ON MICHIGAN, KEEP BIG PICTURE IN MIND. The first thing to say about Abdul el Sayed’s victory in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary is that it’s not a story about polls. OK, it is a story about polls — they were really, really bad, and el Sayed’s win was much narrower than predicted — but that is not the most important thing about the race. The most important thing is that a radical, Democratic Socialists of America-aligned candidate — a guy who spent the day before the election hanging out at a pool party with Hasan Piker — is now the Democratic nominee for Senate from Michigan. And that means the socialist takeover of the Democratic Party has taken an enormous step forward.
Look at who did not want el Sayed to win. The Democratic National Committee did not want him to win. Neither did Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer. Neither did former House speaker and still powerful player Nancy Pelosi. Neither did Democratic kingmaker James Clyburn. Neither did the Congressional Black Caucus PAC. Neither did the rest of the party establishment.
Just say that the old base of the Democratic Party had its doubts. For example, during the campaign, Clyburn said he was “concerned” by a photo from an el Sayed rally in Michigan. “I didn’t see a single person that looks like me,” Clyburn, who is the second-most senior African American in the House, said. “That tells me all I need to know.” In Tuesday’s voting, el Sayed’s opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, who is white, won Wayne County, which has the state’s largest black population, by 6 points; Oakland County, which has the second-largest black population, by 7 points; and Macomb County, which has the third-largest black population, by 7 points.
In July, a poll from the Detroit News and WDIV found strong black support for Stevens — 67% — to el Sayed’s 21%. It’s not clear how that turned out in the election, but it seems pretty likely that el Sayed underperformed among African American voters. That is apparently what Clyburn, who is the voice of a traditional Democratic coalition that chose Joe Biden as its candidate in 2020 and 2024, sensed as he looked at the el Sayed campaign. On the other hand, with what Michael Barone calls the “graduate student proletariat” — the backbone of the current socialist movement — it appears el Sayed knocked it out of the park.
In any event, the basic fact here is that a socialist-aligned candidate has won in a statewide Democratic primary. (El Sayed is not a member of DSA and says he is not a socialist, but socialists love to support him.) In June, the political world was abuzz over DSA victories in Democratic House primaries in New York and later in Colorado. That was big, but remember that each House district is about 750,000 votes. They are geographically limited as well; in the New York races, geographic diversity in a district meant Brooklyn and Queens.
But Michigan is a state with more than 10 million people. It has farmers; it has industry; it has tech; it has racial diversity. Its 15 electoral votes could be the winning margin in a presidential election. It is, in short, important, and now Abdul el Sayed — or Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, as the Republican campaign committee now calls him, using his full name — has won a statewide party primary. That’s bigger than a slice of Queens.
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And in that way, el Sayed’s victory is a very, very big deal. Yes, right now the polls — for what any poll is worth in Michigan at the moment — show him narrowly losing to Republican nominee Mike Rogers. But there is a long way to go, and Rogers, who almost won election to the Senate two years ago, is fighting history: the last time a Republican was elected senator in Michigan was 32 years ago, in 1994.
You’re likely to hear many comments to the effect that el Sayed, who was expected to win by a big margin, instead got in by the skin of his teeth. It’s true, but it’s also not hugely important. The hugely important thing is that el Sayed won. And now, he has a chance in November.