>while one of the most moderate Democrats in the House, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, easily advanced to the general election in Washington’s 3rd district.
Worth mentioning that Washington state doesn’t have a conventional party primary. Instead, we have a nonpartisan top-two primary which, like California, pits every candidate, regardless of party affiliation, against each other, making the general election a runoff between the top two vote getters. There’s some debate about this, but I think this almost certainly helps moderate incumbents stave off more radical challengers from their own party.
re: "if El-Sayed takes tonight’s results as a signal that he needs to be more conciliatory between now and November."
his semi-victory speech seems to be a positive sign toward this:
“However we might feel about the campaign we’ve just come through, I want you to understand that it pales in comparison to the cynicism, in comparison to the corporatism, in comparison to the lies that Mike Rogers and Donald Trump are going to tell,” El-Sayed said. “However much we might disagree with our democratic opponent, there is so much more that unites us than divides us. Tomorrow, we begin to mend fences,” he said. “Whatever happens tonight, we have a responsibility to assure that we unite to make sure that Mike Rogers never sees the inside of the U.S. Senate."
I detect a bit of racism here … are Arab guys supposed to go out of their way to be less hostile and more conciliatory than guys like President Trump and VP Vance? Or what were you trying to say?
I'm not "trying" anything: I'm SAYING I don't like this guy El-Sayed. He's grossly aggressive and hostile. Given we are at war with -- well, not Arabs just at the moment, but Persians next door, I think not liking these types is reasonable. VP Vance is hostile?? He's a pussycat.
Though I have to admit, you might have a point about President Trump. [:-)
I'd underscore the point that the rise of the left in the Democratic Party is driven in part by the flight of moderates.
I left the party and enrolled as an independent after the Platner debacle here in Maine. For me it was less Platner himself than the willingness - eagerness, actually - of his supporters to blame his victims, including branding one as a Republican operative, all the while rationalizing his own appalling behavior.
So this has a social, or tribal, aspect. Having grown up as a D in a French-Canadian mill town, I finally had to confront the fact that I simply did not like or share the values of the young, well-educated urbanites and the wealthy coastal retirees who now control the party. They are completely detached - socially, economically, and even geographically - from our largely working-class native population. I find it is less a disdain than an obliviousness, which is actually more infuriating.
A friend who participated in our recent post-Platner mini-caucus said: "I didn't know any of these people and didn't like what I saw, so why should I spend time in a party with people I share nothing with and don't like?"
"Cast your mind back to the beginning of the century. At that point, a mere 28 percent of Democrats described themselves as liberal and two thirds were either moderate or conservative.
Fast forward to today and the liberal share has more than doubled to 59 percent while the moderate/conservative share has declined drastically. It’s the liberals’ party now. And especially, it’s the white liberals’ party now."
The current Democratic coalition is quite different than even Obama’s coalition. For example, Starr County, Texas—the most Democratic county in the country in 2012—voted 86% for Obama and is 97% Latino. Harris lost it to Trump by double digits. Those are the moderate voters Nate is referring to that are leaving the party.
I completely agree. When I was a county party vice chair, the others were a saw mill operator, a couple of commercial fishermen, a nursing home employee, a Head Start mom, etc. Now it is almost all transplant retirees. Lots of ex-Fed senior civil servants. Their website has both a land acknowledgment and a welcome to "Maine progressive voters or interested seasonal residents."
I'm not saying that these voters have suddenly become Republicans—if they had, Henry Cuellar would not have been overwhelmingly reelected in 2024, and done very well in Starr county.
But the point is that, before 2020, Starr County (in fact that whole region) was one of the most reliably Democratic areas in the entire country. Every Democratic presidential nominee since 1912, with the exception of George McGovern, won at least 72% of the vote in Starr county.
Many working-class voters hold moderate or conservative views on cultural issues. The Democratic Party has started struggling to retain these voters because increasing parts of the party have come to view cultural disagreement as a sign that those voters do not belong in the coalition. A party that demands rigid fealty from the working-class on hot-button cultural issue will struggle to build a durable working-class majority.
Lifelong Independent: pretty far to left on most issues. A couple things, first I think the party has a lot of issues, and so I get why ID is low, blind defense of Platner is a good example. I find the Democrats basically ineffective at implementing policies and bad at elections. They also left off any primary challenger to Biden in 2024 (I think Dean Philips was polling at a reasonable for past candidates to be included in NC). That soured me on any chance of moving from I to D.
Second, I will say that one of the Platner accusers was/is a Republican “operative.” That didn’t make her case and accusations any less valid or serious. It’s really a lesson to everyone to look at the substance and not the affiliation/background/biases. We’re all just people in the end and our views and opinions don’t delegitimize who we are or what happened to us. Good luck in Maine, glad there’s somewhat of a choice now vs before.
Should the Rank-Choice Voting system be put in place? MacMorrow votes are apparently greater than the AES margin of victory. Surely, those voters would have split imperfectly between AES and Stevens, but it would have been interesting to see Rank-Choice here.
Strategic voting in a Insant Runnoff Voting is very non-obvious. Since the rounds are potentially smooshed together. For instance voting your first choice may not be strategicly optimal depending on how you think everyone else will vote.
Separating in to 2 elections does make things simpler, at the obvious cost of doing it 2x. There are no strategic considerations in a 1 on 1 election
In practice, with real elections having large numbers of electors, the cases when you would strategically benefit by not putting your true first choice first are rare and more importantly, hard to predict beforehand. They tend to be very sensitive to the precise results, which means that the best advice is just to vote your true preference.
Campaigns certainly aren't going to advocate such strategic votes, because if too many people follow them, they backfire!
Rank choice voter, with an appropriate algorithm, is essential a bunch of 1-1 choices. Do I prefer A or B? A or C? B or C? You can answer all these questions voter base wide with rank choice voting.
And if, in my small example, say A and C get 40% first place votes and B gets 20%, but B is everyone's first or second place choice. The B beats A her 1-1 60% to 40%, and beats C in the A-C 1-1. So, B should be the nominee since she is overall preferred over every other candidate. That's what I mean by an appropriate algorithm. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, this is not currently the rank choice voting algorithm used anywhere.
What you are asking for is called "Condorcet" voting. Unfortunately it is not mathematically certain that there is always a Condorcet winner in any given election.
That said, the usual Ranked Choice algorithm ("instant runoff", in which the lowest-voted candidate is progressively eliminated and their votes reallocated to the voter's next preferred candidate remaining) tends in practice to elect the Condorcet winner in large-scale elections.
I'm actually all for RCV, I just want it to be legible. I think Australia's voting process is laudable in general (don't y'all send people to the hinterlands to make sure everyone has actually had the opportunity to vote?).
