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Yes, the Left Won Big Last Night
Something has shifted among the Democratic electorate.That was already clear from Zohran Mamdani’s trouncing of establishment royalty Andrew Cuomo in the New York mayoral race last year, punctuated by a series of yet more socialist wins over establishment incumbents seven months later. And it was clear from the primary election in Maine, where Democratic voters rejected their own governor in favor of a left-populist firebrand dogged by scandals who had never held political office.But the victory of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan over the centrist, Israel lobby–backed Haley Stevens may eclipse even these as both a victory for the broad left and for anyone who genuinely cares about democracy.No candidate has been outspent to the degree El-Sayed was and still won, however narrowly, with Stevens’s nine-to-one advantage in outside spending funding an endless torrent of TV ads touting a nonexistent endorsement from former President Barack Obama and scurrilously attacking El-Sayed. Former socialist lawmaker Jamaal Bowman fell in 2024 to a money landslide roughly a quarter of the scale of what El-Sayed faced.Besides a visceral reminder that it is possible for people power to triumph over naked plutocracy, the results should also help, depending on what happens in November, put to bed the very last talking point that party centrists held over their progressive opponents: that socialists and other lefty candidates only have appeal on the coasts or in deep-blue urban areas.This was never true, as we knew from countless indicators: Bernie Sanders’s 2016 primary win in Michigan, for instance, or the fact that two of the earliest “Squad” wins came in Detroit with Rashida Tlaib and Minneapolis with Ilhan Omar, along with the spate of local- and state-level socialist victories in the Midwest over the past decade, including the socialist blocs in the Chicago and Minneapolis city councils. But given the Senate race’s statewide nature and in a state that Trump has won twice, El-Sayed is now in a position to put that talking point to rest in the eyes of the average voter in a way that none of these other electoral milestones could have.Still, denial is a hard thing to shake. “Progressives didn’t get the big election night they wanted,” went an early Wednesday headline from Politico. This morning saw a hurried, collective moving of goalposts by Left-averse commentators to absurdly redefine victory as not actually winning the election, as El-Sayed did, but winning it by a blowout margin — a standard that no doubt would have still been applied if Stevens had been the one who eked out the narrow victory.In reality, it’s hard to make the argument that Michigan handed the Left a bad night. Five out of six of Bernie Sanders’s endorsed candidates won in the state, including Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member Donavan McKinney, who will almost certainly become what will potentially be the ninth socialist member of the US House from the safe blue seat in Michigan’s Thirteenth Congressional District and expand the left-wing “Squad” to as many as dozens of members. Also notable is Sunrise Movement cofounder William Lawrence, who won his three-way race for the purple Seventh Congressional District — previously held by centrist Democratic senator Elissa Slotkin, whose endorsed candidate for the seat came in third last night.Also victorious among Sanders endorsees was Abbas Alawieh, a cofounder of the Uncommitted Movement and an uncommitted delegate at last year’s Democratic National Convention who led a sit-in there in protest of the Kamala Harris campaign’s position on the Gaza genocide, and who won his primary for state senate with a comfortable 18 point margin. That list also includes two other DSA members: County Commissioner Yousef Rabhi, who handily defeated the sitting, four-term mayor of Ann Arbor, and Chris Gilmer-Hill, who was endorsed by both El-Sayed and the organization’s Metro Detroit branch and won his primary to represent Michigan’s Eighth District in the state house.If this isn’t the night that progressives had wanted, then we can only assume they had wanted to lose.Two Birds With One StoneBut it’s El-Sayed’s victory that is deservedly being treated as the most important story of the night.The result marks another high-profile rejection of the Democratic elite by their previously loyal voters, arguably the story of the party during the Trump 2.0 era. Establishment Democrats went all in to try and swing the race to Stevens, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer securing donor support for her and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Sen. Kristen Gillibrand — who last year falsely accused Mamdani of talking about “global jihad” — reportedly lying to donors that the other centrist in the race was a DSA member.A spate of eleventh-hour endorsements from big Democratic names, including the still-popular Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and the mystifyingly prominent Rep. Jim Clyburn, couldn’t push Stevens over the line. Her centrist colleague, Rep. Hillary Scholten, trashed El-Sayed as a misogynist and “anti-American” and even suggested she might not back him in the general. (Scholten, who this year ran unopposed, is now in a potentially vulnerable place, with El-Sayed having won 58 percent of the vote in three Western Michigan counties with parts contained in her district).But arguably, the most significant thing about the race is the sheer scale of right-wing money El-Sayed had to overcome to win and the massive defeat of the pro-Israel lobby that it represents.Only a few years ago, pro-Israel forces were virtually