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27 Thoughts On A Tough Primary Season
There's more to come, but the worst is over, and now it's time for some perspective.
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NBC News and Decision Desk HQ have called the Michigan Senate Democratic primary for Abdul el-Sayed.
Primary season isn’t over. But with the Michigan Senate primary now behind us, I think we’re over the hump, effectively in general election season, much like how we downshift for summer in May, weeks before the solstice.
In one sense this all worked out fine for me, personally—and what’s more important than that?—because if I were a Michigan voter, I would have voted for Abdul el-Sayed over Haley Stevens. But I’m not sanguine about it. If Michigan were a D+5-10 state in presidential years, I would be. But it’s not. Exultant progressives are, generally, pretty cavalier about the electoral track records of mainline Democrats vs. progressive Democrats in close-run states and districts.
Ceteris paribus (politicians of basically equal talent running in ordinary times, etc.) in a tight race you’d rather be the candidate viewed as moderate than the candidate viewed as ideologically strident. The political class abuses math both opportunistically and innumerately, but that finding is pretty robust.
But ceteris isn’t paribus. These aren’t ordinary times—the electorate suddenly seems less hostile to high-salience progressive ideas (cutting off aid to Israel, Medicare for All, data-center moratoria, money out of politics). And these are not politicians of equal talent: El-Sayed is unusually charismatic and he opposes the current leadership of the toxically unpopular Democratic Party; Stevens is an unimpressive electoral performer (despite being moderate), an Israel supporter, and Chuck Schumer ally whose primary campaign depended on enormous outside expenditures.
More speculatively, while el-Sayed’s candidacy might carry a bit more downside risk than Stevens, he also runs with a lot of upside risk, too. He’s benchmarked a seven-percent margin of victory for himself, predicting that he’d beat Republican Mike Rogers by slightly more than the state’s current generic-ballot margin. That’s definitely possible. If things shake out well, he could even exceed it.
All of that upside potential lies in the fact that he’s a nimble, energetic, gloves off campaigner—a kind of Democratic swing-state opponent Republicans have basically no experience running against. Someone who, like Republicans, is willing to win by defining his opponent in the minds of voters as weak and pathetic, and winning on the strength of voter revulsion. I’m excited, if admittedly a bit nervous, to see how that plays out.
It isn’t the beginning or the end of anything, but I ironically take heart that this is where the GOP stooped.
For starters, el-Sayed is not a socialist. So Republicans begin with a lie. But the racist part is a perfect echo of their attempt to beat Barack Obama by referring to him everywhere and always as “Barack Hussein Obama.” How’d that work out for them? Is Obama still popular? Did he serve two terms? Did he win Michigan? Someone remind me…
I understand and share the concern that this primary was unusually brutal and unfortunately late in the cycle. It was also much closer run than the final tranche of polls suggested it would be. There will be a lot of hard feelings and little time to mend them. So el-Sayed has his work cut out for him. Stevens would have, too, if she’d won.
At the same time, brutal primaries aren’t fatal. Many Democratic partisans feel snake-bit by the long and brutal 2016 Democratic presidential primary, prefiguring Donald Trump’s first election. And fair enough! It was a close general election. If things had been more chill on the left, during the primary, maybe Hillary Clinton would’ve won.
But Trump also won a brutal primary! He mounted a hostile takeover of the entire GOP. Maybe more aptly, after that primary, weeks before the general election, he endured a scandal (the Access Hollywood tape) that drove basically everyone in the party he’d taken over to withdraw support from him, then re-endorse him. And he won anyhow.
If you take little comfort from that (Trump won in 2016 with a minority of the popular vote, which doesn’t happen in Senate races) remember that the 2008 Democratic presidential primary was also very bitter, Democrats nominated someone with a name almost as Muslim-sounding as “Abdulrahman Mohamed el-Sayed,” and won handily.
The 2008 and 2016 elections had little in common thematically, and the winners are antitheses of one another. But I believe those races turned out the way they did because the winning electorates (Democrats in 2008, Republicans in 2016) were convinced that the stakes of the election were existential. It helped them overlook misgivings and get over primary-season hard-feelings.
These midterms are a lot like that. El-Sayed will have to put in the effort, but he’ll be pushing on an open door.