Yeah we actually fine anyone who doesn't vote. The fine is something like $70 and it's enforced, too.
So voting needs to be made easy for anyone living in the outback, otherwise you'd be fining someone for breaking a law they had little chance of practically adhering to.
To be clear, I'm raising a question. It does strike me that in a highly polarized electorate like Michigan obviously is today that either a runoff or RCV might make sense to try to resolve the polarization. After all, if the opposite result were to happen in either RCV or a runoff, doesn't that tell us something?
The one thing I am surprised hasn't gotten more focus is the role gender and appearance played in this race. If you search Haley Stevens on social media platforms, the most common complaint about her is AIPAC/Israel, but the second most common and certainly non-negligible criticism is about her appearance and voice. That is in very stark contrast to Abdul El-Sayed, who is tall and handsome with a very pleasant voice.
If the money and the candidate policies remained fully unchanged but Haley Stevens was a six foot man named Henry Stevens with a dulcet baritone, that candidate would have cruised to victory.
Maybe Haley Stevens talks weird and acts weird not because of being a woman, but in spite of being a woman? Folks can make their own judgment but outside of places where folks talk like this (Whitmer to a moderate extent) are aliens to the rest of us. I wonder if that’s how Southerners are perceived elsewhere?
Agreed. Past time for Stevens to get started on those GLP-1 shots. Losing 40 pounds might well have helped with the face issue, too. Well, now she doesn't have to. There are some serious political considerations that involve appearence and a serious politician does well to deal with that. She can't change sex and she can't change her height, but there are things that people can work on.
I think Haley Stevens should make whatever personal medical decisions she wants, but to deny that misogyny played a role in getting Abdul El-Sayed over the finish line is absurd, and much of left wing of the party has shown a history of blindness to problematic attitudes and behavior patterns in their small tent.
One of the biggest stories of American politics for the last decade is a story of how non-college educated, working class voters in major metro areas have consistently shown up for candidates who look like Joe Biden, Raphael Warnock, and Jon Ossoff in a way they have not for candidates who look like Hillary Clinton, Stacey Abrams, and Haley Stevens. The female candidates who have won state wide races in swing states are relatively tall and thin, like Gretchen Whitmer and Tammy Baldwin.
I don't know what the answer is, but it is a messaging and imaging problem the party can't keep pretending doesn't exist.
"Attractiveness" and "misogyny" are very different things. You're talking about Michigan, when half our Congressional delegation are women, we have a woman governor, and our next governor is probably going to be a woman too. Saying misogyny played a role is absurd.
I'm not SURE it's misogyny ---- handsome, tall men, too, are favored, and there's that WSJ article that showed deep voices have a big effect!! Who knew. I have noticed for years that the only men in America that have "senator hair" (think Jack Kennedy) --- are senators. Not having male-pattern baldness in that age group as well as having charisma are both rare traits ---- and the senator class selects for them.
But of course you are right: attractive women are inevitably also favored. I thought Hilary was fine --- and indeed, she won a lot of posts, and ran for president twice. I would not put her in that problem-appearence category, myself.
The party needs to figure out where the voters are on Israel. Stevens basically avoided talking about the topic. Al Sayed is closer to the center of the party on this, and could point out how hard AIPAC worked to defeat him. It might be different if we hadn't just been dragged into a deeply unpopular war with Iran because Israel wanted it. On pretty much every other position, I'm more in line with Stevens. But on this topic I deeply want AIPACs $20 per voter to be seen as wasted. El Sayed's positions aren't horribly wrong and mostly won't change things in the Senate anyway. So he got my vote.
Unfortunately, with the final margin now under 1%, AIPAC is going to conclude this race was winnable with only minor adjustments. And they're not wrong about that. The money did indeed get them within spitting distance. This loss wasn't decisive enough to convince them it's not worth trying again.
I think you're basically right, but most groups get stuck in echo chambers like that. I think their initial reaction will a little more chastened, but then they'll switch back to 'see, should have been $30.5 million!' OTOH, if more of the post-mortem polling says what I wrote, they may have to reconsider a bit more. In that case, more money would mean bigger backlash. Also, this is an unusual situation. The vast majority of the time, a much smaller investment would have been sufficient. No one wants to see Israel actually threatened. They had tremendous sympathy October 7th. But I do expect them to double down for November.
Nate: in 2026, a platform of "I'm in it to eat greasy local foodstuffs on someone else's dime" combined with a coherent healthcare policy is probably a winning strategy, so don't let your concerns hold you back.
It'll be interesting to look at the demographics. My guess is that young voters went heavily for El-Sayed, while the older voters went for Stevens. As Nate says at the end of his post, in order to defeat Peters in what seems likely to be a close election, El-Sayed is going to have to take significant steps to reassure the Stevens voters that he's not too far to the left. That may be difficult, given the contentiousness of the primary.
All he has to do to guarantee my vote is repudiate Hasan Piker. If he just distances himself then I have hard choices to make. If they campaign together I probably sit this one out.
After Hillary Clinton lost Michigan in 2016 after leading in the polls by over 20%, I don't see why we would draw any conclusions of what Michigan primary polling may be telling us.
El-Sayed ran a very aggressively anti-Zionist campaign; practically every one of his campaign emails featured the word AIPAC in the first sentence. And his response to the West Bloomfield terror attack was shamefully weaselly. I don't think it's unfair to say that his campaign crossed the line into anti-Semitism. At the very least, he's clearly unwilling to stand up to the anti-Semites in his party, who absolutely exist: Michigan's Attorney General has announced she won't be attending the Democratic nominating convention out of fear of harassment.
“I was horrified and heartbroken this afternoon to hear the reports of an active shooter at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield. I’m thankful that no worshippers, students, or teachers were harmed. We all owe a debt of gratitude to temple security and law enforcement, who acted swiftly to keep the community safe.
“To my Jewish sisters and brothers, you have a right to worship in peace. You have a right to send your kids to the synagogue in the morning and know they’ll come home safely at night. And you have a right to know that your religious identity and faith practice are respected.
“There is no room for antisemitism in America. So today and everyday, I am standing in solidarity with all of us who value our right to pray how we choose to pray against antisemitism and hate in all its forms.” El-Sayed, March 12th
Dunno, doesn't seem so bad to me. I'm aware that there's a new definition of antisemitism out there, in which any criticism of the decisions of the government of Israel is being called antisemitic. I suppose from that perspective...
Just a disappointing result for Democrats at the national level. And that 4% to McMorrow ? Just another classic example of the party not being able to get organized to create a winning formula, allowing micro interests to steer things in the wrong direction, The the goal is to win national power and not to make statements. Carville is correct on one point. If you don't win the power, then it does not matter one bit what your policy is.
