It’s worth poking around the entrails of the returns for the agonizingly close — and, given pre-primary polls results — surprising results of recent Democratic primaries in the key swing Midwestern states of Michigan and Wisconsin, with a side look at Minnesota.
These results highlight a basic split between the constituencies that have suddenly come to dominate the Democratic primary electorate, neither of which much resembles the white working class demographic, the memory of which Democratic politicians invoke nostalgically, though its members mostly vote for Trump Republicans these days.
In both Michigan’s senatorial and Wisconsin’s gubernatorial primaries, the results were so close that it’s useful to express them in the usually supererogatory tenths of a percentage.
In Michigan, the Woke 2 (to use Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s terminology) candidate Abdul el Sayed beat Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) by a margin of 1 percentage point. In Wisconsin, as of this writing, the establishment choice, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, leads Assemblywoman Francesca Hong by 0.4 percentage points.
Switches of just 7,999 votes in Michigan and 1,638 votes in Wisconsin would have changed the results.
Just as el Sayed’s victory does not prove that a candidate who emphasized issues out of the Democratic Socialists of America playbook is a sure winner, Hong’s defeat does not prove that such a candidate is a sure loser.
Both have proven that a DSA-type candidate can be a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, a year in which, if current trends continue, the Democratic nominee would be favored to win the presidency.
Looking back, one can see how changes in the Republican Party’s constituencies foretold the success of Donald Trump’s candidacy. In the 2008 and 2012 presidential primaries, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum carried the non-college demographic and non-major metropolitan areas in seriously contested Midwestern primaries.
In 2016, those groups were key to Donald Trump’s plurality wins in crowded primary fields and to his upsets of Hillary Clinton in the key Midwestern states of — yes, the same ones again — Michigan and Wisconsin.
Midwestern Democratic primaries were once dominated by blue-collar workers in major factory towns. But less than half of Michigan’s primary vote this month came from metro Detroit, which favored the establishment candidate Stevens, 51% to 45%. El Sayed’s margin and more came from the state’s college and university counties, where some 14% of all Democratic primary voters supported him over Stevens, 59% to 37%.
There were splits within the metro areas as well. El Sayed, who is Muslim and spoke out constantly against Israel, carried heavily Arab American Dearborn, 78% to 20%, while Stevens carried next-door and majority-black Detroit, 62% to 34%. In Oakland County, heavily gay Ferndale voted 78% to 21% for el Sayed, while neighboring and heavily Jewish Oak Park voted for Stevens, 60% to 33%.
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As elections analyst Ryan McComb notes, precinct returns showed el Sayed ran strongest in places where a majority of adults had college degrees and incomes below $100,000. That’s the “downward-mobile educated class,” as he put it, or the “graduate student proletariat,” a term I’ve used since Jesse Jackson won the 1988 Michigan presidential primary.
We don’t yet have such fine-grained analyses of Wisconsin, but there are some obvious reasons why Hong fell just short. Her chief weakness was in her home turf, Madison’s Dane County, which she carried by just 7 percentage points. It’s not just the home of the state’s flagship university, but the state capital.
Hong seemed far less adroit and charming than el Sayed. For the last two weeks, she parried with difficulty questions about her past for abolishing prison and police. Even Madison denizens may have feared her opposition to Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day might strike normie voters as bizarre. In contrast, el Sayed’s disparagement of football, Fourth of July fireworks, and Mackinac Island seem to have become public only after the primary.
Another difference: Incumbent Gov. Tony Evers (D-WI) not only endorsed Crowley (just as Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer endorsed Stevens), but campaigned strongly for him. He plausibly depicted Hong as a sure loser in November and a threat to public employee unions.
Crowley carried his home turf, metro Milwaukee, 44% to 39%, based on strong support from blacks and affluent whites.
Still, Hong carried counties beyond Madison and Milwaukee, not just college towns like La Crosse, Eau Claire, and Stevens Point, but also Wausau, Oshkosh, Appleton, and Green Bay. My guess is that’s due to strong support from low-income college grads — we’ll see if that’s right from finer-grain analysis.
Meanwhile, in Minnesota, the one clear contest between a DSA-type progressive and a more conventional Democrat resulted in a solid left-wing victory: Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan (D-MN) beat Rep. Angie Craig (D-MN), 59% to 39%. Minnesota is dominated by the Twin Cities metro, which includes the flagship state university in Minneapolis and the state capital of St. Paul. It’s also the home of 62% of the state’s population and 74% of Democratic primary voters.
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That’s why it’s been a farther reach for Republicans than Wisconsin or Michigan. Democrats are still favored in this fall’s Senate race, even though Republican nominee Michele Tafoya is a well-known former NFL sideline reporter and Flanagan is a radical who, wearing a T-shirt showing a knife between the words “Protect Trans Kids.” Evidently, she thought that, as my Washington Examiner colleague Tim Carney wrote, “people should stab anyone who didn’t agree that a man became a woman by identifying as a woman.”
In any case, it’s wrong to conclude “Socialist wave hits wall with upset in Wisconsin.” There’s a large segment of the Democratic party that is “charged up and ready to go,” in Barack Obama’s phrase, and which could capture the party’s presidential nomination — and maybe the White House. Something like that happened in 2016 and could happen again in 2028.