Abdul El-Sayed’s win tees up the first true swing state test for the Bernie left

Abdul El-Sayed has defeated Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary — albeit by a significantly smaller margin than preelection polling suggested. He’s beaten back $30 million in AIPAC spending and endorsements from top Democrats, including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who backed Stevens. Now he’s moving on to face the GOP nominee, former Rep. Mike Rogers, in a contest crucial to determining Senate control.

So the next question is: Can El-Sayed beat a Republican?

That will be a cinch, some in his camp claim. “For progressives, getting out of the primary is a far more difficult battle than winning in the general,” left-wing streamer Hasan Piker told CNN last week.

But the reality is that we’ve had very few true tests of how candidates associated with the left flank of the party — and specifically with the Bernie Sanders-backed revolt against the establishment — would fare in competitive swing-state general elections.

Which means that this would be one of the first such tests, and that its outcome will have enormous stakes for the party’s future.

El-Sayed’s views on Israel and his prospective history-making turn as the first-ever Muslim senator have gotten much coverage. But El-Sayed is also a dyed-in-the-wool member of the Sanders faction, having been closely aligned with Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez since his first political campaign in 2018. Both have campaigned for him this cycle.

If El-Sayed defeats Rogers convincingly (he’s personally predicting a 7-point victory as his baseline), he’ll become a megastar and even possibly a presidential contender. He’ll arguably be the first to prove that the Sanders formula — attacking billionaires, corporate influence, and the party establishment, while backing sweeping social welfare spending like Medicare-for-all — can win over voters who once backed President Donald Trump.

“If Abdul El-Sayed beats Stevens I actually think he’s very likely to be the next president,” Nathan J. Robinson, editor-in-chief of the socialist publication Current Affairs, posted on X last month. “If he wins the general, it’s over for centrist Dems.”

Conversely, if El-Sayed — who has trailed Rogers in recent polls — loses, skeptics may conclude that the left can’t appeal to the country’s true swing voters, and that nominating a leftist for president in 2028, or in downballot races, is too big of a risk.

The core disagreement: Will the left’s approach succeed in the general election?

Over the past decade, it has become an article of faith across much of the left that their particular populist approach to economics and foreign policy would be potent in a general election.

They argue that typical Democrats have a more compromised platform and timid style, lacking the populist fire that can win over disaffected Americans. “Bernie would’ve won” in 2016, the saying goes, by using his outsider credibility and ambitious plans to appeal to the working-class voters and independents that went for Trump. Kamala Harris’s defeat, amid intense criticism on the left over her and Joe Biden’s support for Israel, further bolstered their sense that the party establishment just can’t get it done.

Now, left factionalists are pointing to their several high-profile primary victories this year and arguing that energy and enthusiasm are on their side — and would translate to the general election too.

Many mainstream Democrats see this as naive. They believe that while talk of “socialism” and other far-left positions might work fine in deep blue cities and districts, it could well prove toxic in swing states that have voted for Trump. While public opinion on certain issues has moved in the left’s direction, especially Israel, candidates could have a tougher time on issues like crime, where El-Sayed has offered nuanced explanations of his “defund the police” rhetoric from 2020.

“Winning a Democratic primary means close to nothing when it comes to the general election, because these are functionally different voter pools,” Lakshya Jain of the center-left publication The Argument recently wrote.

Some analysts pointed to the primary results as a potential harbinger of general election struggles, with El-Sayed performing poorly against Stevens in the kinds of rural areas that have swung toward Republicans in the Trump era.

Are there past examples of Bernie-aligned candidates making it to tough general elections?

But even though the “Bernie vs. the establishment” battle has been raging on and off for the past decade, there have been very few clean tests about how Bernie-backed candidates would do in swing states.

Sanders never won the presidential nomination, and candidates aligned with him have generally preferred to run in strongly Democratic areas where, if they win the primary, the general election is a fait accompli. The now-expanding “squad” of left-wing House members that began with Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley all fit this model.

There have, however, been a few past examples where Sanders-aligned candidates have made it to the general election in tough territory.

