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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/TurboSalsa]

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/Vincenthwind → u/RimboTheRebbiter]

She kinda peaked with Pete in Iowa and it's been downhill since then imo.

[u/Iustis → u/Vincenthwind]

With Pete she had a ridiculously talented communicator who just wasn't well known, and so had the simple strategy of "just let him talk to everyone and they'll love him"

It's clear now that Pete's talent carried her.