary runoff in South Carolina—and the second time in August alone that a Trump endorsee was beaten in a key primary in the deep-red South.

 

I’m too much of a pessimist to believe that the president has “lost his touch” or that Republican voters have begun to practice quality control toward weak candidates after 10 years of brainworm “slopulism.” But if you want to tell yourself a story about the fading influence of a very old, very unpopular president based on the primary results of late, it isn’t hard.

 

The most one can say for Trump’s defeats last night is that both were inconsequential. Republicans were doomed in Minnesota this fall no matter whom they nominated, especially against an opponent as formidable as Amy Klobuchar. And Ralph Norman will serve the president’s agenda in the Senate as faithfully as Darline Graham will.

 

The truly consequential defeat on Tuesday was inflicted on left-wing socialists in Wisconsin, where progressive Francesca Hong shockingly blew a 20-point lead in polling over David Crowley, a guy who dropped out of the race a month ago before re-entering at the Democratic establishment’s behest. Combine that with Abdul El-Sayed’s unexpectedly narrow victory in last week’s Senate primary in Michigan, and we now have a clear trend of “normie” Democratic voters successfully—or almost successfully, in El-Sayed’s case—practicing quality control against questionably electable far-left candidates in important Midwestern battlegrounds.

 

Hong’s defeat is a heavy blow to the supposedly ascendant Democratic Socialists of America. Isn’t it?

 

Winning by losing.

 

Hong spent most of the race dishing out boilerplate left-wing economic populism about universal healthcare and taxing the rich. What turned her into a national figure was coverage of her recently resurfaced musings on abolishing prisons, canceling Thanksgiving, and the “proximity to whiteness” that her biracial son has given her—positions so toxic that even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez glibly dismissed them on grounds that “Woke 1 was crazy.”

 

The candidate wasn’t smooth about cleaning up after herself, either. Asked recently by CNN whether she still holds the same views on Thanksgiving, Hong equivocated before lamenting,“Thanksgiving is also a time that’s incredibly painful for many people in our communities.”

 

Essentially, her “Woke 2” campaign against oligarchy and the high cost of living was rebranded in the home stretch as a “Woke 1” campaign of cultural radicalism. And Wisconsin Democrats weren’t going to gamble their party’s chances in a tough gubernatorial race, with a Trumpist election denier waiting on the other side, on a candidate like that. Woke 1 was crazy, they seemed to say last night—and “crazy” wasn’t worth the risk in a general election.

 

Is it really a loss for the DSA, though, that its banner won’t be carried this fall by someone who’s already become a laughingstock for her “Woke 1” positions?

 

Consider that Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders, the two most prominent socialists in the country, declined to endorse Hong. (Sen. Elizabeth Warren dismissively said “I don’t know her” when asked if she’d support the Wisconsinite.) Sources close to Sanders whispered to Politico that “Hong is less vetted and not as sharp on some of her messaging than other candidates,” in the publication’s words, and noted that the senator didn’t want to be involved in another electoral fiasco after the Graham Platner mess.

 

“Francesca Hong’s loss is the best imaginable result for progressives, because this was the left-wing Doug Mastriano: a completely unelectable candidate with no ability to fundraise,” pollster Lakshya Jain observed last night. Mastriano was such a weak, fringy opponent that Democrats ended up spending money to help him win Pennsylvania’s Republican gubernatorial primary in 2022; the same happened in reverse this year in Wisconsin, with right-wing groups spending money to help Hong. Had she prevailed yesterday, democratic socialists would have been staring down the barrel of a brutal “DSA candidate fumbles winnable swing state to ‘Stop the Steal’ freak” headline in November, the last thing they need as they try to gain influence within their party. They’ve now been spared that.

