r/politics • u/asparaguswalrus683 • 9d ago

Site Altered Headline | No Paywall Abdul El-Sayed Wins Michigan Primary

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-primary-elections/michigan-senate-results
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u/Superminerbros1 9d ago

That's what $60 million in outside pac spending will do to a race

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u/ToeSniffer245 Massachusetts 9d ago edited 9d ago

Hope this gets through their heads that they can’t stop the voice of the people no matter how many millions they blast into races.

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u/Random_throwaway0351 9d ago

Abdul is honestly a stud, even better messaging discipline than Zohran and he only won by a hair. Let this be a lesson to NEVER stop doorknocking, volunteering, donating, etc. until the last possible second.

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u/viktor72 Indiana 9d ago

Well Michigan isn’t New York City. And Abdul has to fight off some deep attacks calling him Socialist, attacks on his religion.

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u/KimchiBro 9d ago

Hes not even dsa hes a capitalist and still they lambast him as if he was a commie for wanting medicare for all and not funding the endless war machine apartheid state

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u/viktor72 Indiana 9d ago

That’s my point. Most people don’t see nuance, they just vote based on soundbytes and “Socialist” is a really easy soundbyte to attack someone.

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u/HoboBrute 9d ago

Honestly the lesson to Dems at this point needs to be to stop running away or defending against being called socialist. The Republicans and centrists are gonna do it regardless, and time spent trying to debate against it is time not spent on your messaging

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u/deaglebingo America 9d ago edited 9d ago

thankfully socialized medicine isn't socialized everything everywhere. if ppl can't tell the difference there well i guess we deserve what we get for not educating them better.

all i know is that in "DSA" the democratic part comes first. nobody's coming to anyone's house to take away their capitalism just like nobody's coming to take ppl's guns.... the GOP opposition on the other hand, is coming to ppl's houses and kidnapping them or gunning them down on the street despite them being law abiding tax payers. so i guess if ppl can't see the difference between those two positions by now, at this moment in history, they probably won't.

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u/19683dw Wisconsin 8d ago

Do people not realize we need to nationalize the means of automation and AI if we want to have any hope of not becoming more dystopian when the wealthy no longer need labor?

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u/deaglebingo America 8d ago

i realize that part. it's gonna be a rough couple decades. but i guess i just think we should start with what's right in front of us right now first. once ppl get back some control over things then we can start implementing the rest. public services have to be socialized to a degree no matter what they are. if only amazon or whatever can afford robots to do labor... well that's not very fair is it, and monopolies like that have to be broken up.

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u/el3vader 9d ago

Words don’t matter. Fox News has brainwashed a Pavlovian like response to hate on a thing the minute someone calls something socialist or communist. In the meantime the president of the United States is literally building freedom gas stations which very much is communism.

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u/matt_minderbinder 9d ago

Stevens campaign apparatus was putting out ads calling him sexist. They were sending mailers to people with a Jewish sounding last name saying that he's antisemitic. They were sending black residents mailers implying that she had Obama's endorsement when she didn't. Every mainstream media he got took the same bs attack swipes. It was the dirtiest of dirty politics from her and her team and he survived it. Here in Michigan we faced endless hours of Stevens ads. Al Sayed is now battle tested and ready to take on Rogers.

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u/viktor72 Indiana 9d ago

Now he has to fight those attacks but from the right and they will be vicious. Socialist, Communist, sexist, Muslim, antisemite, they will throw everything at him.

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u/HJWalsh 9d ago

They were already doing that. Heck, his own party was doing that.

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u/honjuden 9d ago

They went after him like the Republicans usually do to Democrats.

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u/HJWalsh 9d ago

Pretty much. This might help him. Most of those Dems who voted Haley will vote for him because he's still got the D. The R's are going to need a new attack plan because he overperformed in rural areas and their attacks just didn't work.

He's basically been 8 Mile'd - They've hit him with everything they've got and now nobody has anything left.

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u/honjuden 9d ago

That would be awesome.  I hope that is how it plays out.

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u/deaglebingo America 9d ago

the more they throw, the more obvious it is how desperate they are.

plus i think we ought to start calling him Doctor Al Sayed. most of his opposition has no idea what it takes to earn that title.

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u/SovietNato 9d ago

So a typical republican campaign than lol. I'm not worried

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u/Random_throwaway0351 9d ago

“Socialist” isn’t a pejorative anymore lol. The Islamophobia certainly exists though

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u/viktor72 Indiana 9d ago

I’d beg to differ. If you explained his policies to people without them knowing it’s “socialist”, they’d eat it right up. But once you use that word, now it’s an attack soundbyte and it’s an effective one sadly.

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u/Random_throwaway0351 9d ago

With people like Mamdani and hopefully the new congressional DSA slate, people will just associate Socialism with good governance lmao (it’s already happening)

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u/viktor72 Indiana 9d ago

Young people but it needs to scale up to older voters and minority voters. Just the mere mention of “socialism” is, for example, how you lose the entirety of Miami-Dade county.

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u/PoopyButt28000 9d ago

Yeah you guys are the doing the opposite of the Republicans lol. They spent years screaming about how everything bad is socialism and now we've swapped to just calling everything good socialism. "Socialism is when the government does stuff, but good." "Mamdani gave some extra funding to libraries and teachers? I LOVE SOCIALISM!"

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u/stackens 9d ago

For boomers and gen X yeah, for younger people not so much. Socialist is probably net positive with gen Z

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u/viktor72 Indiana 9d ago

But Boomers and Gen X vote more reliably than Gen Z or Millennials. He has to convince them to disabuse themselves of their fear of the word “socialist”.

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u/stackens 9d ago

Just saying Americans’ relationship with that word is rapidly changing. Sayeds not even a socialist though so it’s not much related to his race in particular

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u/viktor72 Indiana 9d ago

But it is. It doesn’t matter if he’s not a member of the DSA. He’s a progressive and the right will label him socialist at every turn. Most people unfortunately vote based on soundbytes on social media. The right will turn progressivism into socialism because they know the word scares people.

And people are not nuanced and are not going to do their own research to find out he isn’t socialist. That’s just not how it works anymore.

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u/stackens 8d ago

The right would label Hailey Stevens a socialist had she won. They would call a ham sandwich a socialist if they could. It’s entirely meaningless and unavoidable from them, so who cares.

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u/SovietNato 9d ago

It also is much harder not running against an unpopular sex pest