‘Some Things Have Changed’

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.