It Wasn’t a Blowout, but El-Sayed Won. Get Behind Him, Democrats.

That said, stepping back from the last few weeks, when El-Sayed’s victory seemed certain, this is still a huge win for progressives and a major defeat for the center-left. AIPAC spent more than $30 million to boost Stevens, a m***ive outlay for a Senate primary. Whitmer and many other prominent Michigan Democratic officials implored the state’s Democrats to back Stevens.

The center-left both in Michigan and nationally leaned into the case it regularly uses to defeat progressive candidates: electability. Stevens, centrists claimed, would have a better chance of winning in a general election than El-Sayed. That that argument didn’t fully resonate in Michigan, the swingiest of swing states, is a huge setback for the center-left. If El-Sayed wins in November, that electability case against progressives will be even more weakened, perhaps easing the path to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the party’s 2028 nominee.

Speaking of November: As I wrote recently, Democrats with fairly progressive records (Barack Obama, Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin) have won in Midwestern swing states in the recent past. But what’s untested in swing states is 2020s progressivism that generally embraces the term socialist (although El-Sayed himself has said many times that he is not a socialist) and deep skepticism of American traditions and norms. It will be important for El-Sayed to emphasize populist economics and stances on other issues that most voters agree with, such as backing abortion rights and not funding Israel’s military. But this is not the time for either the candidate or his supporters to float more controversial ideas, like abolishing prisons or defunding police.