When the midterm election campaign began, Michigan seemed like a state that Democrats could take for granted in their pursuit of the Senate. Yes, it’s a presidential battleground state, but that makes it the kind of state that Democrats would ordinarily win easily in what seems like a strongly Democratic midterm cycle.
It’s not a state Democrats can take for granted anymore. There are clear signs that the newly minted Democratic nominee, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, could underperform a typical Democratic candidate’s vote share by enough to endanger the party’s chances.
Start with the polls. A Fox News poll released Thursday found the Republican Mike Rogers leading Dr. El-Sayed by four percentage points. This was the first poll taken since the primary and, ominously for Democrats, it’s not really any better for Dr. El-Sayed than the polls taken before the primary. In fact, Dr. El-Sayed hasn’t led in any general election poll fielded over the last month.
It’s important not to read too much into these early polls. The primary was divisive, and Dr. El-Sayed’s support could rise if Democrats consolidate around him. And Democrats have no business losing Michigan in such a favorable national political environment.
But the polls nonetheless raise the possibility that he could significantly underperform, and they aren’t the only reason to think he’s at risk of doing so. Historically, candidates of the activist left have tended to fare much worse than other Democratic candidates.
How much do progressives underperform?
Progressive and moderate analysts have been arguing for years about whether Democrats pay a meaningful electoral price when they nominate progressives.
One reason the question is challenging: It’s hard to define what, exactly, we mean by “progressive.” Under some definitions, progressives don’t fare much worse than other Democrats, with some progressive academics finding that they only do about a point worse than how a “typical” Democrat would, based on how their state or districts vote in presidential elections. Under other definitions, progressives seem to fare quite poorly.
The difference comes down to whether we’re talking about a broader group including relatively “mainstream” progressives, like Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, or a smaller group of activist-backed candidates of the progressive left, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the other members of the so-called Squad of young progressive women in Congress.
Mainstream progressives. “Progressive” is a huge category. Over half of congressional Democrats support Medicare for all; nearly half are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus; nearly half voted to cut off aid to Israel.
With this broader definition, progressives don’t seem to fare much worse than mainstream Democrats as a whole; after all, they are mainstream Democrats.
Ms. Baldwin is a good example. By any measure, she’s one of the most progressive senators. She supports Medicare for all. Nonetheless, she has a typical electoral track record. She narrowly won re-election in 2024, even as President Trump won her state.
It makes sense that Ms. Baldwin has done about as well as an ordinary Democrat. By all appearances, she is an ordinary Democrat. She runs on cheesy advertisements — pun intended in Wisconsin — about taking on bureaucrats. She never championed progressive slogans like “abolish ICE” or “defund the police”; she opposes them.
When progressive academics find that progressives do only about a point worse than other Democrats, it’s because Ms. Baldwin, Mr. Booker and many other mainstream Democrats are counted as among the most progressive Democrats in the country by their measure.
Progressive left. There’s no doubt that Ms. Baldwin or Mr. Booker are “progressive,” but they’re not always the kind of candidate that people have in mind when they refer to progressives nowadays. There’s another, narrower kind of “progressive” — a candidate of the activist progressive left, like Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad.
This isn’t an easy group to define. Clearly, the self-identified democratic socialists, like Mr. Mamdani or Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, are at the core of it, but there’s also a broader group of progressives who don’t necessarily identify as democratic socialist but who clearly stand apart from the typical progressive Democrat. They might ally themselves with the democratic socialists, define themselves in terms of their support for activist causes like Gaza or the climate, run against the Democratic Party, engage in righteous fights with Republicans, post clap-backs on social media, or champion activist slogans like “Abolish ICE” and “Defund the Police.”
These candidates of the activist left often seem to fare much worse than mainstream progressives, even though they may not be very different on the issues. The members of Justice Democrats, which includes the Squad and many of their congressional allies, fare about five points worse than other Democrats. Elizabeth Warren, who might count as part of that broader group of activist-backed progressives who aren’t democratic socialist, has underperformed the Democratic baseline in Massachusetts by as much as 10 points on net.
When relatively moderate analysts say that progressives badly underperform, it’s usually with this narrower group of activist-backed progressives in mind.
Sometimes, moderates go even further and claim the successes of mainstream progressives like Ms. Baldwin as their own. This is understandable to an extent, as Ms. Baldwin uses many of the tactics that moderates say the party should embrace, but Ms. Baldwin is no moderate. She’s a progressive. She’s an example of what progressives claim: Progressives don’t necessarily fare terribly.
But progressives have been misusing the Baldwin example as well. They do not treat her as an archetype for a successful progressive candidacy. Instead, she is treated as one of many nameless data points showing that progressives, in general, don’t suffer a major electoral penalty. This conclusion winds up being used to license nominating candidates who might bear no resemblance to Ms. Baldwin and who, instead, might be poised to underperform significantly.
Is El-Sayed going to underperform?
It can be hard to predict exactly which progressive candidates are liable to underperform, but Dr. El-Sayed has a lot of the hallmarks of the kind of progressive who has underperformed in the past.
He may not be a self-identified democratic socialist, but he’s an unapologetic ally of democratic socialists like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and the influential Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. He’s defined in part by his support for progressive causes, like opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza. To this point, he has campaigned as a firebrand, often with the language to match. He presents himself much more like the Squad than like Ms. Baldwin.
With the general election race just getting underway, there’s time for him to campaign as a more broadly acceptable nominee. Unlike the typical member of Justice Democrats, he has a real incentive to do so: He’s running in a battleground state.
But running in a battleground state carries additional risks, and there’s reason to think progressive candidates might fare even worse there. Michigan has many more moderate, white and working-class voters than the districts and states where candidates of the progressive left have recently won.
This proposition is mostly untested, as candidates of the progressive left have arguably never won a nomination in a battleground state or district before, but Ms. Warren’s performance in Massachusetts is at least consistent with this possibility. She underperforms the typical Democrat even more than the Squad does, and it might be in part because Massachusetts, while heavily Democratic, is a lot less so than Representative Pramila Jayapal’s Seattle or Representative Ilhan Omar’s Minneapolis. She performs well in the one district represented by a squad member (Ayanna Pressley), while she underperforms elsewhere in Massachusetts. It raises the possibility that candidates of the progressive left would underperform by more if they ran outside of progressive strongholds.
If there’s any good news for Dr. El-Sayed, it’s that he ought to have a lot of room to underperform and still win. With Democrats ahead by an average of seven points on the generic ballot nationwide — in which people are asked which party they’ll support for Congress in November — Democrats ought to be favored to win an open Senate race in Michigan by a similar margin. Most of the candidates of the progressive left haven’t underperformed by so much. To lose, he would need to be one of the worst electoral performers in the party. But if the early polls are any indication, it’s possible he will be.