One is Andrew Gillum, whose 2018 bid for governor of Florida was backed by Sanders and other progressive groups, including billionaire Tom Steyer’s network. He won the nomination over establishment favorite Gwen Graham — but then went on to lose the general election to Ron DeSantis by a mere four-tenths of a percentage point, ushering in what became the era of Deep Red Florida.

In nominating Gillum, did the left blow a winnable race amid a national Democratic wave? Maybe — but one counterargument is that longtime Sen. Bill Nelson, a thoroughly mainstream Democrat, lost his seat by a similarly tight margin in that same election. Florida may have just been trending redder generally. Gillum’s post-election personal struggles also color views of his candidacy today.

That same cycle, in Nebraska, Kara Eastman upset the establishment favorite to win the nomination for a swing House district. (Sanders hadn’t endorsed her in the primary, but she ran on a platform of Medicare-for-all and free college.) She lost in 2018 — and again in 2020, even though Joe Biden won her district — and has been viewed inside the party as a cautionary tale about blowing a winnable race ever since.

The outcome was happier for Keith Ellison, a close Sanders ally who won his race to be Minnesota’s attorney general in 2018. Yet his margin of victory — about 4 percentage points — wasn’t particularly impressive in a lean blue state in a strongly Democratic year when Tim Walz won the governor’s race by 11. Later, when Ellison ran for reelection in 2022, he eked out a win by less than 1 point while Walz won by 8.

John Fetterman was generally understood to be a “Bernie faction” candidate when he ran for an open US Senate seat in Pennsylvania in 2022. (Sanders stayed neutral in the primary that year, but had backed Fetterman’s earlier lieutenant governor campaign and championed him in the general election.) But he wasn’t exactly running on a bold left platform — he backed off his past Medicare-for-all support and was pro-fracking.

Fetterman ended up winning by 5 points even though it was a favorable cycle for Republicans — but simultaneously, the more centrist Josh Shapiro won the governor’s race by 15. However, Shapiro’s opponent was believed to be weaker and more extreme, and the stroke Fetterman suffered that year complicates efforts to read too much into his performance.

Separate from his electoral performance, Fetterman’s association with the Sanders left ended years ago as his politics moved to the right; lately, there has been talk he might switch parties. This has also fueled arguments from moderates that populist outsider candidates are less reliable than more conventional ones even if they do manage to win.

El-Sayed is running on a bold left platform in a true swing state

Taking this grab bag of outcomes together, one can see why mainstream Democrats might be skeptical that the left has the secret sauce to win swing voters. But each race has had its own unique circumstances and complications.

Furthermore, in this cycle, the electorate could be in a different place — more disenchanted by the establishment and more willing to take a chance on further-left candidates.

Graham Platner was set to be the great hope for the Sanders faction until his Senate campaign was derailed by scandal and he was replaced on the ballot by Troy Jackson — another Sanders-aligned candidate, albeit one with his own long history in state politics. But though Jackson is facing a formidable Republican incumbent, Maine is a blue state that hasn’t backed a GOP presidential candidate since 1988.

Michigan is tougher turf, having voted for Trump in two of the past three presidential elections. The conventional wisdom for how a Democrat can win a race there is to run a cautious campaign, being careful not to alienate potentially winnable Republican and independent voters. A good example is Gary Peters, the departing two-term senator El-Sayed is running to replace, who’s a traditional pro-union Democrat known for keeping a low profile in general.

El-Sayed is not doing that. He supports Medicare-for-all, a billionaire wealth tax, abolishing ICE, and a full arms embargo on Israel. While El-Sayed is not a democratic socialist, he’s very closely tied to Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez — the trio held hands and raised their arms together at a recent rally, in an image Michigan voters may well see in GOP-funded attack ads.

And back in 2020, El-Sayed expressed sympathy with activists calling to “defund the police” and said most major cities spend far too much on police departments, though he’s tried to downplay those views this cycle.

“I’m worried that he’s more passionate about attacking other Dems than Republicans and may not be ready for what’s coming,” Adam Jentleson, president of the center-left Searchlight Institute, posted on X recently.

Now that he’s won the primary, El-Sayed will get the chance to try and show he’s ready — and to test whether his bold left platform will be his greatest asset, or a millstone.