“Money out of politics.
Money in your pocket.
Medicare for All.”
That’s how Dr. Abdul El-Sayed opened his US Senate primary victory announcement on Bluesky. El-Sayed, a former Wayne County health director backed by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, DSA and the UAW, won despite being vastly outspent in the most expensive Senate primary in American history. Outside spending from AIPAC and corporate special interests totaled nearly $70 million. “ We didn’t know that they were going to outspend us $11 to $1. And yet we’re still standing,” El-Sayed said Tuesday night.
The left saw even more victories downballot in Michigan, while three other significant related dynamics were also visible. First, in Kansas and Missouri, conservative GOP power-grabs went down to landslide defeats. Meanwhile, in Kansas, Adam Hamilton, founding pastor of the largest United Methodist Church in America, won the Democratic US Senate nomination, reflecting two converging dynamics. First, he is the latest in a wave of similar candidates—pastors and seminarians—whose emergence challenges conservative Christians’ efforts to claim they alone speak for all of Christianity. Second, Hamilton, who began running as an independent, may be a long-shot, but he puts a supposedly safe rural state GOP Senate seat at least potentially in play, along with Iowa, Nebraska, and Alaska. Together, all four of these developments signal a profound shift away from the politics of the recent past—not just Trump and MAGA, but the neoliberal order that preceded and helped produce him.
What ties all the trends together in a positive sense is that they reflect a positive vision of America that can accept and face our flaws, because it has faith in our power to learn from past mistakes and do better.
“America can do glorious things, but to love America isn’t just to dress up in some colors and pretend that everything’s fine,” El-Sayed in his pre-victory speech. “To love America is to will America to do the hard work of being better. If you love America, you want America to be America for all of her kids.”
“We can’t control the past 250 years. What we can do is build the next 250. And to do that, it’s going to mean movements like this one, of the people, by the people, and for the people with a distinct purpose of taking on the challenges that we face. Those movements have never been more important than they are right now.
“I look in front of me and I see all kinds of colors, all kinds of stories coming together around the idea that we can have nice things. We just can’t do it alone. that to have them, we’re going to need to reach across the divides they tell us we can’t breach–divides of race, of faith, of geography, of sexual orientation, gender identity to build together what we want to hand off to our kids and our grandkids.”
In addition to El-Sayed, the left saw significant downballot victories in Michigan, with William Lawrence, a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement easily winning the primary for the 7th Congressional District. Abbas Alawieh. a co-founder of the Uncommitted Movement, did the same in State Senate District 2. And DSA member Yousef Rabhi defeated the incumbent Mayor of Ann Arbor, effectively ensuring his election in November. In addition, Donavan McKinney narrowly defeated incumbent Congressman Shri Thanedar. As a result, Detroit will become the first metro area entirely represented by DSA members.
The rejected power-grabs in Kansas and Missouri are significant for exposing the vast gap between GOP politicians and the people they claim to represent.
In Kansas, conservatives activists and donors were outraged that the Supreme Court upheld abortion rights in 2019, and that resident reaffirmed that in a 2022 ballot battle. So they sought “another path”—abolishing the existing non-partisan process for selecting Supreme Court justices, in place for seven decades, and replacing it with partisan elections, which can be dominated by dark money spending by out-of-state millionaires and billionaires. Voters overwhelmingly rejected the attempt, 61-39.
In Missouri, Amendment 4 was Republican’s attempt to make it harder to pass citizen-initiated measures, in respose to a series of progressive success in recent years that have protected abortion rights, expanded Medicaid, increased the minimum wage, and legalized marijuana.
The amendment would have required any future citizen initiative to gain a majority in every congressional district—which none of the measures mentioned have done. In practice, it would effectively destroy the citizen initiative in Missouri, while leaving legislative measures alone, with a simple majority requirement. Voters rejected it in another landslide, with nearly 80% of the vote.
At the same time, Missouri voters even more strongly rejected a reverse Robin Hood GOP legislative with more than 82% of the vote. The proposal would have phased out the state income tax and replaced it with expanded sales taxes—a massive shift in tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class and the poor. (The top 1% pays 3.5% in income tax, compared to 0.6% for the bottom 20%, so wealthy Missourians would benefit far more than the poor in their state with tax abolished. In contrast, the top 1% pays just 0.9% in sales tax, compared to 5.3 for the bottom 20%, so the poor would’ve stood to pay even more.)
In Kansas, Hamilton’s victory furthered a wave of wins by pastors, seminarians and former clergy running for federal office as Democrats this year. At least 12 have run this year, according to Jack Jenkins reporting for Religion News Service. With Hamilton’s victory six have become nominees, one of them in a contest where both were pastors.
As Jenkins reports, Republicans have resorted to flatly denying their faith.
“I call them PINOS,” said Iowa Republican Joe Mitchell, running against state representative Rev Lindsay James for a seat in Congres. The term is an acronym for “Pastors in Name Only,” he told Jenkins “Because they’re not real pastors, right? They don’t profess the true gospel of Jesus Christ.”
But in reality, it’s evangelicals like Mitchell who’ve strayed far from Christ’s teaching to welcome the stranger, as shown by the massive faith-based opposition to ICE, which has left evangelicals alone uncertain and divided, quoting anything they can from the bible, but never the words of Jesus.
As more religious leaders choose to run as Democrats, the actual substance of Christian faith becomes more important, as opposed to paper-thin claims of Christian identity that are poorly supported in practice.
Another development the Hamilton’s victory highlights is the potential for Democrats, or Democrat-friendly independents to win Senate seats long held by Republican in rural or rural-dominated states. In Hamilton’s case, he’s running to fill a seat that Democrats have won only once—in 1912, the first time it was decided by popular vote, and William Thompson won with 49.3%. He lost re-election six years later, and it’s been held by Republicans ever since. So if Hamilton wins, it will be truly historic. An unbelievable long-shot, Washington politicos would tell you. But the common theme of this latest round of elections is that people like them are seriously out of touch.
A prime example is the belief that a candidate like El-Sayed is at a serious disadvantage compared to the establishment candidate he beat. But recent research by UC Berkeley’s Jake Grumbach and Stanford’ Adam Bonica show this to be false.
“My research with Adam Bonica shows that, all else equal, progressive and moderate candidates perform about equally well in general elections,” Grumnbach toldRandom Lengths. “When a leftwing candidate runs in a major general election, like for a Senate seat, the press tends to frame it as the be-all and end-all test of whether moderates or leftists are more electable. But any given election, especially a close election, is determined by a million factors beyond how leftwing or moderate the candidate is–especially in the Trump era.”
El-Sayed himself has a similar view.
“They want to tell us that here in Michigan we’re a purple state,” El-Sayed said in his pre-victory speech. “That somehow everybody walks around wondering, ‘I wonder where I stand on a left right spectrum,’ when really up and down the state what you hear is, ‘I wonder how I can afford my rent. I wonder how I can afford my groceries. I don’t know what’ll happen if I get sick because I can’t afford my deductible.’”
“We are not a purple state,” he concluded. “We are a state in need of a movement to take our politics back. And despite their spending, despite their lies, told in ad, after ad, after ad, after ad on TV, we’re walking into the rest of this evening with a three-point lead.”
In the end, that lead held. And El-Sayed vowed to expand that movement to encompass everyone in the Democratic coalition and beyond, saying, “There’s more that unites us than divides us.”