For all of the left’s big wins in Democratic primaries this year, there’s always been one asterisk: Progressive candidates haven’t won in presidential battleground states.
On Tuesday, progressives got a big win without an asterisk. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive backed by democratic socialist allies, defeated the establishment-backed congresswoman Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary for Senate in Michigan.
The outcome is a milestone in the steady advance of the left in Democratic politics. Dr. El-Sayed is not simply a “progressive” — a term that could describe half of congressional Democrats. He is a candidate of the new, young, activist left, with vocal democratic socialist supporters. In the past, candidates like these simply haven’t been competitive in battleground states. In the end, he wasn’t just competitive but victorious.
But while Dr. El-Sayed’s victory is yet another sign of growing progressive strength, it wasn’t a decisive breakthrough. His victory was narrow — not only in the overall vote count, which is currently within one percentage point, but also in terms of the breadth of his coalition. If one were to guess based on the results in Michigan, Ms. Stevens would have defeated Dr. El-Sayed in a hypothetical national primary election.
The results by precinct followed the pattern observed in other progressive victories this year. Dr. El-Sayed won in areas with more young voters, well-educated liberals and Muslim voters. Ms. Stevens, on the other hand, won a coalition of majority Black areas, high-income voters, Jewish voters, older voters and rural white working-class areas.
These demographic divides are not necessarily surprising: They’re the usual divides in recent Democratic primaries. The same fault lines were evident when Zohran Mamdani won in New York City or when progressives fared well in Colorado.
Still, one might have expected that an extraordinary progressive victory in a battleground state would be matched by an equally extraordinary coalition, one extending far beyond where the progressive left usually wins. That imagined breakthrough was supported by pre-election polls, which showed Dr. El-Sayed winning the state by double digits.
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That’s not what happened. Instead, he won an unusual victory with not much more than the usual progressive coalition. He failed to win working-class Black areas and most white working-class rural parts of Michigan, where progressives argue that a populist economic message can resonate.
In this respect, Dr. El-Sayed’s one-point victory is very different from Bernie Sanders’s 1.5-point victory in Michigan in 2016. In that election, Mr. Sanders swept rural and white working- class parts of Michigan against Hillary Clinton. Since then, the progressive left — including Mr. Sanders himself — simply hasn’t been able to win such broad support, instead running up the score in young and heavily Democratic urban areas.
This young, progressive-left coalition has become so dominant in its strongholds that it can now compete and win in a battleground state. But the narrowness of this coalition still limits its opportunities. In particular, it will be very hard for a progressive with this kind of coalition to compete in the South, which would put progressives at a significant disadvantage in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary.
In a hypothetical national Democratic primary election, Ms. Stevens would be projected to defeat Dr. El-Sayed, based on how the two candidates fared in different demographic areas of Michigan. Dr. El-Sayed would win big in a handful of relatively white, well-educated and progressive states — like Washington and Vermont — while Ms. Stevens would dominate the South. The rest of the country — the Northern battlegrounds like Michigan and the big diverse blue states, like California and New York — would be evenly divided.
Of course, the 2028 primary election won’t be a rematch between Ms. Stevens and Dr. El-Sayed. Next time, maybe the Democratic establishment won’t consolidate behind a staunch supporter of Israel at a time when progressive activists have made opposition to Israel’s conduct in Gaza a litmus test. The fact the establishment did so — in Michigan of all places, with its sizable Arab American population — is a striking illustration of why it’s in danger of losing its grip on the party.
But if the establishment could hope to do better next time, it’s hard to look at its track record this cycle and say it can be expected to do so. Ms. Stevens wasn’t any weaker than Andrew Cuomo in New York City, Janet Mills in Maine or the slate of candidates who have run, withdrawn and run again in Wisconsin’s governor’s race — where Francesca Hong, an avowed democratic socialist, might win a primary she might have otherwise been expected to lose.
There are always races where the party’s establishment doesn’t find a perfect candidate, including in presidential primaries. What’s different now is that the progressive left is strong enough to capitalize on an opening if one presents itself. There’s no reason to presume there can’t or won’t be one in the next presidential primary.