Sure, the primary race was supposed to be a blow out, and it turned out that Abdul El-Sayed squeaked through by less than a point. But that’s little comfort. Abdul El-Sayed beat the Democratic establishment candidate, Representative Haley Stevens, in the Democratic primary for the senator from Michigan. That he didn’t win huge doesn’t change the fact that he won. Abdul won.
Michigan’s marquee race, the Democratic Senate primary, turned out to be a nail-biter Tuesday. But one thing is clear in progressive Abdul El-Sayed’s surprisingly narrow win over Rep. Haley Stevens, the choice of the old guard: The left-wing insurgency is here to stay.
The New York City win of Zohran Mamdani could be shrugged off as a local quirk. After all, Mamdani won as Mayor of New York. Hell, even Giuliani won as mayor, which tells you how easily New York voters can be led astray. But Abdul was running for Senator, and to hold the Democratic senate seat of retiring Gary Peters. If the Dems have any hope of taking the majority in the Senate, holding this seat is critical. And yet, Abdul won.
With all the bad feelings the primary engendered, I figured El-Sayed would need to make some overtures ahead of November. Representative Hillary Scholten, a Democrat, had refused to commit to voting for him in part because of his decision to campaign with the leftist streamer Hasan Piker, who expresses jejune sympathies for all sorts of brutal anti-American regimes, Hamas among them. I wanted to know how he’d tried to persuade people like her.
Beyond his extreme progressive positions, he’s tied himself to actual left-wing lunatics like Piker, who isn’t shy about expressing his adoration of terrorists and hatred of Israel. To be fair, Abdul doesn’t much like Israel either, calling it an apartheid state that engaged in genocide. He says he doesn’t hate Jews, but just everything about Jews.
This could present a problem in the general election, given that El-Sayed’s positions are extreme outliers disfavored by most. Or are they?
El-Sayed didn’t accept the premise that there were many people like her. “There’s this operational sense of the party that says that elites carry constituents,” he said. “If that was true, I’d lose. It’s just not true. The only thing that has been driving any support for our opposition has been the $60 million of lies being put on TV.”
That sounded rather strong. (The only thing?) I asked, “Do you really not believe that there are people whose opposition to your ideas, or skepticism of your ideas, is sincere?”
“I think there are really quite few,” he replied.
Had the “big tent” of the Democratic Party been taken over by its left fringe? The infiltration of the Democrat Socialists hasn’t exactly been kept secret, but under the belief that the Dems needed to pander to this wing or lose them, and thus lose to the forces of Trump and MAGA, they have welcomed a group that is in direct conflict with the mainstream of liberal Democrats and wants nothing to do them.
Some wag noted that the reason Democratic Socialists run as Democrats is because they can, and they can win, which would never happen if they ran as what they are. But they are not Democrats. They are not liberals. And they never will be and don’t want to be.
Is El-Sayed right that there are “quite a few”? He’s right that there are enough to win him a primary against everything the establishment Dems threw at him. That’s not insignificant. It’s unimaginable that the Democratic Socialists constitute a majority of the Democratic Party, but does it really matter anymore? If they are handed enough clout to influence, if not dictate, the party platform, then the numbers become irrelevant. They are in control, minority though they may be.
This matters because it means that voters, whether conservative, liberal or swing, are left with two choices: They can vote for MAGA, which has subsumed the Republican Party, or Democratic Socialists, which has seized control of the Democratic Party, even if its hand around the party’s neck has yet to choke all reason from its moribund body.
Are we to be whipsawed between two extremes? Are we left to choose which side we hate most at any given moment, only to have our loathing flip once the dreaded winner seizes control and either builds, or tears down, the grandiose arch? Or are we to walk away, unable to vote for one side and unwilling to vote for the other?
In the past, I’ve described the electoral choices as being in a pit up to your neck with feces, having someone about to pour a bucket of vomit on your head. Do you duck? Well, do you?