AIPAC's Outrageous Dark Money Attack Failed
Abdul El-Sayed faced down the most expensive opposition in Michigan history and won. The various races also highlighted some very interesting trends for the state.
Election night started off with high energy amongst supporters of Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive vanguard in the ugly Senate primary race here in Michigan. I watched online as early results and mail-in ballots gave Sayed a large early lead, appearing to justify polling predictions of a massive victory. Gloating abounded on BlueSky amongst progressives who were hoping to be completely done with the toxic trash of this campaign. By 10 pm, the noise began to die down as Haley Stevens, the beneficiary of record-shattering super PAC largesse via AIPAC (American-Israeli Political Action Committee), began closing the gap with El-Sayed.
I turned on cable news for the first time in months, putting on MS Now, but I simply couldn’t stand it after an hour or so and turned it back off. I put on NBA2K26 for a while and had the Kornacki feed from NBC News on my phone, on mute, so I could watch numbers come in during timeouts. I ended up staying awake until 3 am, only to finally give up and go to sleep with no call. I woke up with no call as well, but thankfully, mercifully, by 10 am the victory was declared. Abdul El-Sayed had defeated a war machine with the power of positivity.
$80,000,000 was expended in this race, about $9 million for doomed state senate Majority Whip Mallory McMorrow, $7.3 million for el-Sayed, and a whopping $63 million for Stevens, the choice of Chuck Schumer (gee, I wonder why). Approximately half of that came from the AIPAC-funded group United Democracy Project, which smeared El-Sayed as “hating women” because he…criticized a woman he was running against (Gretchen Whitmer, 2018), and Michelle Obama’s “Get Moving” program (for focusing too much on individuals and not enough on structural issues that help create obesity in children in the first place). They also ran ads repeatedly claiming Stevens was tough on ICE when the entire state knew she’d voted yes to “thank ICE” and fund it a year ago.
In short, El-Sayed was outspent 9-1, and he still won. He was faced down with the highest-funded campaign in state history, and he still won. He did not win any of the three Metro Detroit counties, the first statewide Democrat candidate to do so (exempting Bernie Sanders’ 2016 primary win because that was for president, not statewide office). He did not win Flint, or Saginaw, or Bay City, or Detroit. Stevens won every city and area that had always been considered the only way to get a Democratic nomination for statewide office, and she lost.
Why? How?
The Kids Are Alright
The student vote, the young vote, the age group always derided by pundits and always tagged as those who make lots of noise and never participate in the process, well, they showed up. They showed up big. Every major college town or city in this state, from Houghton and Marquette in the Upper Peninsula to Mount Pleasant, Ypsilanti, East Lansing, Ann Arbor, and Kalamazoo across the Lower Peninsula, went for Abdul El-Sayed. They not only did so, but they did so in numbers far exceeding the margin that Stevens won elsewhere. Where Stevens was winning by five percent up and down the I-75 corridor, El-Sayed drew heavy turnout in the college towns and was winning by 25-35%. He also swamped Stevens in Grand Rapids, a longtime conservative stronghold that has shifted leftwards in recent years. It completely changes how campaigns amongst Democrats will be run statewide, because there’s now a proven roadmap on how to win.
Most importantly, as Bridge Michigan reported today, the actual Election Day votes in Metro Detroit shifted heavily away from Stevens. El-Sayed beat her 59-41% amongst those who did not cast an early ballot or voted by mail, likely meaning that his last second ad blitz and superior ground game also played a strong role in his victory. That last second ad blitz strategy also seemed to benefit a candidate in my district, the Michigan 10th congressional district. What had seemed to be a battle between state House minority leader Tim Greimel and Macomb County SVU chief prosecutor Christina Hines was upended when little-known Eric Chung ran a final week ad blitz on local TV and blew past Greimel to take a strong second place finish behind Hines, who won with 45% as Chung pulled in 33% from nearly zero name recognition.
Trump’s Hold May Be Slipping
The 8th congressional district GOP primary had a tumultuous final month, but nothing could’ve prepared anybody for what happened, least of all the candidates.
A few weeks ago, Donald Trump backed Navy veteran Amir Hassan over his opponents Thomas Smith and Al Lemmo. Smith dropped out soon thereafter and backed Lemmo. Because a Trump endorsement usually means a victory in the cult atmosphere of the Republican Party, Hassan was expected to win.
That’s not what happened.
For the first time in my memory, at least, the candidate that dropped out of actively running before the election won the election. Thomas Smith didn’t just win, he utterly smoked Hassan, winning by 17% over him and getting a majority of votes cast at 50.4%. Lemmo pulled in about 16% of votes. This has led to a number of questions:
Is it a repudiation of Trump in a part of the state that’s friendly to him?
Was it racism by GOP voters who couldn’t stand to vote for a man with a “Muslim name?”
Did Smith drop out so late that early voting and absentee ballots minimized the effect of his dropping out?
I don’t know that there’s a good answer to any of these questions. Trump also endorsed John James for governor, and James beat Perry Johnson and Mike Cox by nearly the exact same percentages as Smith’s win. I’m tempted to say it’s because Republicans don’t understand names that use more than a dozen letters combined, but that would be a bit unfair. I think there’s a partial case to be made that Trump’s batshit lunacy in economic and foreign policy is bleeding voters, especially in parts of the state where there isn’t as much economic investment and where a lot of farms are. Farmers have been especially hit hard, and it may finally be swaying their votes. This is all speculation, though, until there’s some exit polling, perhaps, to tell us what they were thinking out there.
Oh, And One More Thing
William Lawrence, one of the founders of the environmentalist group Sunrise Movement, beat two well-funded opponents for the Democratic nomination in the 7th congressional district—former holder of the nuclear football and ex-Navy Seal Matt Maasdam (who worked for President Obama after leaving his service as the nuclear codes officer) and former ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink, who quit when Trump was elected. This was no small feat, especially in a district that is closely divided, and in which voters were expected to choose pragmatically. Lawrence is an unabashed progressive who defied the establishment moderates and the money to win a clear victory. He ran a campaign that was very much in line with Abdul El-Sayed, and they are both hammering home the same message—less money abroad to evil regimes, more money at home, increase taxes on the billionaire class and pass Medicare for All. In Detroit, the 13th district, incumbent lunatic Shri Thanedar was booted out by democratic socialist Brandon McKinney, again espousing the same themes.
All of those points hold a lot of resonance across the ideological spectrum, especially since Republicans gutted the Affordable Care Act and millions lost health insurance again. 2.3 million fewer children are covered by Medicaid after the Trump administration allowed states to be as cruel as they want to be in determining coverage. Meanwhile, the rich around Trump are richer than ever, and Trump himself has robbed us blind in an orgy of selfishness. It’s finally gotten through to many MAGA backers, and it’s not impossible that this message can reach them. Every day, as the gap widens between the Epstein types and the average worker, the path for progressives widens as well. Half-measures aren’t going to cut it anymore, and the repeated wins by progressives should be a warning to Democratic Party leaders: Join the march forward or get run over by it.