And for those of us in Michigan, far outside of Stevens' district, McMorrow was the better candidate. I understand why she dropped out but had the leadership of the party been behind her from the beginning, who knows?
It is more interesting to me what would have happened in this State if AIPAC did not donate an unreal amount of money to defeat AES. It seems to me that it gave AES an issue that transcended him vs. Stevens. As Bob Dylan said: money doesn't talk; it swears.
I really agree here. The vibes I got as a Michigander pre-McMorrow drop out (and thus before full consolidation behind stevens) was that a lot of left types just kinda didnt like Stevens that much. Afterwards, though, it became real hatred, and on the flipside the endless attack ads have to have hurt Abdul in the general...
Nate, I think you’re looking at this from the perspective of a forecaster rather than a campaign.
Campaigns release internal polls to shape the narrative, especially in the social media era. Whether the poll ultimately proves accurate is almost beside the point. The El-Sayed campaign presumably believed it was better off creating the perception that it had momentum. I don’t know enough about the dynamics of a Michigan Democratic primary to know exactly why, but one plausible explanation is that Stevens’s voters were likely to turn out regardless, while El-Sayed needed to generate enthusiasm among lower-propensity supporters.
The public and the press doesn’t distinguish between an internal poll and an independent poll. If you can dominate a news cycle with headlines showing you’re up by double digits, you can get UMICH students to change their registration to feel like they are part of a phenomenon.
Using trash data to give people the illusion of momentum isn’t a good choice though. If EAS *knows* it’s a trash poll and pushes it anyway, that’s kinda gross and distasteful at best. But even if you disagree and think it’s fine to farm big headlines to get out the vote, there’s still no upside to it.
Normies who don’t care about pollster quality aren’t going to look at this “from the campaign’s perspective” and think, “Ahhh yes. Very clever that EAS used historically poor primary polling to his advantage and seized the momentum narrative even though the quality was sketchy. Smart dude.” They will think, “Oh shit, this guy underperformed his polling numbers by 10 points. What happened?”
If anyone actually bothers to ask him why he missed his polling by so much then he’s in the uncomfortable position of saying that he knew the poll was too optimistic but hyped it anyway (again, kinda gross), or he has to say that he thought the poll was good, which is kinda incompetent.
Either way, I don’t see a win from a campaign perspective. For people who are paying attention, it’s somewhere between “meh” and “eww”. For people who aren’t paying attention . . . well, they aren’t paying attention, so it doesn’t matter either way. I only see a downside for the campaign.
I don't think campaigns are repeat players with the electorate with most people who vote in the general.
To people like us who follow politics closely, campaigns build reputations over multiple cycles. We remember who released questionable internals and who cried wolf. But I believe most voters experience each campaign as a one-off. They aren’t keeping a mental ledger of whether Abdul El-Sayed’s internals in the 2026 Michigan primary were overstated.
The campaign’s objective isn’t to maximize long-term credibility with election analysts. It’s to influence behavior on one day, and more broadly, over a few weeks. If favorable internal polls generate a positive press cycle, attract donors, energize volunteers, and convince marginal supporters that the campaign is viable, they serve their purpose even if they turn out to be wrong.
It’s this kind of “bad use of polling” that works in the atmosphere to destroy the public perception of polling in general. Not all polls are created equal, and not all races can be polled well. Some polls are bad from the start; other times it’s the landscape that is difficult. As Nate says in the article, though, the extent to which certain polling landscapes will reward good polling (or give inconsistent, unreliable results) are actually kind of predictable. But most people - even most people who are dialed into politics to some extent - probably don’t know these nuances, and therefore can be subject to buying into polling misinformation and the general narrative that polls tend to be either self-serving/biased, or not possible to conduct with much accuracy. Which, as we know, isn’t true.
Nice post. I don't understand why campaigns do this either, report made-up poll numbers showing these faked big win predictions. Do they really believe some schmo is likely to say, oh, that guy is winning big so I won't bother to vote for Stevens? Or lots more people to show up to vote so they can be part of a "momentum"? Who really does that? I just don't believe it happens. Polling is the worst of fake news.
It doesn’t take many people changing their behavior to affect the outcome in a primary like this. AES is going to end up winning largely because he got turnout in Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids. Without that, he loses.
Many of the voters progressive campaigns are trying to mobilize in places like Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids are 18- to 24-year-olds. Decades of marketing research has shown that this age group is particularly responsive to messaging that aligns with their identity and values. A narrative that “our movement is surging” or “we’re about to win” creates social proof and make supporters feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. A double-digit poll does that in a way that a close poll doesn't.
Campaigns release these polls because they are hoping to persuade a relatively small number of low-propensity supporters to vote, volunteer, donate, or talk to their friends. In a low-turnout primary, even a modest shift in participation can have an outsized impact.
Ehhh, that sounds more like something that people tell themselves to justify doing stuff that feels good instead of thinking about what works. I've been working on the data side of consumer marketing research for about 20 years now, and I don't think "18-24-year-olds are particularly responsive to messaging that aligns with their identity and values" is a supportable statement.
Yeah, people will click a bigger number on a scale in response to those things, but the follow-up of them actually taking an action based on those kinds of vibes doesn't pan out.
But honestly, I don't think releasing a low quality poll has any bearing on how people perceive the values and identity of a candidate. You can argue that there's just pure, unmitigated tribalism at work here. "We're wining! Vote for winners!"
So the benefit to this maneuver is nebulous and hard to quantify, and possibly based in a misunderstanding of consumer market research. The down side is straightforward in that people don't like being manipulated.
As you said, primaries can turn on a small number of people. Does the benefit of hyping up some teenagers outweigh the cost of annoying a different segment? I don't have a definitive answer for that, and I don't think the data exists to provide one.
Your original comment was to think about this from the point of view of the campaign, and the campaign *should* be thinking about potential downsides and not ignoring them just because the upside feels good.
The campaign has sent a message to the small number of people who *are* paying close attention. The candidate in this case is either incompetent or disingenuous when it comes to deciphering polling data. If you're going to offer a concrete downside like that to a coherent voting bloc (no matter how small), you need to be able to articulate an upside that's stronger than, "Yeah maybe we'll get the teenagers hyped up."
So you are saying that they release these piles of lies, lies, lies to propagandize young voters into turning out and voting ------- based on fake news, lies.
So this is what we're going to get with socialists coming in. A polity based on nothing but lies. I suppose you are right, too.
