OPINION:
The big winner of the Michigan Democratic primary for U.S. Senate on Tuesday night was … wait for it … former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, who won the Republican nomination.
That’s because radical leftist Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination with less than 50% of his party’s primary vote in one of the largest and most important swing states.
The Democratic Party establishment’s choice, four-term U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, together with a third Democrat—who had withdrawn from the race a month earlier, but whose name remained on the ballot—got more votes combined than did Mr. El-Sayed.
With an estimated 98.7% of the vote reported as counted as of midafternoon Wednesday, Mr. El-Sayed held a slender lead of just 1 percentage point: 740,966 votes, or 48.5%, to Ms. Stevens’ 726,068, or 47.5%. (That minuscule margin belied an Emerson College poll released July 30 that found Mr. El-Sayed leading Ms. Stevens comfortably, 54% to 39% with 6% undecided.)
Despite having dropped out on July 5, apparently too late to be removed from the ballot, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow still garnered 4.0% with 61,252 votes, far more than Mr. El-Sayed’s margin of victory, about 15,000.
Ms. McMorrow’s tally can’t be attributed to pre-exit early voting, since early voting didn’t begin until July 25, some 20 days after the state senator quit the race. One is left to conclude that her voters didn’t much like either Mr. El-Sayed or Ms. Stevens—and cast their ballots in protest accordingly.
So, as the saying goes, “the math isn’t mathing” for Mr. El-Sayed, a Muslim and a vicious critic of Israel whose detractors have derided him as the would-be senator from Hamas. He has accused Israel of “apartheid” and “genocide” in Gaza.
His win was razor-thin, and it came despite—or more likely, because of—his having been endorsed by many of the usual far-left and socialist suspects: Sen. Bernie Sanders, Vermont independent; Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. He also campaigned with radical leftist influencer Hasan Piker, who hatefully opined that “America deserved 9/11” and who called the late Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong, history’s greatest mass murderer, “one of the great leaders of this world.”
As the saying goes, “With friends like that, who needs enemies?”
Democratic strategist Lis (cq) Smith on the PBS “NewsHour” on Wednesday night called Mr. El-Sayed’s win “a massive loss for the [Democratic] establishment” and said that the party is facing “an identity crisis.”
Mr. El-Sayed’s victory bodes well for Mr. Rogers—who lost a 2024 Senate race by an even narrower margin, just 0.3 of 1%—in this fall’s contest for the open Senate seat being vacated by Democratic Sen. Gary Peters.
If the Democrats’ nominee can’t win a majority of his own party’s primary voters, it’s hard to see how he can win the general election in November.
If Democrats can’t hold the Michigan seat, it makes it considerably less likely that they can retake majority control of the Senate in the midterms in November. And it would be better for the country if they didn’t.
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