Abdul El-Sayed Is Very Electable

We know less about electability than we think.

As was widely expected Abdul El-Sayed defeated Haley Stevens in the contest to be the Democratic nominee for the US Senate seat in Michigan that is being vacated by Democrat Gary Peters. El-Sayed will run against Republican Mike Rogers in November. The primary took what is now a familiar form-a progressive with little or no experience in elected office calling for populist economic policies with a strong anti-Israel position running against a more experienced moderate Democrat with a more pro-Israel view.

Throughout the primary the question of electability loomed in the media and presumably among many Michigan voters. It is important not to fall into the trap, one for which there is little empirical evidence, that boring centrists are the only people who can win in purple districts or states. On the contrary, the only thing we know for sure about electability is that we don’t know anything for sure about electability. It is also the case that whoever won this Democratic primary was going to have a strong chance of winning in November against an uninspiring MAGA aligned Republican in what will be a good Democratic year.

There is no guarantee that El-Sayed will win in November, but the odds are pretty good. Moreover, many of the Democrats who opposed him in the primary, beginning with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are already rallying behind El-Sayed. El-Sayed will have to pick up support from African Americans who voted with Stevens in the primary as well as older white Democrats. He will do very well with the former group, and while he won’t get all of the latter, he will likely do well enough.

El-Sayed’s victory, although by a much narrower margin that was expected, is also a reminder of how much the Democratic Party has changed in a relatively short time. Most apparently, the party has moved leftward on many economic issues and has become much more anti-Israel than in the past. These changes have obviously helped candidates like El-Sayed.

The coalition that constitutes the Democratic Party has also changed just during this decade. As recently as 2022, if you were told that a candidate in a Democratic primary for statewide office in Michigan or citywide office in New York would lose both the African American and the Jewish vote by substantial margins, you would assume that candidate had no chance to win. However, both El-Sayed in Michigan and Zohran Mamdani lost those once two key constituencies and won their primary-in Mamdani’s case by a healthy margin.

The progressive coalition that has propelled people like Mamdani, El-Sayed, Melat Kiros in Colorado and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York to victory is different than the progressive coalitions of African Americans, LGBT people, Latinos in some places and liberal Jews that helped elect progressives the four or so decades before this one.

These changes within the Democratic Party also reflect changing American demographics. Today’s left coalition includes Muslims, younger educated white voters, younger African Americans, a not insignificant number of radical Jews and a more dispersed segment of the electorate that wants a more aggressive approach to fighting fascism from the Democratic Party. That is a coalition that did not exist a decade ago, and probably would not have been enough to win many primaries, but it is powerful now.

One of the major issues in this race was the role played by AIPAC the pro-Israel lobbying group that has increasingly cast its lot with right-wing forces in both Israel and the US. AIPAC spent about $20 million trying to help Haley Stevens. In the end they had nothing to show for that money other than a strong second place finish for Stevens. In other words, they accomplished nothing with their money.

Twenty million dollars is a huge amount of money even in a reasonably large state such as Michigan. However, it is likely that AIPAC has destroyed its reputation so badly that the only thing worse than AIPAC spending millions against your campaign is having them spend millions to support your campaign. Smart Democrats now are realizing that AIPAC support, regardless of how much money is spent, is unhelpful and perhaps fatal to their campaign.

As November approaches, the most likely outcome in Michigan is that El-Sayed wins and becomes a smart and progressive US Senator. His views will continue to anger some, but this also the nature of politics. There is one other thing that must be said about El-Sayed and the coming general election. El-Sayed will be an exponentially better senator than Mike Rogers.

It will be difficult for the Democrats to win back the Senate this fall, but it is also essential for the future of American democracy that they do that. It is hard to imagine the Democrats succeeding in that endeavor if they lose what is already a Democratic seat in Michigan. Therefore, any Democrat who does not get behind El-Sayed now or who endorses Rogers is not acting in good faith and will make themselves complicit in MAGA fasiscm.