 

They’ve also been spared an inevitable national Republican ad campaign aimed at tying all Democratic candidates—but especially progressives—to Hong’s nuttery. Before Tuesday, I saw theories kicking around online that it would be good for other DSA-adjacent candidates like El-Sayed if she won her primary because she’d end up as a lightning rod or “heat shield” for them from right-wing criticism. That strikes me as far-fetched: More likely is that “socialists hate Thanksgiving” talking points would have seeped into other races, scaring off undecideds who already suspect “Woke 2” Democrats of remaining ardently “Woke 1” behind closed doors.

 

I’m particularly skeptical of the “heat shield” logic with respect to El-Sayed, an out-of-central casting bogeyman for nationalists by dint of his radicalism, his brashness, and his Muslim faith. He’s the villain that Republicans thought they were getting in Zohran Mamdani, whose geniality and outreach to Trump has made him harder for them to hate. Hong’s clownishness would not have obscured El-Sayed’s villainy in Republican messaging this fall.

 

Besides, El-Sayed has plenty of “Woke 1” culture-war clownishness in his own Very Online archives for the GOP to exploit. Among other things that CNN recently discovered after sifting through his old YouTube videos (many of which have now been quietly deleted) is an episode in which he “questioned whether football could be ‘ethical’ or ‘safe’ and linked the sport’s ‘ethos’ to narratives used to justify slavery and westward expansion.” This guy is running in Michigan.

 

All told, a Hong victory in the primary would have gained the DSA little or nothing and probably cost it much. It won by losing. And then, across the border in Minnesota, it won by winning: Peggy Flanagan, the state’s lieutenant governor and a staunch progressive endorsed by Sanders, crushed centrist Rep. Angie Craig in the Democratic primary for Senate by nearly 20 points. Flanagan will cruise to victory again in November, assuring the far left of having a fellow traveler in that seat.

 

Shedding the hated “Woke 1” socialists while advancing the “Woke 2” strain seems like a decent outcome for the DSA to me. But it leaves us with two questions. How the hell did Francesca Hong blow a 20-point lead, anyway? And why did she fall short in her race while El-Sayed managed to hang on in his?

 

Woke 2 versus Woke 1.

 

The irresistible answer to the first question is another question. Did she ever really have a 20-point lead in this race?

 

Yeah, yeah, I know what the polls said. But the polls also said that El-Sayed led Rep. Haley Stevens by something like 15 points in Michigan before he eked out a 1-point victory. The polls say a lot of things. The fact that they’ve now missed the outcome in two key Midwestern Democratic primaries by Grand Canyon-sized margins means there’s obviously some sort of systemic methodological error afoot.

 

The most likely culprit is nonresponse bias. In surveying Wisconsin and Michigan, pollsters may have gotten high response rates from stereotypical pro-Hong and pro-El-Sayed progressives—white, college-educated, politically engaged, and very eager to share their opinions. Whereas stereotypical pro-Crowley and pro-Stevens normies—nonwhite, less educated, too busy with work and life to sit through political surveys—were less likely to pick up the phone. The result: Wildly mistaken blowout forecasts in both races.

 

One wonders whether El-Sayed would have pulled it out in Michigan if the polling there hadn’t signaled to Stevens supporters that there was really no point in bothering to turn out for her.

 

There’s another possibility, though: Maybe last night’s upset was less a matter of methodological error than sharp movement in the race after the final polls were taken.

 

There was a lot going in the Wisconsin primary in the home stretch. Hong was getting blown up in the media over her “Woke 1” pensees; meanwhile, Crowley was back in the race after two other Democratic candidates dropped out, elevating him as the last best hope of Thanksgiving enthusiasts. And he got a huge assist from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who joined him on a last-minute barnstorming tour of the state to try to save the party from a looming electoral disaster. Evers pulled no punches on the trail too, warning Democratic voters frankly that Hong would probably lose to the GOP this fall.

 

Undecideds and late-deciders were taking all of this in. Then El-Sayed won his primary while conspicuously underperforming his polling, further spooking Democrats who worry about the electability of socialist candidates. On the day after the Michigan race, former Biden operative Dan Kanninen read the tea leaves in Wisconsin and presciently explained why he thought Hong’s grip on the race wasn’t as tight as the polls suggested. Beat for beat, the reasoning he laid out anticipated what happened last night.

