I promised last week that there’d be more to say on the question of why voters in America might be willing to support candidates who describe themselves as “socialist” or align with organisations like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Since then we’ve had some additional data points, and especially the victory yesterday (Tuesday in the United States) of the left’s Abdul El-Sayed in the Democrat primary for a Michigan Senate seat.
El-Sayed is not a member of the DSA and doesn’t call himself a socialist, but there’s no doubt that he stands on the far left of the Democratic Party. Jon Chait last week described him as a conspiracy theorist: “[his] formula is to describe just about any policy as a conspiracy by a corporate entity or wealthy cabal to enrich itself at the expense of the people.” Nonetheless, polls going into the race credited him with a double-digit lead over his more moderate opponent, Haley Stevens.
Nate Silver sounded a note of caution about those polls: “when there’s consensus, I don’t regard that as a good sign in polling. I think Michigan polling can be a little bit of the blind leading the blind.” And sure enough, although El-Sayed won he did so very narrowly, with 48.5% to Stevens’s 47.5%, a gap of about 15,000 votes. Associated Press didn’t call the race until more than twelve hours after voting finished.
Still, a win is a win; as Silver puts it in his postmortem, “an El-Sayed win by any margin is a significant accomplishment.” Michigan is not like New York, where we saw DSA member Zohran Mamdani score a big win last year; it’s a classically marginal state that Donald Trump carried in both 2016 and 2024. Its Senate seat is pretty much a must-hold for Democrats in their quest to win back control of that chamber.
It’s also a state with a substantial Arab-American population (proportionately the largest in the country), and El-Sayed made his opposition to the Iran war and to Israel’s military operations in the region a big theme of his campaign. Many pundits have yet to acknowledge that the reluctance of the Democrat establishment to criticise Israel – or to do anything to rein it in when it was in office – is a major ingredient in rank-and-file dissatisfaction.
Concern about war crimes probably merged with concern about big money. Israel’s supporters spent huge sums backing Stevens, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that it did her more harm than good. Of course money can help a campaign, but beyond a certain point it tends to become counter-productive, particularly when it ties in with an opponent’s narrative (like El-Sayed’s) about being an outsider fighting against vested interests.
There’s nothing specifically “socialist” either about support for the Palestinians or about opposition to the corruption of money in politics. And that seems characteristic of many of the themes being pushed by the DSA and its allies; they are at most tangentially related to the economic issues that traditionally have defined what socialism is. Matt Yglesias pointed to another one last month in the shape of the American housing market, whose dysfunctionality is driving discontent among younger voters.
More generally, as Yglesias puts it, “for most young people ‘capitalism’ means something like ‘the status quo system’,” so rejection of capitalism becomes a natural response to discontent with the way things are going, quite independent of any economic program. That’s the case even though, as any casual student of history would expect, the parts of the economy that do most to fuel discontent (such as housing and health care) are the parts run in the least capitalistic fashion.
None of this tells us much about how candidates like El-Sayed will play with the wider electorate. So far, most results have been confined to those who turn out in Democrat primaries rather than voters at large, but it’s a common mistake to confuse the two – just as many commentators on the rise of Trump fail to recognise that winning the Republican nomination and winning the election were two very different processes.
Presumably many, perhaps most, Democrat voters were choosing the candidate they thought best placed to win in November, but they were still making that judgement through the lens of their own political views, which are clearly to the left of the mainstream. And one aspect of their generalised discontent is that rank-and-file Democrats may have stopped believing what the party establishment tells them about electability, or even have stopped caring much about electability at all.
The Republican Party has had that problem for some years now: its primary voters have repeatedly saddled it with candidates well out of the mainstream that have cost it critical seats. It’s too soon to say whether El-Sayed will be a liability for the Democrats in November; it may be that the election will be sufficiently decisive that it won’t matter. But the ideological contest for the soul of the party has a long way to run.
The World is Not Enough 
Supporting the Palestinians needs to include disarming and de-funding all the Palestinian militias and also ensuring “Free Palestine” is actually free and we don’t get Khomeni-upon-Med-and-Jordan.
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And free unicorns!
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Christian Slater, do not try sarcasm on me, ever again.
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If somebody told me that Abdul El-Sayed has a pattern of describing policies which he opposes as being conspiracies by corporate entities or wealthy cabals to enrich themselves at the expense of the people, I would recognise that as the kind of assertion which might be true. But there must be policies which Abdul El-Sayed favours, and we can be certain that he wouldn’t describe those policies in that way. Why, then, does Jon Chait’s offer a description which, on its literal value (‘just about any policy’), must be false? That doesn’t tell us anything about Abdul El-Sayed, but it might tell us something about Jon Chait. Based on my experience of people saying that kind of thing, I think the most likely explanation is that Abdul attacks policies which Jon favours, but Jon, in response, is seeking to divert discussion away from the merits (or demerits) of those policies in themselves. That’s not a trick I want to fall for.
When the Democratic Party is choosing candidates, I want them to nominate the candidate with the best chance of beating the Republican candidate; but far more often than not there’s no way of telling who that is. Consider, as an illustration of this, the 2016 Presidential election. If the Democrats had nominated somebody else, instead of Hillary Clinton, like, say, Bernie Sanders or Martin O’Malley, would their results have been better, worse, or about the same? Or, conversely, if the Republicans had nominated somebody else, instead of Donald Trump, like, say, Ted Cruz or John Kasich, would their results have been better, worse, or about the same? There’s no way to know. Similarly, whatever results, good or bad, the Democrats achieve in the forthcoming Michigan Senate election, there’ll be no way of knowing whether those results would have been been better, worse, or about the same if they had nominated Haley Stevens instead of Abdul El-Sayed.
But even with electability unknown, there’s another question here.
If more candidates supported by the DSA or, like Abdul El-Sayed, declaring similar positions, are are nominated as Democratic candidates, they may not win. But if they do win, what impact will that have?
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Why not?
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