Why is it hard to believe that happens? Anyone paying for Nate Silver is way more tuned into politics than the average voter. There are plenty of people out there who do want to be part of something and will vote accordingly.
The polls released were way off, but not “historically” so. Nate wrote that Presidential primary polls tend to average 9 points of absolute error from the ultimate result, and that generally polls for down-ballot races are less accurate than presidential races. Taking those two together, double-digit polling error on a primary for a Senate seat would be fairly typical.
That was a poor choice of words on my part. I meant that we know from the history of polling that primary polling is bad. Not that this was a historically bad poll.
Jack said, The El-Sayed campaign presumably believed it was better off creating the perception that it had momentum." While in fact creating the perception that they are a pile of worthless liars. Jack is right that no one distinguishes between internal polls and independent polls, and IMO there is probably no difference: they are all propaganda and there is no unbiased information to get from the lot of them. Polls are mostly run by the left, after all, which may be all we need to understand about the last ten year's constant, unremitting exaggeration of the Dems' election chances.
There’s a contradiction apparent in this logic: If nobody distinguishes between internal polls and independent polls, then they are also are more than likely unaware which polls even were internal vs. independent, and perhaps not even aware that El-Sayed released a bunch of internal polls. Meaning the take-away generalization from a “normie” is far more likely to be “the polls were way off/polling in general is inaccurate” than “El-Sayed is a liar for strategically releasing some of his internal polls.”
And strategically releasing internal polls, by the way, is something that candidates do frequently on both the right and left. Whether they’d rather release the internals that show them winning in a landslide or the ones that show a close race depends on the given campaign, but the concept in general is hardly rare, much less outrageous on El-Sayed’s part. It may not have been a good decision in the end from a strategy standpoint. But acting like this is some sort of black mark on his character as opposed to typical campaign strategy shows that you’re either new to this subject matter, or arguing in bad faith
I can't agree: there is the legal maxim, falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. The maxim means "false in one thing, false in everything"—the principle that a witness who lies about one matter loses credibility on all matters. There was a time in America when people thought telling the truth was an important indicator of character. Apparently some of you think it's fine if socialists at least lie up one side and down the other. That winning is all that matters.
I mean, it’s a stretch to call it an outright lie as opposed to selective release of information. For all Al-Sayed knew, maybe those polls he released were the ones that were correct. Or for all we know, maybe all his internal polling had him that far ahead. The reason you can’t trust internal polling released is because you either don’t have all the information, or at least you don’t know if you have all the information. Not because it’s necessarily less accurate just by virtue of being internal polling.
And it’s not as though it’s a “lie” about his policy stances or some personal scandal. Is it really more egregious than a candidate saying “we believe we’re going to win this race”, when privately they actually doubt their prospects? It’s just gamesmanship.
Haley Stevens' defeat is very much a symptom of the Democratic Establishment being incompetent and turning what should be winnable elections for their handpicked candidates into tire fires. AIPAC is the new NRA. AIPAC's endorsement of a candidate is a red flag for a chunk of the Democratic Party base. Maybe next time the Democratic Establishment should nominate someone with more loyalty to the base of the Democratic Party in the state and not a Super PAC for a foreign power. Also, it would help the Democratic Establishment's case if they stopped nominating Hillary-a-likes and then getting shocked when they don't make it over the finish line. Sometimes the most dangerous place to stand is the spot considered the safest.
As for AES, he's probably going to lose to Mike Rogers. I like AES's slogan "Money Out of Politics, Money in Your Pocket, Medicare for All", but he does have definite downsides never having run before and being a tad more to the left than the Great Lakes region is used to in recent decades. That said about AES, also taking into consideration how much Haley Stevens was struggling against AES in the primary where a stronger and more charismatic candidate would have been running well ahead of AES, she would have probably come out of the primary processes with the same long odds against Mike Rogers as well. I don't live in Michigan, but from what I've seen and read, Mike Rogers "superpower" as a Republican is that he's as close to "normal" as Republicans get in the Trump Era. Bernie Sanders even said Mike Rogers was a particularly strong candidate for a Republican.
It's 8:38 AM and the Michigan Senate primary is still not called. "Tonight is probably bearish for Democrats in the general election," Nate says. Sure. I liked the explanation for the huge drop between polling results and vote results for AES, "Part of the reason that Democratic voters are moving to the left is that moderate voters are leaving the party." Yes, well, that would do it.
Another thing I liked is the effort to explain why, oh why, do campaigns release grossly inaccurate internal push-polls showing double digit wins when the election was so close, in fact, it's still hung a day later? Besides that they just like to lie like carpets because they have bad characters ---- no, never mind that, I'm still hung up on the ancient idea that polls are supposed to actually provide information for the people, as opposed to being pure enemy propaganda. Silly me. Nate says that maybe they did that to discourage Slotkin and others from endorsing Stevens: professional pols lose credibility if they endorse big losers, and that's what these double-digit polls for AES were claiming.
>while one of the most moderate Democrats in the House, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, easily advanced to the general election in Washington’s 3rd district.
Worth mentioning that Washington state doesn’t have a conventional party primary. Instead, we have a nonpartisan top-two primary which, like California, pits every candidate, regardless of party affiliation, against each other, making the general election a runoff between the top two vote getters. There’s some debate about this, but I think this almost certainly helps moderate incumbents stave off more radical challengers from their own party.
Also tends to lead to candidates who feel more representative of the people,
which tends to put a damper on the slow build up of feeling unrepresented.
Which is a bit of a 'duh' statement, but *motions to the world around us* not everyone has figured that part out yet.
re: "if El-Sayed takes tonight’s results as a signal that he needs to be more conciliatory between now and November."
his semi-victory speech seems to be a positive sign toward this:
“However we might feel about the campaign we’ve just come through, I want you to understand that it pales in comparison to the cynicism, in comparison to the corporatism, in comparison to the lies that Mike Rogers and Donald Trump are going to tell,” El-Sayed said. “However much we might disagree with our democratic opponent, there is so much more that unites us than divides us. Tomorrow, we begin to mend fences,” he said. “Whatever happens tonight, we have a responsibility to assure that we unite to make sure that Mike Rogers never sees the inside of the U.S. Senate."
I think its also responding to people like Hillary Scholten who have said openly that they will refuse to support Abdul in the general
You call that speech CONCILIATORY???
"in comparison to the corporatism, in comparison to the lies that Mike Rogers and Donald Trump are going to tell"
"we have a responsibility to assure that we unite to make sure that Mike Rogers never sees the inside of the U.S. Senate."
Darn, that Arab guy is aggressive and warlike. He sounds like a terrible, dangerous man to me.
Yeah it's conciliatory, towards his center-left Democrat primary opponents..
