by Zeeshan Aleem | Aug 6, 2026 | Congress, elections, Opinion
The prevailing wisdom among centrist Democrats is that former Wayne County Health Director Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan on Tuesday spells disaster for the party’s chances of winning the seat — and jeopardizes its odds of clinching a majority in the senate. El-Sayed’s boldly progressive positions, according to this view, will alienate the electorate of a purple state whose statewide outcomes are determined by moderate swing voters.
But a recent study by two political scientists indicates that this view is wrong — and that even in the Rust Belt a left-wing candidate like El-Sayed is not doomed by virtue of supporting Medicare for All and cutting off military aid to Israel. A big reason for that is because of the way President Donald Trump has scrambled our politics and transformed the way Americans think of the left-right political spectrum.
Plunging trust in institutions and the collapse of the neoliberal consensus have made the banner of “anti-establishment” and “populist” positioning more salient than conventional ideology.
A lot of political scientific literature supports the idea that from the late 20th century through the mid-2000s, there were clear rewards for candidates in federal elections to take moderate positions and penalties for taking extreme ones. But there’s evidence indicating that during the 2010s — around the time of Trump’s rise and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ insurgency in the Democratic primaries — that dynamic began to change. Stanford University professor Adam Bonica and University of California professor Jacob Grumbach recently released a working paper — currently under peer review at a journal — that analyzes congressional elections from 2016 to 2024, and it found
by Nnamdi Egwuonwu | Aug 6, 2026 | 2026 election, elections, News
DETROIT — The most important person at Abdul El-Sayed’s first press conference as Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee arguably wasn’t the nominee himself, but the redheaded politician standing behind him.
State Sen. Mallory McMorrow was once a rival to El-Sayed in the primary, casting him earlier this year as inexperienced, untested and unlikely to deliver on his lofty policy goals. After he appeared alongside far-left streamer Hasan Piker, she accused him of “stoking division” — an attack later echoed by Rep. Haley Stevens, who narrowly lost the primary race to El-Sayed on Wednesday morning.
Now, a day after El-Sayed again appeared with Piker, McMorrow stood beside him as a symbol of the unity Michigan Democrats say they will need to repair a base fractured by a bruising primary and to defeat Republican nominee Mike Rogers, who has already begun running general-election attack ads and secured a $45 million pledge of support from the Senate Leadership Fund.
“I know that this was a long and brutal primary. Take it from me; I lived through it personally,” McMorrow began. “But what is most important now is that we recognize that for all of the differences we may have had in this primary, those differences pale in comparison to the contrast that we face in November.”
She went on to frame the task of unifying around El-Sayed as a way to oppose President Donald Trump. “Mike Rogers and Donald Trump are looking at Michigan, and they are hoping that these family fights that we had, the disagreements within the Democratic Party, are the fights that we’re going to maintain through November,” McMorrow said.
As Michigan Democrats chart a
by Chris Walker | Aug 6, 2026 | 2026 Elections, Abortion, ballot initiative, elections, Kansas, Missouri, News, referendum, Reproductive Rights
On Tuesday, voters in Kansas and Missouri overwhelmingly rejected ballot measures proposed by Republican lawmakers that aimed to restrict their democratic and human rights. In Kansas, proposed Amendment 1 would have required direct elections for state Supreme Court justices. The measure was introduced by Republicans in the state legislature to counter the process for appointing jurists to the…
Source
by Chris Walker | Aug 6, 2026 | 2026 Elections, Andy Beshear, elections, Health, Kentucky, Mitch McConnell, News, Senate
Amid speculation from the public that a deadline had passed to replace Kentucky Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, whose health status and ability to return to office are presently unknown, Gov. Andy Beshear (D-Kentucky) has reiterated that no such deadline exists. McConnell’s office has said that the senator required hospitalization in June for a fall in his home. The senator has made no…
Source
by Chris Walker | Aug 5, 2026 | 2026 Elections, abuse, Donald Trump, elections, Max Miller, Mike Johnson, News
Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) provided comment this week on a Republican lawmaker who is facing a series of domestic abuse allegations, indicating that he has no plans to admonish his colleague in the near future. Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) is in the middle of a child custody battle with his ex-wife, Emily Moreno. Court records from that case indicate that…
Source
by Sam Rosenthal | Aug 5, 2026 | 2026 Elections, Abdul El-Sayed, AIPAC, Cori Bush, Democratic Party, Democratic Socialists, Democrats, elections, Francesca Hong, Haley Stevens, Israel, Michigan, Missouri, Op-Ed, primaries
Tuesday night marked another significant battle in the clash between establishment Democrats and insurgent progressives that has come to define the 2026 primary season. After hard-fought battles in Michigan, Missouri, and elsewhere, progressive candidates defied expectations and reams of outside spending to emerge victorious in most of the closely watched races. In Michigan…
Source
