Abdul El-Sayed’s win in the Michigan Senate primary was a historic breakthrough. Not only because he is a Muslim son of immigrants who broke with almost every single tenet of establishment Democratic party politics. But because he has wiped that complacent sneer at progressive wins off the faces of centrist gatekeepers. Zohran Mamdani? Relax, he’s just a mayor. And it’s New York City. Outside urban and liberal corridors, there is nothing to worry about. Now El-Sayed has won the Democratic party’s nomination in a swing state that is also on the list of presidential nomination states.
There is a lot to be excited about. Not only within the US, but for observers abroad hopeful for the emergence of a truly revolutionary left that is able to weather powerful and well-funded adversaries and prevail. The money raised to defeat El-Sayed was staggering. He was outspent by more than nine to one. It was the most expensive Democratic congressional primary ever. A roll call of cartoon bad guys, such as Chevron and Philip Morris, funded his opponent, Haley Stevens, to the tune of over $60m. Of that funding, nearly half came from a Super Pac backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac).
The symbolism of the win is heavy, that of a politics snapping the chains of corporate power and special interest groups whose agendas run counter to voters’. It suggests two things. One, an electorate waking up to the fact that its democracy is captured. Two, features in the past that would have been disqualifying – lack of experience, lack of establishment endorsement – now render a candidate a “clean skin”. Someone untainted by the sordid game that keeps in play expensive healthcare, cruelty to immigrants and the hoovering of tax dollars out of the country.
Israel took up a large role in the campaign, both on the part of El-Sayed and his opponent. But it’s striking how both were talking about different things. El-Sayed’s detractors stuck to repetitive talking points about “Israel having the right to exist”, a question that is not relevant to the average voter. El-Sayed framed Israel as simply a place that has taken too much of Americans’ money. “The question is quite secondary to whether they have a right to our tax dollars.” It was a clear and salient approach.
What El-Sayed’s win isn’t, yet, is a promise that this success can be replicated not only outside primary contests and against Republicans, but across the board among progressive candidates. The Democratic establishment has been hapless in the face of Donald Trump, and new fiery candidates can appear to have the answers that their party so far has not.
But they are up against huge challenges. First, what the Republican party will throw at them: accusations that, as Trump said, “full of shit” candidates like El-Sayed are radical commies who will bring nothing but “death, squalor, poverty” and “a life of hell”. Then there is what the centrist wing of the Democrats can mobilise against them.
A leading centrist group called Third Way has already raised millions to discredit democratic socialists by investing in social media and mobilising activists against candidates like El-Sayed. “We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” said the group’s leader. Their fear, they say, is that the momentum behind democratic socialists will go all the way to the presidential nomination, and then produce a candidate who would be crushed by Republicans. Because, of course, that has never happened before to a centrist Democratic presidential candidate running against Trump.
Still, the portrayals of progressive candidates as radical can go a long way in a country where people think that Trump is more moderate than Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton. Fighting on a national level, the left can get away with far less in the political imaginary than the right. That is because the very promise of change that gives progressive candidates the edge in certain contests becomes easily framed as a race into the unknown. This becomes an even more resonant threat as progressive candidates do not have the depth and breadth of a long party record behind them, or the familiarity that comes with ubiquity on the political landscape.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Politicians like Mamdani and El-Sayed are modelling something truly unique. They signify a new US in which the politics of outsiders and their cultural and ideological features is fused powerfully with and against the features of their adopted countries. They have opted not for meek total assimilation for mobility, nor have they recused themselves from contests for a country in which they have claimed a stake.
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But they and the rest of the US are carrying too much on their shoulders at a time of domestic and global upheaval. Their movement battles with the stubborn entrenchment of a bankrupt Democratic party establishment, the savage culture wars of the right, and, even though some have thus far prevailed, a gargantuan machine of lobbyists and corporate interest groups.
Progressive voters are not simply found, they are made. And constantly remade into coalitions. If the Democrats would rather lose on their own terms than win on the progressive left’s, then fighting these new candidates will establish the impression that they are freak radicals destined to fizzle out. But these candidates have alighted on what seems like the most viable politics right now. Refuse to embrace them wholeheartedly, and you guarantee that Trumpism wins again and again. Back them all the way to 2028. What, after all, do you have to lose that you haven’t lost already?