No one said anything about being conciliatory to Trump.
True, but it seemed a hostile message, unusually so.
I detect a bit of racism here … are Arab guys supposed to go out of their way to be less hostile and more conciliatory than guys like President Trump and VP Vance? Or what were you trying to say?
I'm not "trying" anything: I'm SAYING I don't like this guy El-Sayed. He's grossly aggressive and hostile. Given we are at war with -- well, not Arabs just at the moment, but Persians next door, I think not liking these types is reasonable. VP Vance is hostile?? He's a pussycat.
Though I have to admit, you might have a point about President Trump. [:-)
Wow tennisfan2 you called it on the bigotry lol this is some rank 2002 era racism right here
Are you intentionally being a troll here?
Aggressive, yes. But U.S. politicians are constantly using apocalyptic language about opponents. From both the left and right.
It needs to stop, but it's a collective action problem that will never get solved on its own.
I'd underscore the point that the rise of the left in the Democratic Party is driven in part by the flight of moderates.
I left the party and enrolled as an independent after the Platner debacle here in Maine. For me it was less Platner himself than the willingness - eagerness, actually - of his supporters to blame his victims, including branding one as a Republican operative, all the while rationalizing his own appalling behavior.
So this has a social, or tribal, aspect. Having grown up as a D in a French-Canadian mill town, I finally had to confront the fact that I simply did not like or share the values of the young, well-educated urbanites and the wealthy coastal retirees who now control the party. They are completely detached - socially, economically, and even geographically - from our largely working-class native population. I find it is less a disdain than an obliviousness, which is actually more infuriating.
A friend who participated in our recent post-Platner mini-caucus said: "I didn't know any of these people and didn't like what I saw, so why should I spend time in a party with people I share nothing with and don't like?"
Ruy Teixeira talks about this a lot.
"Cast your mind back to the beginning of the century. At that point, a mere 28 percent of Democrats described themselves as liberal and two thirds were either moderate or conservative.
Fast forward to today and the liberal share has more than doubled to 59 percent while the moderate/conservative share has declined drastically. It’s the liberals’ party now. And especially, it’s the white liberals’ party now."
The current Democratic coalition is quite different than even Obama’s coalition. For example, Starr County, Texas—the most Democratic county in the country in 2012—voted 86% for Obama and is 97% Latino. Harris lost it to Trump by double digits. Those are the moderate voters Nate is referring to that are leaving the party.
I completely agree. When I was a county party vice chair, the others were a saw mill operator, a couple of commercial fishermen, a nursing home employee, a Head Start mom, etc. Now it is almost all transplant retirees. Lots of ex-Fed senior civil servants. Their website has both a land acknowledgment and a welcome to "Maine progressive voters or interested seasonal residents."
Well, it’s still pretty likely that Talarico will win Starr county. The 2024 election is more and more becoming a very outdated comparison.
I'm not saying that these voters have suddenly become Republicans—if they had, Henry Cuellar would not have been overwhelmingly reelected in 2024, and done very well in Starr county.
But the point is that, before 2020, Starr County (in fact that whole region) was one of the most reliably Democratic areas in the entire country. Every Democratic presidential nominee since 1912, with the exception of George McGovern, won at least 72% of the vote in Starr county.
Many working-class voters hold moderate or conservative views on cultural issues. The Democratic Party has started struggling to retain these voters because increasing parts of the party have come to view cultural disagreement as a sign that those voters do not belong in the coalition. A party that demands rigid fealty from the working-class on hot-button cultural issue will struggle to build a durable working-class majority.
Lifelong Independent: pretty far to left on most issues. A couple things, first I think the party has a lot of issues, and so I get why ID is low, blind defense of Platner is a good example. I find the Democrats basically ineffective at implementing policies and bad at elections. They also left off any primary challenger to Biden in 2024 (I think Dean Philips was polling at a reasonable for past candidates to be included in NC). That soured me on any chance of moving from I to D.
Second, I will say that one of the Platner accusers was/is a Republican “operative.” That didn’t make her case and accusations any less valid or serious. It’s really a lesson to everyone to look at the substance and not the affiliation/background/biases. We’re all just people in the end and our views and opinions don’t delegitimize who we are or what happened to us. Good luck in Maine, glad there’s somewhat of a choice now vs before.
Should the Rank-Choice Voting system be put in place? MacMorrow votes are apparently greater than the AES margin of victory. Surely, those voters would have split imperfectly between AES and Stevens, but it would have been interesting to see Rank-Choice here.
ranked choice voting should be normal for all primaries imo.
I think 50+1 should be required or a runoff.
It basically comes down to the same thing, without having to bring people back to actually vote a second time.
Strategic voting in a Insant Runnoff Voting is very non-obvious. Since the rounds are potentially smooshed together. For instance voting your first choice may not be strategicly optimal depending on how you think everyone else will vote.
Separating in to 2 elections does make things simpler, at the obvious cost of doing it 2x. There are no strategic considerations in a 1 on 1 election
In practice, with real elections having large numbers of electors, the cases when you would strategically benefit by not putting your true first choice first are rare and more importantly, hard to predict beforehand. They tend to be very sensitive to the precise results, which means that the best advice is just to vote your true preference.
Campaigns certainly aren't going to advocate such strategic votes, because if too many people follow them, they backfire!
Rank choice voter, with an appropriate algorithm, is essential a bunch of 1-1 choices. Do I prefer A or B? A or C? B or C? You can answer all these questions voter base wide with rank choice voting.
And if, in my small example, say A and C get 40% first place votes and B gets 20%, but B is everyone's first or second place choice. The B beats A her 1-1 60% to 40%, and beats C in the A-C 1-1. So, B should be the nominee since she is overall preferred over every other candidate. That's what I mean by an appropriate algorithm. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, this is not currently the rank choice voting algorithm used anywhere.
What you are asking for is called "Condorcet" voting. Unfortunately it is not mathematically certain that there is always a Condorcet winner in any given election.
That said, the usual Ranked Choice algorithm ("instant runoff", in which the lowest-voted candidate is progressively eliminated and their votes reallocated to the voter's next preferred candidate remaining) tends in practice to elect the Condorcet winner in large-scale elections.
"RCV, but less intuitive and harder to explain to a normal person" is a terrible idea.
Nah we have it in Australia and there's nothing particularly brilliant about Aussies. Ranked-choice is the least-worst option out there.
I'm actually all for RCV, I just want it to be legible. I think Australia's voting process is laudable in general (don't y'all send people to the hinterlands to make sure everyone has actually had the opportunity to vote?).
Fair enough.
Yeah we actually fine anyone who doesn't vote. The fine is something like $70 and it's enforced, too.
