On Wednesday morning, the Associated Press called Michigan's Democratic Senate primary for Abdul El-Sayed. The margin was one percentage point — far tighter than final polls, which had shown El-Sayed leading moderate Representative Haley Stevens by double digits. With 99 percent of the vote counted, the race was decided.
The closeness of the count is worth noting. But the significance of the outcome, as reporters Olivia Reingold and Eli Lake argue in their dispatches for The Free Press, is not diminished by the narrow spread.
Reingold reported from El-Sayed's watch party on Tuesday night. 'There were keffiyehs as far as the eye could see,' she wrote — 'keffiyehs on heads, keffiyehs as belts, keffiyeh-printed phone cases.' The coalition that delivered the victory was visible, organized, and, by her account, energized in ways that the Stevens campaign could not match.
Lake's analysis reaches further. He documents that El-Sayed campaigned repeatedly alongside progressive influencer Hasan Piker, who has praised Hamas and, according to Lake, 'said America deserved 9/11.' Lake's framing is direct: Piker 'represents a strain of American politics that demonizes the republic.'
The relevant shift, Lake writes, is not merely that such figures exist. It is that the political cost of associating with them has apparently dropped to zero — or below. There was once a time, he notes, when progressive politicians had to distance themselves from anything that hinted at anti-Americanism. El-Sayed did not distance himself. He won anyway.
El-Sayed is a member of what the outlet describes as the Democratic Party's 'ascendant left wing.' His primary victory over a sitting moderate congresswoman is the latest data point in a pattern that has been building across several election cycles: the party's center of gravity is moving, and the movement is not subtle.
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Say it plainly: what happened in Michigan on Tuesday is not a local story about a single Senate seat. It is a measurement. The Democratic primary electorate in a major Midwestern battleground state chose a candidate whose most prominent surrogate has, on the record, praised a designated terrorist organization and said the United States earned the attacks of September 11, 2001. The margin was close. The choice was not ambiguous.
Follow the incentive. If association with those positions carries no electoral penalty — and Tuesday's result suggests it does not, at least in a Democratic primary — then the incentive to maintain distance from them disappears. What replaces it is an incentive to embrace them, because the coalition they animate turns out to vote. The general election in November will test whether that calculus holds beyond a primary. The record, as of Wednesday morning, is what it is.
