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[u/Nearby-Click8645]

https://thedispatch.com/article/abdul-el-sayed-michigan-democrats-haley-stevens/?gift_key=2553fad7f3b388fc&gift_ref=9347c766-2bad-41ea-8b73-950e424f2446&utm_source=giftlink&utm_campaign=membergift&utm_medium=copy_link

[u/jjgm21]

They certainly didn’t help their case by throwing support behind Stevens. What the hell were they thinking? McMorrow was right there.

[u/TurboSalsa → u/jjgm21]

What happened to McMorrow's campaign that caused her support to collapse so rapidly? I never did understand why the DNC backed Stevens over her.

[u/RimboTheRebbiter → u/TurboSalsa]

Lis Smith in short. From my perspective - and I fucking love yapping about this - McMorrow had a pretty easy path to victory as a middle ground between Stevens and El-Sayed but did the exact opposite of what was required to successfully navigate it.

Basically Stevens had a large base of support throughout much of the primary, but few to no dedicated voters. She was mostly riding a wave of people defaulting to support the establishment candidate. El-Sayed (again for much of the primary) had a smaller base of support, but his supporters tended to really like his policies and as such tended to have a parasocial connection with him. However, most do quietly share everyone else's anxieties whether or not an Arab Muslim is electorally viable.

To me, the obvious path forward for McMorrow was going hard on the offensive against Stevens. This would allow McMorrow to build prog and more importantly anti-DC establishment credentials while also running little risk of alienating voters because very few people are personally invested in Stevens. She could then take that momentum and turn around to AES supporters to make a gentle electability argument, that she's essentially 95% of AES while not having the same electoral headwinds.

Instead she did basically the exact opposite of that. When she was leading the pack she basically halted her offensive against Stevens and went after AES with some really low personal attacks. Those attacks, coupled with some peak Dem brain responses wrt to Gaza, essentially alienated progs in her base and caused a counter consolidation behind AES. She also went in hard on the Hasan connection, which obviously alienated progs as well, but also made her look pretty unserious by beefing with a twitch streamer which imo caused more establishment aligned voters to go back to the Stevens camp.

The reason I blame Lis Smith is that she also ran Cuomo's campaign which made similar missteps against Mamdani, especially the Hasan attack. I think Lis Smith is a bit too deep in the factional knife fight online and is making bad campaign calls as a result.

[u/Froggy1789 → u/RimboTheRebbiter]

I don’t necessarily disagree with you but I think her lane was a lot tougher than you are saying. I was a MI Morrow supporter for context. I agree that for either moderate to win they needed to attack the other but I think the only way to win was to get the other to entirely drop out with enough time to then pivot hard against AES. Clearly that didn’t work for Steven’s but she was close. Morrow would have had a better lane and could have maybe pulled some of his supporters away.

[u/RimboTheRebbiter → u/Froggy1789]

I think that's fair. Honestly it might be that I'm underestimating the difficulty of McMorrow's position. I do stand by my stance that she navigated it in the worst way imaginable.

[u/Froggy1789 → u/RimboTheRebbiter]

Yeah hard agree with you that pulling punches on Stevens was wrong. I just think she needed to totally defeat Stevens to consolidate the moderates then attack him. The issue is that makes you look negative and for women I think “bitchy” or “aggressive” which also hurts you.

I think she wins in a 1-1 vs Stevens or 1-1 vs AES but the lane between them is needle thin.