El-Sayed Won Narrowly but Cori Bush Lost Badly in Missouri

Abdul El-Sayed’s victory over moderate Rep. Haley Stevens is taking up all the oxygen in the room today but you don’t have to look very far for evidence that last night was not the resounding win the far left had been hoping for. Start with El-Sayed himself. Going into election day his win was considered a given and some were seeing a potential double-digit blowout, but that didn’t happen.

Coming into Election Day, Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary was widely expected. A blowout seemed possible. Instead, his victory margin will likely be less than two percentage points…

El-Sayed did not deliver a resounding defeat to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and other parts of the center-left Democratic establishment who backed Stevens, as his supporters hoped. The election returns suggest that El-Sayed struggled with rural voters, in particular. Looking forward to the general election, that data has to worry Democrats, who tend to lose elections to Republicans because they are blown out in small towns.

That was written sometime early this morning by Perry Bacon. If you actually look at the vote total for El-Sayed, it’s currently a lot closer than 2 points. With greater than 95 percent of votes in, El-Sayed is at 48.48 percent and Stevens is at 47.51 percent. So it’s less than a 1 percent gap, or about 15,000 votes out of more than 1.5 million cast.

A win is a win and El-Sayed can correctly claim that he was heavily outspent in the most expensive Senate primary in history. Still, this was the opposite of a blowout. If anything he barely eked out a victory. If the results had been reversed would progressive think their views had been discredited by a 1 percent loss? I don’t think so.

Democrats now also have to wonder if El-Sayed can deliver in the general. El-Sayed is predicting a seven-point victory, but Sabato’s Crystal Ball thinks it’s likely he’ll underperform a more moderate Democrat.

Either Stevens or El-Sayed would have had work to do to bring the party together, and either could have faced problems with key voting blocs. For instance, El-Sayed did quite well in heavily Arab-American pockets of the Detroit area, while Stevens appears to have done well in some significantly Jewish pockets elsewhere in greater Detroit, reflecting, among other things, their different positions on the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. It’s easy to envision El-Sayed losing ground amidst usually-Democratic Jewish voters: We saw a similar dynamic a few months ago in a special House election in New Jersey, when progressive Israel critic Rep. Analilia Mejia (D, NJ-11) performed fine overall but definitely underperformed among Jewish voters in her district, per a New Jersey Globe analysis. We may take a deeper look at the Michigan Senate primary in a future issue once the results are more firmly settled.

This November, we suspect El-Sayed ultimately will underperform what a more generic Democrat would have gotten, although of course there is no such thing as a “generic Democrat.” However, underperforming does not necessarily mean losing. Democrats just need to hope the broader environment helps paper over their problems in this race.

Could he win? Definitely. But predicting another blowout after last night’s squeaker seems like a bad bet.

Meanwhile in Missouri, former Squad and current DSA member Cori Bush attempted to return to Congress and got squashed by Wesley Bell, a pro-Israel moderate.

Representative Wesley Bell of Missouri, a moderate pro-Israel Democrat, fended off a primary challenge from a former congresswoman and democratic socialist on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, in a loss for the surging socialist movement.

Former Representative Cori Bush, Mr. Bell’s predecessor in the St. Louis district, had hoped to add to the high-profile victories that socialists have notched over Democratic incumbents this year in New York City and Denver.

But Mr. Bell, a former prosecuting attorney and city councilman, held on…

The loss was a setback for democratic socialists…

So it was a very mixed bag for both factions of the Democrat Party last night but I’m not sure that’s coming across in most of the coverage of El-Sayed’s win.

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