Abdul El-Sayed earned a narrow victory in the Michigan Senate primary on Tuesday, coming from third place and withstanding a $62 million onslaught from his main opponent, Haley Stevens. He won a statewide primary in a swing state on a message that prominently featured Medicare for All. He won despite the party’s sitting governor and sitting senator endorsing Stevens. And he won despite Stevens’s outside backers using an eight-year-old quote from the most popular politician in the Democratic Party, Barack Obama, praising her for being part of his administration.
Those facts and that framing do not necessarily reflect the way a lot of progressives are feeling right now. But if the past two weeks of bad polling had not appeared and the last survey of the race was the mid-July poll showing Stevens up by seven, that mood would be markedly different. Expectations setting can really take one’s eyes off the 50 percent-plus-one nature of American elections. El-Sayed was outspent and had the bulk of the establishment against him, and he won.
Progressives had a near-sweep in Michigan, in fact. Will Lawrence took advantage of establishment infighting and used his focus on data centers in a mid-Michigan toss-up district to romp to victory. DSA member Donavan McKinney won a primary challenge in Detroit, defeating millions of dollars from incumbent Shri Thanedar, who finally got into a one-on-one race his money couldn’t talk him out of. The co-founder of the Uncommitted movement, Abbas Alawieh, won his primary and is on track to become a state senator. There were other significant gains up and down the ballot.
A perceptive piece in Drop Site News pointed out that discontent with the way that Michigan’s legislative trifecta turned out led to progressive energy and eventually these victories. I wrote about that at the end of 2024, actually, and one of the discontented I talked to was a housing organizer named Will Lawrence. “People have fought for decades to realize this,” he told me. “A lot of people are really pissed off. Because they feel like it’s been squandered.”
Don’t mourn, organize.
One thing is clear from last night’s results: We’re going to get a test of the long-held conventional wisdom about whether progressive Democrats can win in swing seats. The national environment is certainly in Democrats’ favor no matter who they are: Waves can cover ripples. But the strategy for victory could upend the idea that there’s only a narrow range of ideas that can be victorious in Democratic politics as played at the big boys’ table.
Lawrence’s campaign released a memo this morning outlining their path to victory in Michigan’s Seventh Congressional District, rooted in taking on “Silicon Valley billionaires and DC insiders determining the future of our towns and our country,” as campaign manager Stevie O’Hanlon writes. The memo ties incumbent Republican Tom Barrett to the state’s big utility companies as a means to tie him to data centers. And it highlights Lawrence’s organizing muscle, citing a local reporter calling it “the most impressive grassroots operations that a Lansing-based congressional effort has built in the 30 years I can speak to.”
Ultimately, the race has an incumbent who has voted almost uniformly with Donald Trump, who is severely underwater with voters, while exhibiting the same kind of self-enrichment (paying campaign vendors who employ his wife, filing for an impossible $20,000 in mileage reimbursements) that Trump is known for. Meanwhile, the challenger is reaching deep into his opponents’ coalition to find voters disenchanted with data centers and rising costs. Putting aside ideological or factional concerns, the Democrat is poised to win with a smart and strategic campaign.
El-Sayed has a similar message and approach, and a similar story he can tell about his Trump dittohead opponent. Whether the establishment House and Senate campaign arms back up these candidates with financial support will be a big factor. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is out with a statement saying that “Democrats are united by a common purpose: putting a check on Donald Trump by defeating his Republican enablers and taking back the Senate. We look forward to working with Abdul and Democrats across Michigan to win this seat in November.” We will see if they back that up with cash.
To that end, the DSCC released a memo on the race that committed to an early six-figure digital ad buy attacking Republican nominee former Rep. Mike Rogers for taking $1 million from the drug industry and voting to keep prices high. The memo makes the case that Rogers’s corruption and Trump’s unpopularity will carry El-Sayed to victory. While that’s not necessarily an endorsement of the Democratic nominee’s politics, it does state unreservedly: “Abdul El-Sayed is in a strong position to hold this seat, and he will be elected U.S. Senator in November.”
Ultimately, the fall campaign is more likely to feature a united front than a divided one. And having more than one way to beat a Republican is a good scenario for Democrats.