 

In the end, as Semafor’s Dave Weigel noted, neither Hong nor El-Sayed underperformed expectations. She received more than 300,000 votes, which would have won any other Wisconsin gubernatorial primary this century. He received nearly 750,000, a landslide total by the standards of Michigan’s 2018 primary. Hong lost, and El-Sayed nearly lost, because “pollsters are just not catching these armies of quieter Dems (and some crossover indies) cannonballing into the polling booth,” as Weigel put it. The normies in the party showed up in unexpected droves to try to do quality control.

 

Why didn’t both candidates lose, though? What was the secret sauce that got El-Sayed over the hump but not Hong?

 

Any answer to that will necessarily be speculative, but there are some important differences between the two. One, as I alluded to earlier, involves endorsements. The same triumvirate of Sanders, Warren, and Ocasio-Cortez that withheld support from Hong in Wisconsin backed El-Sayed in Michigan, which is to say that the progressive movement was invested in his success to a degree that it wasn’t in hers. Even if those endorsements were only marginally useful in drumming up extra turnout for him, margins were everything in these two races. El-Sayed ended up winning by fewer than 16,000 votes; Hong ended up losing by fewer than 4,000 to the Evers-endorsed Crowley.

 

Another difference is demographics. Michigan has a small but influential bloc of Arab and Muslim voters, and El-Sayed cleaned up with them, taking nearly 80 percent of the vote in Dearborn and earning more ballots there than Kamala Harris did in the 2024 presidential election. Maybe that’s due to his outspoken criticism of Israel, maybe it’s due to his historic significance as a potential U.S. senator who’s both Arab and Muslim himself, maybe a bit of both. But dominating with that constituency may have been decisive to his statewide margin. Hong didn’t have the same advantage.

 

A third is simple charisma. El-Sayed is sufficiently talented as a speaker that none other than Bill Clinton allegedly encouraged him to run for office someday after listening to his commencement address at the University of Michigan in 2007. He’s also a “fighter” by temperament in the obnoxious populist sense of the term: Passionate about his causes and disdainful of his opponents, he scratches an itch for combativeness that’s common among his party’s grassroots after nearly two years of being steamrolled by Trump.

 

Hong is none of that. She’s soft-spoken, seemed unsure of herself in interviews, and lacked the native belligerence that modern populists crave. In the age of Trump, if you’re going to come for Thanksgiving, come hard.

 

Ultimately, though, I think the key difference is that El-Sayed gave Democratic voters a reason to look past any discomfort they may have felt about his radicalism, whereas Hong never did.

 

That was also true in Minnesota of Peggy Flanagan, a leftist but a known political quantity. “Flanagan and Hong were both the progressive candidates in their race, but Flanagan [is] also very much an ‘establishment’ figure (the incumbent [lieutenant governor]!) who obviously everyone is broadly comfortable with,” Matt Yglesias noted. In El-Sayed’s case, I suspect, Democrats got comfortable with his radicalism because it was mostly directed at a target toward which they too feel hostile: Israel and pro-Israel lobbying outfits like AIPAC.

 

Turning a Democratic primary in 2026 into a de facto referendum on a single issue is potentially a good strategy, depending on the issue. A for-or-against referendum on Israel when you’re arguing the “against” position? Good strategy. Opposing Israel is a key plank of “Woke 2” and liberals are increasingly comfortable with that.

 

Turning it into a for-or-against referendum on Thanksgiving when you’re arguing “against” for whatever insane reason? Not so good. That’s “Woke 1.” And Woke 1, as we’ve learned, was crazy.

 

If there’s a lesson from the varying results for progressives in Michigan and Wisconsin, then, I suspect it’s that Democrats will tolerate radicalism provided that it directionally reflects their own preferences. Whether El-Sayed can stay on the right side of that calculus as “Woke 1” skeletons come tumbling out of his closet remains to be seen.