So voting needs to be made easy for anyone living in the outback, otherwise you'd be fining someone for breaking a law they had little chance of practically adhering to.
To be clear, I'm raising a question. It does strike me that in a highly polarized electorate like Michigan obviously is today that either a runoff or RCV might make sense to try to resolve the polarization. After all, if the opposite result were to happen in either RCV or a runoff, doesn't that tell us something?
To be pedantic RCV describes the ballot, IRV describes a resolution criteria.
From my own investigations it is a mediocre resolution criteria. Borda count is nice.
https://www.stat.uchicago.edu/~lekheng/meetings/mathofranking/ref/rivest.pdf
Is the best I've seen.
But also assuming people vote strategically, the actual method of voting only results in minor differences.
The one thing I am surprised hasn't gotten more focus is the role gender and appearance played in this race. If you search Haley Stevens on social media platforms, the most common complaint about her is AIPAC/Israel, but the second most common and certainly non-negligible criticism is about her appearance and voice. That is in very stark contrast to Abdul El-Sayed, who is tall and handsome with a very pleasant voice.
If the money and the candidate policies remained fully unchanged but Haley Stevens was a six foot man named Henry Stevens with a dulcet baritone, that candidate would have cruised to victory.
Maybe Haley Stevens talks weird and acts weird not because of being a woman, but in spite of being a woman? Folks can make their own judgment but outside of places where folks talk like this (Whitmer to a moderate extent) are aliens to the rest of us. I wonder if that’s how Southerners are perceived elsewhere?
Agreed. Past time for Stevens to get started on those GLP-1 shots. Losing 40 pounds might well have helped with the face issue, too. Well, now she doesn't have to. There are some serious political considerations that involve appearence and a serious politician does well to deal with that. She can't change sex and she can't change her height, but there are things that people can work on.
I think Haley Stevens should make whatever personal medical decisions she wants, but to deny that misogyny played a role in getting Abdul El-Sayed over the finish line is absurd, and much of left wing of the party has shown a history of blindness to problematic attitudes and behavior patterns in their small tent.
One of the biggest stories of American politics for the last decade is a story of how non-college educated, working class voters in major metro areas have consistently shown up for candidates who look like Joe Biden, Raphael Warnock, and Jon Ossoff in a way they have not for candidates who look like Hillary Clinton, Stacey Abrams, and Haley Stevens. The female candidates who have won state wide races in swing states are relatively tall and thin, like Gretchen Whitmer and Tammy Baldwin.
I don't know what the answer is, but it is a messaging and imaging problem the party can't keep pretending doesn't exist.
"Attractiveness" and "misogyny" are very different things. You're talking about Michigan, when half our Congressional delegation are women, we have a woman governor, and our next governor is probably going to be a woman too. Saying misogyny played a role is absurd.
You make it sound like she lost in a landslide. The margin was fairly small in this election. Lots of people DID vote for Haley Stevens.
For that mater, lots of people voted for Hillary too. She received more votes than Trump did, after all.
IMO these misogyny claims are mostly cope.
Could you explain what is meant by this use of the word "cope"? It's brand-new, and I don't know what it means.
Well, I cannot give you a Websters dictionary definition, but the context where I see it used it to make excuses for some bad event.
I called this cope because there are other good explanations for what happened.
1. Stevens was the establishment candidate and we are in an (extended) anti-establishment wave.
2. DSA is having a moment, and El-Sayed was the DSA candidate.
If you furthermore recognize that the race was close in spite of those El-Sayed advantages then misogyny starts to sound like a really bad take.
So cope is a noun (now) for making excuses for some bad event. Thank you! That makes sense.
Yes, I see what you mean -- misogyny and her looks can't really be the reason Stevens lost given she very nearly won, well inside one point.
I'm not SURE it's misogyny ---- handsome, tall men, too, are favored, and there's that WSJ article that showed deep voices have a big effect!! Who knew. I have noticed for years that the only men in America that have "senator hair" (think Jack Kennedy) --- are senators. Not having male-pattern baldness in that age group as well as having charisma are both rare traits ---- and the senator class selects for them.
But of course you are right: attractive women are inevitably also favored. I thought Hilary was fine --- and indeed, she won a lot of posts, and ran for president twice. I would not put her in that problem-appearence category, myself.
The party needs to figure out where the voters are on Israel. Stevens basically avoided talking about the topic. Al Sayed is closer to the center of the party on this, and could point out how hard AIPAC worked to defeat him. It might be different if we hadn't just been dragged into a deeply unpopular war with Iran because Israel wanted it. On pretty much every other position, I'm more in line with Stevens. But on this topic I deeply want AIPACs $20 per voter to be seen as wasted. El Sayed's positions aren't horribly wrong and mostly won't change things in the Senate anyway. So he got my vote.
Unfortunately, with the final margin now under 1%, AIPAC is going to conclude this race was winnable with only minor adjustments. And they're not wrong about that. The money did indeed get them within spitting distance. This loss wasn't decisive enough to convince them it's not worth trying again.
I think you're basically right, but most groups get stuck in echo chambers like that. I think their initial reaction will a little more chastened, but then they'll switch back to 'see, should have been $30.5 million!' OTOH, if more of the post-mortem polling says what I wrote, they may have to reconsider a bit more. In that case, more money would mean bigger backlash. Also, this is an unusual situation. The vast majority of the time, a much smaller investment would have been sufficient. No one wants to see Israel actually threatened. They had tremendous sympathy October 7th. But I do expect them to double down for November.
Nate: in 2026, a platform of "I'm in it to eat greasy local foodstuffs on someone else's dime" combined with a coherent healthcare policy is probably a winning strategy, so don't let your concerns hold you back.
It'll be interesting to look at the demographics. My guess is that young voters went heavily for El-Sayed, while the older voters went for Stevens. As Nate says at the end of his post, in order to defeat Peters in what seems likely to be a close election, El-Sayed is going to have to take significant steps to reassure the Stevens voters that he's not too far to the left. That may be difficult, given the contentiousness of the primary.
All he has to do to guarantee my vote is repudiate Hasan Piker. If he just distances himself then I have hard choices to make. If they campaign together I probably sit this one out.
After Hillary Clinton lost Michigan in 2016 after leading in the polls by over 20%, I don't see why we would draw any conclusions of what Michigan primary polling may be telling us.
Is America ready to governed by anti-Semites?
And Communists?
Deal with that question?
No, no, and there's no indication El Sayed is either of those. You can probably come up with better questions...
