Everyone has the Michigan Senate primary backwards.
The conventional wisdom, repeated gleefully by Republicans on Tuesday night, is that Democrats just handed Republican U.S. Senate nominee Mike Rogers a gift: a progressive nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, who national Republicans openly said they preferred to run against.
But look past the spin and at the actual numbers, and a very different story emerges — one where El-Sayed is better positioned to unify Michigan Democrats and win in November than his critics want to admit.
Start with turnout. More than 1.5 million people cast ballots in the Democratic Senate primary — a number that cleared the 1.2 million mark set in 2016, when Bernie Sanders was on the ballot against Hillary Clinton, and matched levels last seen when Sanders ran again in 2020.
Election watchers noted that this kind of primary turnout has only happened in Michigan a couple of times in the last twenty years, and it’s always been tied to insurgent energy on the left. That energy doesn’t just evaporate after the primary. It’s a signal.
The Obama Lesson, Not the Sanders One
Skeptics will point to 2016 as the cautionary tale: an insurgent challenges the establishment favorite, and the party fractures. But that comparison misreads what happened.
In 2008, Barack Obama — an insurgent with an unfamiliar name and a message built on hope and change — defeated the establishment’s chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton, in a bruising primary. Many predicted lasting damage. Instead, Obama’s coalition of newly energized voters combined with pragmatic Democrats who, having lost the primary fight, still wanted to win in November. The result was a historic Democratic victory.
In 2016, the roles reversed. Clinton was the establishment candidate; Sanders was the insurgent. But Sanders’s most fervent supporters were driven by a hunger for change, not party loyalty, and many stayed home or protested rather than rally behind Clinton. She lost to Trump.