Abdul El-Sayed has done it in Michigan. Though the race was much closer than polling predicted, El-Sayed, a progressive epidemiologist and former state public-health official, has defeated Rep. Haley Stevens by about one percentage point. He had to fend off a veritable ocean of money from outside corporate groups and AIPAC, which together spent some $70 million trying to stop him, making it the most expensive Democratic Senate primary in American history.
Though El-Sayed is not a Democratic Socialists of America member, Donavan McKinney is, and he narrowly won the primary to represent Michigan’s 13th House District, which covers Detroit and some of its suburbs; he will be a lock to win the general election. There will almost certainly be seven DSA members in the next Congress: McKinney, incumbents Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, and primary winners Chris Rabb, Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Melat Kiros.
The American left has real momentum for the first time in a century, and not just in major cities. Attention now turns to Wisconsin, where the gubernatorial primary is scheduled for August 11. The clear front-runner is state assemblymember Francesca Hong, who is a DSA member, a single mother, and like her fellow democratic socialist AOC, a former food service worker. Hong, who went from a dishwasher to executive chef and owned her own restaurant in Madison, has every opportunity of besting the political high-water mark of Wisconsin’s sewer socialists of old.
The curious thing about the Wisconsin primary is that the DSA candidate is simply doing a better job—much like the Michigan race, where El-Sayed out-generaled Haley Stevens, as my colleague David Dayen recently pointed out. Organization, credibility, and grassroots enthusiasm narrowly prevailed over a handful of big donors who spent a whopping $95 per vote, as compared to El-Sayed’s nine bucks.
The American left has real momentum for the first time in a century, and not just in major cities.
The Wisconsin Democratic establishment is, as always, obsessed with “electability,” but as Toby Jaffe detailed here at the Prospect, they couldn’t even sort out which candidate to get behind, much less run a campaign focused on the needs of Wisconsin Democrats. First it was going to be Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, but then she dropped out amidst a campaign finance scandal; then it was going to be former statewide candidate Mandela Barnes, but he got hit with a sex scandal and dropped out; and now it’s Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who has already dropped out once. It’s bush-league stuff that undermines the establishment argument that only they can be trusted to run a solid campaign.
Hong, for her part, has the by now commonplace backlog of kind of inflammatory social media posts from half a decade ago, including espousing wacky-sounding leftist ideas. She had previously endorsed defunding the police and abolishing the Thanksgiving holiday; when confronted with those comments, she evasively backed away without disavowing them—unsatisfying to someone expecting stark honesty, and a poor choice in my view, but perhaps indicative of a capacity for minor dissembling necessary for any working politician.
Hong’s actual campaign has been laser-focused on not-terribly-radical policy. Her platform proposes a big expansion of health care, universal paid leave, and a large boost in education funding, somewhat similar to what Minnesota Democrats passed back in 2023 after a long period out of power in the state. Hong has also tracked public opinion and come out swinging against data centers, which now register approval somewhere around the bubonic plague.
Now, the argument that a socialist can’t possibly win a purple state like Wisconsin has a certain surface plausibility to it. Surely the natural territory of a DSA candidate is a deep-blue location like Queens rather than a notoriously swingy state.
But recent polling and elections going back 100 years tend to indicate that Wisconsin is not full to bursting with moderate swing voters; rather it is heavily polarized between quite progressive Democrats and the same feral Republicans as in a red state. This is the state that brought us Bob La Follette and Joe McCarthy; their current senators are polar opposites Tammy Baldwin and Ron Johnson; it’s the birthplace of the Republican Party and the home of the most expansive socialist triumphs in America.
Republicans led by Scott Walker didn’t pay an immediate penalty for winning the 2010 election and immediately rigging the state’s electoral institutions more blatantly than Victor Orbán did in Hungary; a progressive Democrat ought to be able to win the state with a much more appealing agenda. (By the same token, New Yorkers are not nearly as leftist as their party affiliation might suggest; there are plenty of relatively moderate minorities there who vote Democratic mainly because Republicans want to take away their voting rights.)
As a supporter of American democracy, I agree that it is better for Democrats to win than lose. The problem with the establishment’s neurotic fixation on “electability” is that it is rarely expressed honestly in terms of polling or proper campaign management. If it were, every Blue Dog would run on taxing the rich and the Wisconsin moderate clown show mentioned above wouldn’t happen.
As Alex Pareene once pointed out, in these conversations, electability “is defined, like political ‘moderation,’ only in terms of opposition to things people want, but are told they can’t have.” The intention, quite obvious in many cases, is to browbeat primary voters into supporting more conservative candidates who won’t upset the insider apple cart of corporate campaign donations and consulting gigs. Whoever got a taste of the $70 million spent on Haley Stevens is likely satiated.
And as a matter of empirical reality, it also happens to be very difficult to predict who is the better candidate in a general election. As noted above, the Michigan primary polling was off by 15 to 20 points; this is common in state elections and especially primaries, rendering the only kind of data one could bring to bear on electability questionable at best. Even national polls can be gravely mistaken. Hillary Clinton was supposed to be the electable one in 2016, boasting a consistent polling lead against Donald Trump; she lost.
More often, electability comes down to pure demographic bias. Moderate or conservative white men are assumed to be the best kind of person to run. But recent history complicates this point too. In 2008, Barack Obama was a ludicrously implausible long shot—a Black man with a dictator’s middle name and not even one full term in the Senate under his belt. But he also had a compelling life story, boundless charisma, and extreme oratorical talent. He won the biggest presidential victory this century.
The Obama comparison is instructive. He was not just talented but lucky—and just like in 2008, the national environment is shaping up to be an epic disaster for Republicans. The leader of the MAGA cult, Donald Trump, has gone full late-stage degenerate dictator before his term is even half done. He’s laying waste to the White House, plastering gold leaf over everything, hanging his hideous visage on government buildings and the national currency, and starting insane wars of aggression out of nowhere. Thanks to his trade wars with everyone and actual war with Iran, inflation is stubbornly persistent, gas prices are high, and his poll numbers are sliding ever further down the toilet, with average disapproval at about 60 percent at time of writing.
It follows that, just as John McCain was sandbagged by George W. Bush’s immense unpopularity in 2008, Republican candidates this year will be sandbagged by Trump. If there ever were a time for Wisconsin Democrats to take a risk on a candidate who actually wants to implement the party’s stated agenda, it is now.
That said, should Hong win the primary, she will have a grave responsibility on her shoulders. If she can win, Democrats ought to be able to win full control of the state government for the first time since 2010, and implement 16 years’ worth of backed-up reforms. Can she, along with DSA’s rapidly growing army of organizers, canvassers, and small-dollar donors, go toe-to-toe with Trump and the billionaire class? We may find out soon.
