A golden opportunity and critical lesson
Democratic primaries in the Midwest offer a potential glimpse of the future
Welcome to a Thursday night edition of Progress Report.
Well, I’m back with the news and analysis, with more to come this weekend — a lot is happening right now and there are a good number of stories to explore and catch up on.
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A month after a democratic socialist tsunami wiped out establishment-backed politicians in New York and Colorado, a progressive wave is now making its way to the Upper Midwest.
According to new polls, expensive and bitter primaries in both Wisconsin and Michigan are on the verge of turning into blowouts for left-wing populist outsiders. In the Badger State, several polls show state Rep. Francesca Hong with an overwhelming lead on the other candidates: Marquette Law School has her ahead by 22% over former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, with Milwaukee County Exec David Crowley clocking in at just 7%. Barnes dropped out of the race on Thursday, which won’t likely do much for Crowley’s chances: Marquette also polled voters on their second choices and found that with Barnes out, Hong’s lead grows to a whopping 33%.
The Wisconsin numbers are equally dismal in a poll by State Navigate, which found Hong with a commanding 29-point lead over Crowley, who led Barnes by one point in the race for second place. Recalibrated after Barnes’s exit, the poll has Hong with a 28-point advantage over Crowley, with 17% still undecided even as early voting has begun.
Over in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, a very progressive public health official, has built as much as a 15-point advantage in the state’s US Senate primary. He has surged ahead of his one remaining opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, a centrist who has received the backing of virtually the state’s entire roster of Democratic elected officials since state Sen. Mallory McMorrow left the race. Stevens has also been the beneficiary of more than $50 million in outside PAC spending, including $30 million from AIPAC alone.
So how are they doing this?
Both Hong and El-Sayed dominate with younger voters… and others
Barnes’ exit from the race on Thursday will ostensibly allow Crowley, a centrist who quit several weeks ago, only to be summoned back into the race by a panic-stricken Gov. Tony Evers, to consolidate the anti-Hong vote. Just where that will come from, however, is unclear.
In the State Navigate poll, Hong took 66% of the vote among voters 18-29, with the second-closest choice being “not sure” with 17% of the vote. In the Marquette poll, Hong’s lead among voters aged 30-44 sat at 42 points above Barnes; only voters 65+ did not rank her at the top.
El-Sayed, meanwhile, enjoys a 34-point advantage among the 18-29 crew, and remarkably for a one-on-one race, owns a 54% advantage among voters 40-49. That resiliency among “older” voters reflects an unexpected strength with a number of demographics that might typically lay outside what an establishment-bucking, DSA-tinged Muslim candidate might expect to earn.
As expected, El-Sayed, who is ideologically far to the left of centrist Stevens, trounces his rival with college-educated voters, to the tune of a 33% lead. But he nearly breaks even with voters who have at most a high school degree, trailing by just 3%, and actually leads among graduates of vocational and technical schools, a significant demographic in Michigan.
Gender also defies typical fault lines, as El-Sayed holds a 14% lead among both men and women. Physically shredded, especially for a national politician, El-Sayed has tried to emphasize his masculinity in non-toxic ways, including in a recent ad that prominently featured his muscles straining during an indoor rock climbing session. The campaign has been happy to lean in on his “bro” reputation, at least to a point, figuring that it’s better to embrace it than fight and alienate half of eligible voters.
A little help from their enemies
Hong and El-Sayed support Medicare for All, have spoken out defiantly about the genocide in Gaza, and support abolishing ICE. They want to tax the rich and offer structural solutions to the economic precarity long experienced by working and middle class Americans. These positions place them well out of step with the median Democratic elected official, but right in line with a voting base that has moved to the left during the Trump era, especially over the past few years.
Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that Democratic voters have always leaned further to the left, but until recently, they were so spooked by the prospect of losing that they would sacrifice ideology for “electability.” For decades, that’s been code for pro-capital centrists, and the base has dutifully agreed to nominate bland, right-leaning, replacement-level politicians. But between the disastrous 2024 election and the party’s ongoing inability (or refusal) to put up a strong united front against Donald Trump, Democratic voters are simply not buying the argument that corporate-friendly milquetoast is electable anymore.
And that’s a problem for party leadership, because they’ve spent the past month trying to stop Hong and El-Sayed’s grassroots momentum with electability arguments, warning Democratic voters that nominating the two progressive populists will lead to certain doom in November.
It’s been an all-out barrage. In Michigan, nearly all of the most prominent elected Democrats, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, have all thrown their weight behind Stevens, while taking aim at El-Sayed for everything from his campaigning with uber-popular lefty streamer Hasan Piker to misleading accusations of misogyny. Rep. Hillary Scholten has gone so far as to call El-Sayed antisemitic and refuse to say she’ll vote for him if and when he becomes the Democratic nominee.
