Can I claim to have predicted, way back in 1988, the result of Michigan’s fiercely contested Democratic primary for U.S. senator this week?
That’s a stretch and not just because the results are incomplete. As I write, Abdul el Sayed is just barely ahead of Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), by less than 15,000 votes out of more than 1.5 million cast. The New York Times analysts think, plausibly, that lead will hold up when the last 100,000 or so votes are reported.
But the developments that have made el Sayed — who lost the 2018 gubernatorial primary to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) by 20 percentage points — a potential winner were visible in the 1988 contest for Michigan’s delegates to the Democratic National Convention, in which Jesse Jackson ran far ahead of eventual nominee Michael Dukakis by a 24-percentage-point margin.
Let’s flash back 38 years to see what I mean. Then, as a member of the Washington Post editorial page staff, I wrote an article in the Post two weeks after Jackson’s surprise victory, starting out by describing the unusual process.
“The Michigan Democrats’ ‘firehouse primary’ caucus system allowed any eligible voter claiming to be a Democrat to cast a vote—but only between 10 and 4 on a Saturday and at only 576, rather than the usual 11,000, voting locations. In 1988 some 212,000—from a state that cast 3.8 million votes in the 1984 general election–came in and voted.”
In this low-turnout environment, “About 40 percent of them–no one is sure, because no exit poll was taken–were black, and Jesse Jackson, with the 20 percent vote among whites he had been receiving in other caucus situations (much of it from Michigan’s large graduate student proletariat and Arab-American populations), beat Dukakis by 54 percent to 28 percent.”
Some journalists attributed Jackson’s victory to an alliance between black voters and white blue-collar workers, at a time when auto worker jobs at the Detroit Three were being jeopardized by Japanese competition. For a long generation, going back to the New Deal, many liberals had been yearning for an alliance between white and black blue-collar workers who, in their view, shared economic interests. This hope was a constant theme, for example, of the great political scientist V. O. Key, Jr., in his data-rich 1949 book Southern Politics.
But a quick analysis of results by congressional districts undercut this view. Jackson easily carried the two Detroit-based black-majority districts. But he lost the heavily blue-collar districts in suburban Wayne and Macomb Counties. His big surprise wins were in the outstate Michigan congressional districts.
Those wins were produced by a gifted Democratic insider and Lansing businessman, Joel Ferguson, who hired yellow school buses in small outstate cities and shipped busloads of black church members to the few caucus sites. In addition, Jackson won big in Washtenaw and Ingham Counties, home to the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, respectively. His victory came from, I wrote in 1998, blacks and “Michigan’s large graduate student proletariat and Arab-American populations.”
The lesson that “Jackson votes came not from working class whites but from the ‘graduate student proletariat,” as I wrote in Reason in 1991, became less relevant as Bill Clinton increased the Democratic party’s appeal among all voters, with particular gains among those with high incomes and high educational credentials.
That trend, amplified by upscale voters’ aversion to Donald Trump, led me to describe the Democratic party in the Washington Examiner in 2018 “as a coalition of groups regarded as racial minorities (blacks, Hispanics, Asian) and of culturally liberal, highly educated people in affluent metropolitan areas, sympathetic suburbs and university towns (gentry liberals and what one might call the graduate student proletariat).”
In the 38 years since 1988, politicians of both parties have pumped huge sums into higher education, to the point that college and university administrators now outnumber the students they supposedly serve—and to the point that electorally the highest Democratic percentages in states like Michigan and Wisconsin are cast not in Wayne and Milwaukee Counties, with their large black and blue-collar white communities, but in Washtenaw and Dane Counties, home of the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin.
That–plus the leftward shift of white college graduates (visible in el Sayed’s wins in the Grand Rapids and Traverse City areas) and the emergence on campus and beyond of the movement that, since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, has seen Israel in particular and Jews generally as colonialist oppressors and the supposedly colonized Palestinians as the virtuous oppressed — explains how the minority positions of Jackson in 1988 and Abdul Sayed in 2018 could become a victorious (though not quite majority) win for el Sayed in 2028.
The germs were there all along, but the disease has unmistakably broken out only now. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is Jewish, has announced she would not attend the Democratic State Convention, for fear she’d be booed off the stage. Pre-primary polling showed el Sayed narrowly trailing (and Stevens narrowly leading) the Republican nominee, former Rep. Mike Rogers, who lost an open-seat Senate race to Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) by only 0.3 percentage points in 2024.
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Pre-primary polling also showed el Sayed well ahead of Stevens, suggesting that his enthusiastic core voters — high-education and low-income — were more eager to be polled than Stevens’s more downscale base (she carried virtually all of Michigan’s heavy manufacturing counties).
But el Sayed has proven to be an adept candidate, articulate and gifted at personal interaction while avoiding direct endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America and its unpopular platform planks, and he is running in a state Trump barely carried two years ago and in a year when the president and his party are unpopular. Like Zohran Mamdani in New York City, he has political skills which may place him in a key position — perhaps the deciding vote in a Senate majority — in American government. We’ve come a long way since 1988.