El-Sayed scores marquee victory for progressives, and other takeaways from Tuesday’s primaries
CNN
By Aaron Blake, Eric Bradner, CNN
(CNN) — The progressive effort to remake the Democratic Party triumphed in battleground Michigan on Tuesday, as former public health official Abdul El-Sayed defeated the more moderate Rep. Haley Stevens — and the party’s establishment, which had rallied behind her.
El-Sayed was outspent in the Senate primary by a 30-to-1 margin on the television airwaves — with about half of the $62 million advertising deluge being funded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which aimed to defeat a strident critic of Israel’s war in Gaza following Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attacks.
El-Sayed proved much more capable of commanding attention online — owing in part to his omnipresence on podcasts and social media, in interviews with influencers and traditional media alike, in addition to a steady schedule of well-attended rallies. He used those appearances to promote an agenda he’d streamlined into a simple catchphrase: Money out of politics, money in your pocket and Medicare for all.
Along the way, El-Sayed built a new, progressive grassroots that included an enthusiastic social media following and a committed crop of young volunteers.
El-Sayed’s narrow win, cementing a high-stakes November matchup between him and former GOP Rep. Mike Rogers, wasn’t just an indicator of progressives’ ascendance within the Democratic coalition. It was also a preview of the battles to come in 2028, when the party will choose its first standard-bearer to lead it into a post-Trump political era.
It was the most closely watched race — and one of multiple progressive vs. moderate contests — on Tuesday’s slate of primaries in Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Virginia and Washington state.
Voters set the matchups in the governor’s races in Michigan and Kansas. They also chose their nominees in key congressional races in Virginia. And an incumbent Democrat held off a democratic socialist former congresswoman vying to win back her old seat in Missouri.
Here are takeaways from Tuesday’s primaries:
El-Sayed’s win creates a major test for Democrats and the left
El-Sayed’s win ushers in a big moment for both the Democratic Party and the Bernie Sanders wing of the party.
While that wing and democratic socialists (a label El-Sayed does not claim) have gotten significant traction in primaries, that’s come almost wholly in deep-blue areas.
So El-Sayed’s primary win presents us with something rare: A test case for a far-left candidate in a crucial battleground race.
There’s a lot at stake — win or lose.
Win, and El-Sayed proves the party doesn’t need to be scared of candidates who are a little more ideologically rigid. If he does particularly well, he could even bolster theories that Democrats do better with more compelling candidates who can drive base turnout higher.
This is basically the theory that Sanders never got to test out in a presidential general election, having lost in the 2016 and 2020 primaries.
But lose — especially in what could be a good Democratic year nationally — and El-Sayed will have confirmed the establishment’s warnings about him and candidates like him.
So far, we don’t have good data establishing that El-Sayed necessarily performs better or worse than Stevens in the general election. (Rogers, though, has said privately that he feels he’d be in “good shape” against El-Sayed, CNN reported.)
The 2026 battle for the Senate is likely to focus heavily on El-Sayed and how he might play with swing voters, and the results could say a lot about the future of the Democratic Party, too.
A big loss for increasingly embattled AIPAC
Stevens’ loss should help solidify another emerging narrative on the left: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is looking a lot like a liability for progressives, maybe even an albatross.
The nation’s most influential pro-Israel group and its affiliated entities spent more than $30 million helping Stevens — by far AIPAC’s biggest outlay for one candidate ever. But that spending might well have worked against her.
As as Democratic voters have turned sharply against Israel in recent years, being known as the candidate of AIPAC and being pro-Israel is increasingly an attack line in Democratic primaries. And El-Sayed was happy to focus on where the money behind Stevens was coming from.
It’s difficult to completely isolate the Israel and AIPAC factor. And AIPAC did get a win Tuesday, having spent more than $2 million to help Missouri Rep. Wesley Bell easily fend off democratic socialist former Rep. Cori Bush.
But AIPAC’s split record this cycle isn’t as good as it usually is, according to data compiled by the New York Times. What’s more, it’s generally not actually running ads on Israel-related issues — a tacit acknowledgment that they probably aren’t particularly helpful.
Another good day for the DSA
El-Sayed’s win was hardly the only major victory for the left wing of the Democratic Party on Tuesday.
A pair of democratic socialists also won key House primaries in Michigan.
Perhaps the biggest one was climate activist William Lawrence’s win in the 7th district. Lawrence prevailed after two more establishment-oriented candidates — former US Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink and Navy SEAL veteran Matt Maasdam — split the rest of the vote.
And this is a battleground general election race. That means the Sanders wing of the party now confronts major proving grounds in both the Senate race and a very important House race.
Lawrence’s campaign was heavily criticized by the Congressional Black Caucus and even House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, after the Huffington Post published Lawrence’s 2024 remarks saying that Black political leaders “defang the White left.”
CNN is also now projecting that democratic socialist state Rep. Donavan McKinney ousted Rep. Shri Thanedar in the Detroit-based 13th district.