In Wisconsin, meanwhile, the panic over Hong’s huge lead — and rumors of an unflattering investigation of Barnes — led Gov. Tony Evers to summon Crowley back into the race weeks after he dropped out. Hong’s lead has only grown since Evers’ desperation move, and Crowley is unlikely to gain any ground with Barnes’ departure.
If anything, the wagon-circling and coordinated attacks look to be backfiring, reflecting an unprecedented anti-incumbent, “throw the bums out” posture from Democratic voters. Widespread disgust with leadership has voters rejecting anything associated with senior Democrats, regardless of ideology. Hong, for instance, carries wide leads with very liberal and liberal voters, but perhaps even more significantly, only trailed Barnes among moderate/conservative voters by a mere three points. El-Sayed has made AIPAC’s support of Stevens a central plank of his campaign, leading to awkward exchanges like this one, with Stevens weaponizing Jewish voters’ fears in order to defend $30 million in dark right-wing money.
Many of the attacks on Hong and El-Sayed are cynical dog whistles and attempts to weaponize the fact that Republicans will undoubtedly run racist, misleading ads against the two firebrands. That said, it doesn’t mean that they are entirely off-base. Recent polls show Crowley (and Barnes) slightly better positioned to beat Rep. Tom Tiffany, the extremist Republican nominee for governor, and the same goes for Stevens against former Rep. Mike Rogers. Republicans are already attacking Hong for her call to defund the police during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, comments that she’s disavowed but cannot erase from her past.
Still, no matter how much this annoys Democratic Party power-brokers, this what democracy looks like: sometimes people vote their values instead of making calculated decisions intended to mitigate supposed risk. It’s unfortunate that Hong and El-Sayed will have to bear the burden of proving the left’s theory that progressive populism can win back working class voters, especially because they are actively being sabotaged by liberal influencers. A new poll, released Thursday evening, shows that 12% of Stevens supporters would cross over to back Rogers if El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination, a direct result of these internecine attacks on his character.
Still, there’s probably going to be no better year or political environment to create a watershed breakthrough for the left. It’s unfortunate that it may hinge on whether centrists are willing to make ideological concessions and giving up total control of the party.
Federalize this: President Trump has asked the Supreme Court to intervene after an appeals court last week denied his administration’s bid to resume implementing an executive order designed to severely restrict mail-in voting. The ruling kept in place an injunction granted to 23 states that sued over the policy.
Among other things, the Trump administration wants to run every state’s unredacted voter roll through shoddy citizenship check databases, and the executive order prohibits the USPS from mailing ballots to anyone in states that do not comply. Initially, a lower court judge refused to intervene on the states’ behalf because the USPS had not yet refused to send ballots, but a second judge came to the opposite conclusion, based on the fact that several components of the order were patently unconstitutional.
By a 2-1 vote, the Massachusetts-based appeals court agreed with the latter judge, rejecting the cynical attempt to run down the clock inherent in the original argument.
“As the district court reasoned, the [executive order] lays out a clear set of rapidly approaching deadlines by which states must coordinate with federal officials and comply with new voting procedures – all while the states must also ensure that their officials and the public understand the evolving set of rules that would govern the upcoming September and November elections,” the judges wrote in a 2-1 decision. “The Plaintiff States have no practical choice but to respond to the [order] now.”
On Wednesday, I joined a press call hosted by the Fair Elections Center and asked them about the administration’s request that the Supreme Court overturn the appeals court decision and allow the USPS to withhold ballots from tens of millions of Americans. Officials there weren’t exactly sanguine about the high court’s record on voting rights and what might happen with this case.
“The Trump administration has not generally been shy about going to the Supreme Court to try to get what they want,” Michelle Kanter Cohen told me. “We’ve seen just recently the Court both gutting the VRA yet also upholding the opportunities for voters to have their postmarked ballot counted [in Watson v RNC]. So it’s something we’re watching. It’s we really can’t predict sort of the outcomes here.
Rebeka Caruthers, the CEO and president of the Fair Elections Center, was sharper in her criticism of the court:
“We see that there are folks on the Supreme Court that have different viewpoints on who should be able to vote and what standards should be used and shouldn’t be used,” she said. “I would characterize the Supreme Court as a court that isn’t showing willingness to support expansive voting or a representational democracy.
“Ultimately there has to be real legislative change. If we want to make sure that people’s right to vote is enshrined, if we want to make sure that people really have the right to vote in this country, there’s going to have to be a set of strong effective laws that are very clear on the right to vote in this country. We are hopeful that there will be a pro-democracy Congress at some point that would choose to strengthen voting laws in this country.”
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