dictating the results of Democratic primaries through unheard-of levels of outside spending against otherwise well-liked progressives. Stevens herself was one of the beneficiaries of this strategy. In 2022, she cruised to victory over the progressive son of one of Michigan’s most famous political families, former Rep. Andy Levin, on the back of a more than $3 million investment from the United Democracy Project (UDP), the super PAC of the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC).While UDP funded an anti-Levin ad blitz that never actually mentioned Israel, the then-president of AIPAC openly attacked Levin — a proud Zionist and former synagogue president, whose transgression was pushing to condition US aid to Israel as a way to stop it from destroying the two-state solution — as the “most corrosive member of Congress to the US-Israel relationship.” Stevens ended up winning the district, which contains much of her home county of Oakland, by nearly 20 points.Considered an ominous sign for money in politics at the time, that amount was a small fraction of the nearly $32 million that the pro-Israel UDP invested in Stevens this time around, the largest sum it has ever spent on any congressional race. Together with another $30 million from groups funded by various corporate interests, it made the race the state’s most expensive nonpresidential primary on record and the third-most expensive Senate primary ever held. And this time, the issue of Israel was front and center — not so much in the ads that UDP ran but in the fundamental political divide between the two candidates and the metacommentary surrounding it.Just like Cuomo had in New York, Stevens bet big on bear-hugging Israel at a time when the country has never had a worse standing with the US public and tried to make an issue of El-Sayed’s criticism of its treatment of Gazans and his association with other Israel critics like Hasan Piker — even at one point all but calling him an antisemite. And just like Cuomo in New York, the strategy entirely misread where the Democratic electorate is after 2024. This time, “Oakland County’s congresswoman” only won Oakland County — where she was born, raised, and currently lives and that she represents in Congress — by 6 points, well below her winning margin in 2022.Together with the victories of Alawieh and McKinney — who prevailed against an incumbent who became a born-again Israel Firster, dragging his feet on backing a ceasefire and disavowing DSA after October 7 — the race is the most dramatic confirmation we’ve seen so far that the politics around the US-Israel relationship have fundamentally changed, particularly on the Democratic side.Even with a transformed Democratic electorate, it’s unlikely El-Sayed and the forces behind him could have achieved this result without some strategic pragmatism. El-Sayed got the crucial backing of many DSA members on the ground even though he made explicitly clear he was not a socialist. Michigan’s democratic socialists seem to have calculated that the areas where they overlapped, including El-Sayed’s full-throated support for Medicare for All, taxing the rich, and public ownership of artificial-intelligence firms, made his campaign a cause worth supporting — a big-tent approach made easier by the fact that El-Sayed publicly embraced DSA’s support as part of his own broad coalition.El-Sayed, meanwhile, wisely changed his tune in some places even as he held fast to the core policy positions that put him in the crosshairs of big-money, right-wing spenders. He walked back his years-old support for the “Defund the Police” slogan, winning the endorsement of the Wayne County Deputy Sheriff’s Association, much as Bernie Sanders had once done to engineer his own career-making political upset. And he campaigned with a positive, patriotic style, framing his criticism of Israel around a left-wing version of an “America First” pitch, undermining the inevitable attempts to paint him as a violent or dangerous “foreign” extremist.On that note, the history-making nature of El-Sayed’s candidacy, as a proud Muslim and Arab American who leaned into those parts of his background, merits a brief mention. It would be no small thing to have the first ever Muslim US senator at a time of virulent and rising Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism. That bigotry is lately finding physical form not just in people’s daily remarks, attitudes, and random outbursts of violence but also in actual policy and political rhetoric: Trump’s Muslim ban, his various wars on the Muslim world, the increasingly openly racist rhetoric of establishment policymakers. And it’s not just on the Right. El-Sayed weathered one of the nastier dog-whistling campaigns we’ve seen in a while, a Democratic version of the subtly racist campaign John McCain ran against the not-actually-Muslim Obama eighteen years ago, a campaign that similarly saw El-Sayed’s opponent occasionally come face-to-face with the ugliness it had stirred up.This kind of thing is likely not going away anytime soon, even with this result. But El-Sayed’s victory, as well as his chance to overcome the more openly racist version of this that Republicans seem dead-set on running for the general election, will be an important milestone for basic decency and a more tolerant United States.As things move to the general election, we can say two things for sure: we will keep hearing that the Left is headed for almost certain doom; and AIPAC and other vehicles for big money will spend ever more insane amounts to try and make it a reality. But El-Sayed’s primary win is a reminder that, sometimes, with enough hard work, it’s possible to break through a tsunami of cash and come out breathing on the other side.
