Democratic primary voters are not casting safe ballots. They are voting with their hearts, and their hearts are with the socialists.
Four years ago, Mallory McMorrow wasn’t just a rising star within Michigan’s Democratic Party but a “role model” that every Democrat in America was meant to emulate.
Democratic luminaries hailed her forthright speaking style and her ability to appeal to voters like her: “straight, white, Christian, married, suburban” moms, according to McMorrow’s description of herself. But the grassroots energy that once buttressed the Democratic “resistance” has since been captured by the socialist intifada.
Over the holiday weekend, McMorrow cut her own promising rise short when she dropped out of the race for U.S. Senate in Michigan. She was already a “long shot for the nomination,” PBS reported. The maneuver now presents Michigan Democrats with a binary choice between the establishmentarian Democrat in the race, Representative Haley Stevens, and Democratic Socialist Abdul El-Sayed.
If McMorrow’s goal is to consolidate the field of candidates in a last-minute bid to scuttle El-Sayed’s candidacy, the maneuver is unlikely to succeed. And perhaps that wasn’t McMorrow’s goal. After all, she made the move only after the absentee ballots for Michigan’s August 4 primary were printed and distributed.
But even if she had withdrawn from the race with more time to affect its outcome, Democrats in Michigan are not confronted with a collective action problem in which the radical candidate is exploiting persistent divisions within the party establishment. Rather, Democrats are confronting the fact that socialism is the affirmative choice of a new generation of Democrats.
“A poll conducted for a pro-El-Sayed super PAC, shared with Semafor, shows the former Detroit public health official up 54-34 over Stevens, narrowly winning most of McMorrow’s supporters,” reporter David Weigel revealed Monday. Even if you take the internal polling from the El-Sayed camp with a grain of salt, the result is consistent with other polling showing Sayed with a substantial lead over Stevens (albeit a smaller one) as McMorrow faded from the race.
Some progressive partisans have made a half-hearted effort to argue that El-Sayed is the most electable candidate in the race. “They believe he would pull stronger turnout from the left and may be able to win back the state’s Arab American voters in Dearborn who declined to support former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024,” Newsweek reported. Those on the left who have convinced themselves that the Biden administration’s hostility toward Israel wasn’t pronounced enough for the activist class, costing the party Michigan’s electoral votes, are set to test that proposition at the ballot box.
A recent Quantus Insights polling memo indicates, however, that the “fight” for Michigan’s Senate seat will be fought “in the middle” of the electorate. While Stevens “shows the broadest general-election profile,” El-Sayed has a pathway to victory by maximizing turnout among urban and minority voters while capturing enough disaffected independents to “offset Rogers’ advantage with white, rural, and non-college voters.” Stevens is, however, the safer bet. She polls better among older voters, who are guaranteed to turn out, and even outperforms El-Sayed among voters aged 18 to 29, who may not show up on Election Day at all.
Democratic primary voters are not casting safe ballots. They are voting with their hearts, and their hearts are with the socialists.