El-Sayed ran a very aggressively anti-Zionist campaign; practically every one of his campaign emails featured the word AIPAC in the first sentence. And his response to the West Bloomfield terror attack was shamefully weaselly. I don't think it's unfair to say that his campaign crossed the line into anti-Semitism. At the very least, he's clearly unwilling to stand up to the anti-Semites in his party, who absolutely exist: Michigan's Attorney General has announced she won't be attending the Democratic nominating convention out of fear of harassment.
“I was horrified and heartbroken this afternoon to hear the reports of an active shooter at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield. I’m thankful that no worshippers, students, or teachers were harmed. We all owe a debt of gratitude to temple security and law enforcement, who acted swiftly to keep the community safe.
“To my Jewish sisters and brothers, you have a right to worship in peace. You have a right to send your kids to the synagogue in the morning and know they’ll come home safely at night. And you have a right to know that your religious identity and faith practice are respected.
“There is no room for antisemitism in America. So today and everyday, I am standing in solidarity with all of us who value our right to pray how we choose to pray against antisemitism and hate in all its forms.” El-Sayed, March 12th
Dunno, doesn't seem so bad to me. I'm aware that there's a new definition of antisemitism out there, in which any criticism of the decisions of the government of Israel is being called antisemitic. I suppose from that perspective...
Anti-Zionist isn't antisemitic. Lots of young Jewish progressives are anti-Zionists too
Just a disappointing result for Democrats at the national level. And that 4% to McMorrow ? Just another classic example of the party not being able to get organized to create a winning formula, allowing micro interests to steer things in the wrong direction, The the goal is to win national power and not to make statements. Carville is correct on one point. If you don't win the power, then it does not matter one bit what your policy is.
And for those of us in Michigan, far outside of Stevens' district, McMorrow was the better candidate. I understand why she dropped out but had the leadership of the party been behind her from the beginning, who knows?
It is more interesting to me what would have happened in this State if AIPAC did not donate an unreal amount of money to defeat AES. It seems to me that it gave AES an issue that transcended him vs. Stevens. As Bob Dylan said: money doesn't talk; it swears.
I really agree here. The vibes I got as a Michigander pre-McMorrow drop out (and thus before full consolidation behind stevens) was that a lot of left types just kinda didnt like Stevens that much. Afterwards, though, it became real hatred, and on the flipside the endless attack ads have to have hurt Abdul in the general...
Michigander also. I heard the same thing. McMorrow being forced to drop out and all that outside money seemed to make it worse for Stevens.
Nate, I think you’re looking at this from the perspective of a forecaster rather than a campaign.
Campaigns release internal polls to shape the narrative, especially in the social media era. Whether the poll ultimately proves accurate is almost beside the point. The El-Sayed campaign presumably believed it was better off creating the perception that it had momentum. I don’t know enough about the dynamics of a Michigan Democratic primary to know exactly why, but one plausible explanation is that Stevens’s voters were likely to turn out regardless, while El-Sayed needed to generate enthusiasm among lower-propensity supporters.
The public and the press doesn’t distinguish between an internal poll and an independent poll. If you can dominate a news cycle with headlines showing you’re up by double digits, you can get UMICH students to change their registration to feel like they are part of a phenomenon.
Using trash data to give people the illusion of momentum isn’t a good choice though. If EAS *knows* it’s a trash poll and pushes it anyway, that’s kinda gross and distasteful at best. But even if you disagree and think it’s fine to farm big headlines to get out the vote, there’s still no upside to it.
Normies who don’t care about pollster quality aren’t going to look at this “from the campaign’s perspective” and think, “Ahhh yes. Very clever that EAS used historically poor primary polling to his advantage and seized the momentum narrative even though the quality was sketchy. Smart dude.” They will think, “Oh shit, this guy underperformed his polling numbers by 10 points. What happened?”
If anyone actually bothers to ask him why he missed his polling by so much then he’s in the uncomfortable position of saying that he knew the poll was too optimistic but hyped it anyway (again, kinda gross), or he has to say that he thought the poll was good, which is kinda incompetent.
Either way, I don’t see a win from a campaign perspective. For people who are paying attention, it’s somewhere between “meh” and “eww”. For people who aren’t paying attention . . . well, they aren’t paying attention, so it doesn’t matter either way. I only see a downside for the campaign.
I don't think campaigns are repeat players with the electorate with most people who vote in the general.
To people like us who follow politics closely, campaigns build reputations over multiple cycles. We remember who released questionable internals and who cried wolf. But I believe most voters experience each campaign as a one-off. They aren’t keeping a mental ledger of whether Abdul El-Sayed’s internals in the 2026 Michigan primary were overstated.
The campaign’s objective isn’t to maximize long-term credibility with election analysts. It’s to influence behavior on one day, and more broadly, over a few weeks. If favorable internal polls generate a positive press cycle, attract donors, energize volunteers, and convince marginal supporters that the campaign is viable, they serve their purpose even if they turn out to be wrong.
It’s this kind of “bad use of polling” that works in the atmosphere to destroy the public perception of polling in general. Not all polls are created equal, and not all races can be polled well. Some polls are bad from the start; other times it’s the landscape that is difficult. As Nate says in the article, though, the extent to which certain polling landscapes will reward good polling (or give inconsistent, unreliable results) are actually kind of predictable. But most people - even most people who are dialed into politics to some extent - probably don’t know these nuances, and therefore can be subject to buying into polling misinformation and the general narrative that polls tend to be either self-serving/biased, or not possible to conduct with much accuracy. Which, as we know, isn’t true.
Nice post. I don't understand why campaigns do this either, report made-up poll numbers showing these faked big win predictions. Do they really believe some schmo is likely to say, oh, that guy is winning big so I won't bother to vote for Stevens? Or lots more people to show up to vote so they can be part of a "momentum"? Who really does that? I just don't believe it happens. Polling is the worst of fake news.
They get to raise more money from their most enthusiastic supporters whenever they release polls showing "momentum."
I know this because I regularly see these junk polls cited in fundraising emails as a reason to donate.
It doesn’t take many people changing their behavior to affect the outcome in a primary like this. AES is going to end up winning largely because he got turnout in Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids. Without that, he loses.
Many of the voters progressive campaigns are trying to mobilize in places like Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids are 18- to 24-year-olds. Decades of marketing research has shown that this age group is particularly responsive to messaging that aligns with their identity and values. A narrative that “our movement is surging” or “we’re about to win” creates social proof and make supporters feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. A double-digit poll does that in a way that a close poll doesn't.
Campaigns release these polls because they are hoping to persuade a relatively small number of low-propensity supporters to vote, volunteer, donate, or talk to their friends. In a low-turnout primary, even a modest shift in participation can have an outsized impact.