The result might have been less about policies than racial representation — the majority-Black city had recently been without a Black representative for the first time since the 1950s — but it’s still a win for DSA.
The wins follow some major recent wins for democratic socialists and is the third time one has defeated an incumbent this cycle — with the other two coming in New York City and Colorado.
DSA did suffer one setback Tuesday, though, with Bush’s loss in Missouri.
A Trump-backed candidate loses — to a candidate who dropped out
National Democrats weren’t the only ones dealing with disappointment in a top-targeted Michigan House race.
On the GOP side, we got a pretty shocking result: Tom Smith, who suspended his campaign last month, defeated Trump-backed candidate Amir Hassan in the 8th congressional district.
The little-known Smith doesn’t appear to have filed federal campaign finance reports or run a robust campaign. His website describes him as a small business owner.
Smith in a statement to CNN on Wednesday signaled he would resurrect his campaign.
“I look forward to working with” GOP leaders “to expand our House majority and advance President Trump’s America First agenda,” Smith said.
Hassan is a US Navy veteran and former federal law enforcement officer who served as a watch commander in the prison camps at Guantanamo Bay. Trump endorsed him in a social media post back in June, and he raised more than $700,000 for his campaign.
It’s a big blow to the GOP. Michigan’s 8th district is one of the party’s best pickup opportunities. Trump actually carried the district by two points in 2024, even as Democratic Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet won.
A GOP effort to make ballot measures harder crashes and burns
Republicans keep responding to the success of left-wing ballot measures by asking voters to pass ballot measures that would make ballot measures more difficult.
The problem? Voters keep rejecting these gambits. And Tuesday brought a big rejection — a spectacular one, in fact.
Voters in Missouri overwhelmingly rejected Amendment 4. This was a GOP-led effort to require ballot measures proposed by voters to get a majority of every congressional district in the state. That would greatly increase the threshold for passing such measures, which currently only require a majority of the statewide vote, instead allowing heavily GOP districts to effectively veto them.
As of late Tuesday night, the amendment was receiving just 20% of the vote.
The margin was bigger than usual, but the outcome was familiar. Ohio voters in 2023 rejected by double-digits a GOP effort to raise the threshold for ballot measures to 60%. Similar efforts also failed by huge margins in Arkansas and South Dakota. South Dakota also rejected raising it to 55% back in 2018.
The one recent exception? Arizona, whose voters in 2022 narrowly passed a measure requiring a 60% threshold, but only for raising taxes.
Republicans also failed Tuesday on another ballot measure push, with Kansas voters rejecting an effort to make state Supreme Court justices popularly elected. (As it stands, they are appointed by the governor, and Kansas has elected plenty of Democratic governors despite being a red state.) The move was aimed at trying to overturn a 2019 ruling on abortion rights.
Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly’s pick loses in race to replace her
Michigan wasn’t the only place where Democrats were wondering whether they would get the right nominee.
That was also true of the Kansas governor’s race, where state Sen. Cindy Holscher defeated state Sen. Ethan Corson.
Corson had been endorsed by moderate term-limited Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly as well as by former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and other establishment figures. Holscher, while having something of a moderate record, ran with a more combative, populist style while promising to take Republicans head-on.
While Kansas is a red state, it has elected a number of Democratic governors over the years. Holscher now faces state Senate President Ty Masterson, who easily won the GOP primary with Trump’s endorsement.
The other gubernatorial primaries Tuesday night were in Michigan, and they turned out about as expected. Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson sailed to victory and will face Trump-endorsed GOP Rep. John James. James defeated businessman and former long-shot presidential candidate Perry Johnson.
Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is term-limited.
Could Democrats have a chance in Kansas Senate contest?
Adam Hamilton, a United Methodist megachurch pastor who has proven to be a prolific fundraiser, won the Democratic nod to take on Republican Sen. Roger Marshall — giving the party a long-shot chance at picking up a seat as they look for paths to the net four-seat gain they need to win a Senate majority in November.
He’s vying to be the latest example of Kansas occasionally showing a willingness to buck its deep-red reputation in recent years. Kelly twice beat Republicans in the red state during her two runs for governor in 2018 and 2022. And in the immediate wake of the US Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, voters in 2022 overwhelmingly rejected an amendment that said there was no constitutional right to abortion in the state.
Hamilton raised more than $3.6 million in the first two months of his campaign and closed the fundraising period that ended June 30 with $2.6 million in the bank. He bested 10 other Democrats on Tuesday, while Marshall also overcame nominal opposition.
The toughest task for Hamilton could be separating himself from a Democratic Party that is already unpopular in Kansas and rapidly shifting leftward.
To win, he could need huge numbers of voters to split their tickets between the Senate contest and a race for governor that represents potentially the GOP’s best opportunity to pick up a state executive seat in November.
In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday, Hamilton said he doesn’t know that democratic socialists who have knocked off several Democratic incumbents this year have “a momentum across the country.” Kansans, he said, are “centrist people.”
This story has been updated with additional information.
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