A few things have happened since Graham Platner dropped out of the Maine Senate race that could either prove to be a bump in the road to a socialist revolution or a detour.
Democrats look less likely to try a socialist candidate in another battleground state than before the Platner saga.
Democratic state Sen. Mallory McMorrow ended her campaign for the Michigan Senate seat, making it a two-way race between the relatively centrist Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) and left-wing candidate Abdul el Sayed.
Outgoing Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) endorsed Stevens after initially staying neutral in the race. “We need workhorses in the Senate, and we need someone who can do that job from day one. This is not a place for on-the-job training,” he said in his endorsement message.
Stevens has opened up a lead on el Sayed. A Detroit News-Glengariff poll found her up 7 points with 48% of the vote to the progressive’s 41%. This brings her edge up to 4 points in a RealClearPolitics average of polls.
The Detroit News poll shows Stevens handily defeating el Sayed with noncollege voters, 56% to 34%. She positively trounces him among black voters, with 67% to el Sayed’s 21%, a 46-point margin.
This is consistent with other socialists failing to rally the working class. Black primary voters were pivotal in former President Joe Biden’s defeat of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries. Blacks were resistant to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in last year’s Democratic primary, though he won this voting bloc by nearly 20 points in the general election.
Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, found some tightening in the North Carolina Senate race, which is arguably the Democrats’ single best pickup opportunity. Former Gov. Roy Cooper led former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley by just 4 points, 48% to 44%. Most polls before that showed Cooper with a bigger lead, in some cases breaking 50%.
That could be an outlier. But the generic congressional ballot, which measures which party respondents prefer to control Congress, has slid to a 5-point Democratic advantage in the RealClearPolitics polling average. Morning Consult recently had Democrats up by 3, Harvard-Harris favored them by just 2 points.
If swing voters think socialist candidates are too risky, so might Democrats.
There are important counterexamples. The race to replace Platner on the ballot in Maine is dominated by progressive candidates. The nomination process will be controlled by party activists, who tend to skew to the left. Gov. Janet Mills (D-ME), who waged an ill-fated establishment campaign against Platner, won’t even endorse a candidate. She probably expects her endorsement would hurt more than it would help.
It’s possible that the candidate who emerges from this process will be a stronger challenger to Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) than the scandal-plagued Platner was, though that person is likely to face a big cash disadvantage.
“The people of Maine voted overwhelmingly for a bold, working-class, progressive agenda,” Our Revolution Executive Director Joe Geevarghese said on a stream with left-wing candidates.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) don’t have the goodwill with the base to burn in the primaries that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) did as party leader when spending massively against tea party candidates in 2014. As lawmakers from Mamdani’s New York, Schumer and Jeffries are possibly vulnerable to future primary challenges themselves.
All eyes are now on Michigan’s Aug. 4 primary. Establishment Democrats say a progressive firebrand would jeopardize a blue-state Senate seat, Platner-style. Left-wingers counter that progressives would stay home if Stevens is nominated.
The polling doesn’t yield an obvious answer. Both Democrats lead former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers by 0.5 points in the RealClearPolitics average.
El Sayed joked to Semafor that it was hard enough running for Senate as a Muslim with the middle name Muhammad. “And now I have to carry that guy?” he said of Platner.
Meanwhile, online progressives are fuming at efforts to link el Sayed to Platner and position their candidate as a critic of former President Barack Obama, who remains popular among Democrats. But the Sanders wing of the party largely does view Obama as a disappointment, and el Sayed himself told Vox during his 2018 gubernatorial campaign that Obama “was someone who was, at the end of the day, not able to inspire the people on the other side of the aisle to see things his way.”
GRAHAM PLATNER’S COLLAPSE CASTS SHADOW OVER ABDUL EL SAYED IN MICHIGAN DEMOCRATIC SENATE PRIMARY
“He and I were very different people,” el Sayed concluded.
Obama was a U.S. senator before he became president. It remains to be seen whether el Sayed ends up being something very different.