Ehhh, that sounds more like something that people tell themselves to justify doing stuff that feels good instead of thinking about what works. I've been working on the data side of consumer marketing research for about 20 years now, and I don't think "18-24-year-olds are particularly responsive to messaging that aligns with their identity and values" is a supportable statement.
Yeah, people will click a bigger number on a scale in response to those things, but the follow-up of them actually taking an action based on those kinds of vibes doesn't pan out.
But honestly, I don't think releasing a low quality poll has any bearing on how people perceive the values and identity of a candidate. You can argue that there's just pure, unmitigated tribalism at work here. "We're wining! Vote for winners!"
So the benefit to this maneuver is nebulous and hard to quantify, and possibly based in a misunderstanding of consumer market research. The down side is straightforward in that people don't like being manipulated.
As you said, primaries can turn on a small number of people. Does the benefit of hyping up some teenagers outweigh the cost of annoying a different segment? I don't have a definitive answer for that, and I don't think the data exists to provide one.
Your original comment was to think about this from the point of view of the campaign, and the campaign *should* be thinking about potential downsides and not ignoring them just because the upside feels good.
The campaign has sent a message to the small number of people who *are* paying close attention. The candidate in this case is either incompetent or disingenuous when it comes to deciphering polling data. If you're going to offer a concrete downside like that to a coherent voting bloc (no matter how small), you need to be able to articulate an upside that's stronger than, "Yeah maybe we'll get the teenagers hyped up."
So you are saying that they release these piles of lies, lies, lies to propagandize young voters into turning out and voting ------- based on fake news, lies.
So this is what we're going to get with socialists coming in. A polity based on nothing but lies. I suppose you are right, too.
Why is it hard to believe that happens? Anyone paying for Nate Silver is way more tuned into politics than the average voter. There are plenty of people out there who do want to be part of something and will vote accordingly.
The polls released were way off, but not “historically” so. Nate wrote that Presidential primary polls tend to average 9 points of absolute error from the ultimate result, and that generally polls for down-ballot races are less accurate than presidential races. Taking those two together, double-digit polling error on a primary for a Senate seat would be fairly typical.
That was a poor choice of words on my part. I meant that we know from the history of polling that primary polling is bad. Not that this was a historically bad poll.
Jack said, The El-Sayed campaign presumably believed it was better off creating the perception that it had momentum." While in fact creating the perception that they are a pile of worthless liars. Jack is right that no one distinguishes between internal polls and independent polls, and IMO there is probably no difference: they are all propaganda and there is no unbiased information to get from the lot of them. Polls are mostly run by the left, after all, which may be all we need to understand about the last ten year's constant, unremitting exaggeration of the Dems' election chances.
There’s a contradiction apparent in this logic: If nobody distinguishes between internal polls and independent polls, then they are also are more than likely unaware which polls even were internal vs. independent, and perhaps not even aware that El-Sayed released a bunch of internal polls. Meaning the take-away generalization from a “normie” is far more likely to be “the polls were way off/polling in general is inaccurate” than “El-Sayed is a liar for strategically releasing some of his internal polls.”
And strategically releasing internal polls, by the way, is something that candidates do frequently on both the right and left. Whether they’d rather release the internals that show them winning in a landslide or the ones that show a close race depends on the given campaign, but the concept in general is hardly rare, much less outrageous on El-Sayed’s part. It may not have been a good decision in the end from a strategy standpoint. But acting like this is some sort of black mark on his character as opposed to typical campaign strategy shows that you’re either new to this subject matter, or arguing in bad faith
I can't agree: there is the legal maxim, falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. The maxim means "false in one thing, false in everything"—the principle that a witness who lies about one matter loses credibility on all matters. There was a time in America when people thought telling the truth was an important indicator of character. Apparently some of you think it's fine if socialists at least lie up one side and down the other. That winning is all that matters.
I mean, it’s a stretch to call it an outright lie as opposed to selective release of information. For all Al-Sayed knew, maybe those polls he released were the ones that were correct. Or for all we know, maybe all his internal polling had him that far ahead. The reason you can’t trust internal polling released is because you either don’t have all the information, or at least you don’t know if you have all the information. Not because it’s necessarily less accurate just by virtue of being internal polling.
And it’s not as though it’s a “lie” about his policy stances or some personal scandal. Is it really more egregious than a candidate saying “we believe we’re going to win this race”, when privately they actually doubt their prospects? It’s just gamesmanship.
Lies, lies, and damned lies.
Emerson was El Sayed +15 so it wasn't just internals
Haley Stevens' defeat is very much a symptom of the Democratic Establishment being incompetent and turning what should be winnable elections for their handpicked candidates into tire fires. AIPAC is the new NRA. AIPAC's endorsement of a candidate is a red flag for a chunk of the Democratic Party base. Maybe next time the Democratic Establishment should nominate someone with more loyalty to the base of the Democratic Party in the state and not a Super PAC for a foreign power. Also, it would help the Democratic Establishment's case if they stopped nominating Hillary-a-likes and then getting shocked when they don't make it over the finish line. Sometimes the most dangerous place to stand is the spot considered the safest.
As for AES, he's probably going to lose to Mike Rogers. I like AES's slogan "Money Out of Politics, Money in Your Pocket, Medicare for All", but he does have definite downsides never having run before and being a tad more to the left than the Great Lakes region is used to in recent decades. That said about AES, also taking into consideration how much Haley Stevens was struggling against AES in the primary where a stronger and more charismatic candidate would have been running well ahead of AES, she would have probably come out of the primary processes with the same long odds against Mike Rogers as well. I don't live in Michigan, but from what I've seen and read, Mike Rogers "superpower" as a Republican is that he's as close to "normal" as Republicans get in the Trump Era. Bernie Sanders even said Mike Rogers was a particularly strong candidate for a Republican.
It's 8:38 AM and the Michigan Senate primary is still not called. "Tonight is probably bearish for Democrats in the general election," Nate says. Sure. I liked the explanation for the huge drop between polling results and vote results for AES, "Part of the reason that Democratic voters are moving to the left is that moderate voters are leaving the party." Yes, well, that would do it.
Another thing I liked is the effort to explain why, oh why, do campaigns release grossly inaccurate internal push-polls showing double digit wins when the election was so close, in fact, it's still hung a day later? Besides that they just like to lie like carpets because they have bad characters ---- no, never mind that, I'm still hung up on the ancient idea that polls are supposed to actually provide information for the people, as opposed to being pure enemy propaganda. Silly me. Nate says that maybe they did that to discourage Slotkin and others from endorsing Stevens: professional pols lose credibility if they endorse big losers, and that's what these double-digit polls for AES were claiming.