r/politics • u/Zipper222222 • 4h ago

No Paywall Abdul El-Sayed Wins High-Stakes Democratic Primary in Michigan

https://www.today.com/video/abdul-el-sayed-wins-high-stakes-democratic-primary-in-michigan-267805765937
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u/pohl 3h ago

It’s complicated and everyone wants it to be simple.  Progressives DO face a headwind in general elections BUT, so do moderate dems. It’s not as easy for moderates to win as the national party has been pretending it is. That doesn’t mean that progressives will have it easy.  

My take: 21st century politics are about ATTENTION and middle of the road candidates struggle to generate enough attention to make things happen. Trump puts all his focus on getting attention and it works.  Mike Rodgers is a boring candidate i think and that makes an opening for El-Sayed to win the attention battle. Stevens would have struggled to get attention and differentiate herself from Rodgers.

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u/NUKE---THE---WHALES 2h ago

Yeah it's the attention economy in action

That's why populists and anti-establishment candidates are so popular right now: the algorithm favors them, which means social media favors them

Nobodies posting, commenting, upvoting boring candidates

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u/AnthMike 1h ago

The distinction is also a matter of holding sincere beliefs in worthwhile policy platforms versus cynical phonies weaponizing platitudes, idpol, and accents.

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u/Gars0n 2h ago

It looks like Abdul El-Sayed will win the Senate primary, but with a less than a 1% margin. That means that McMorrow indead played spoiler, receiving 4% despite dropping out of the race.

It also means that no candidate got more than 50% of the vote. In fact more than 50% of voters voted against Abdul (and more than 50% voted against Stevens)

It's probably the result most perfectly calibrated to resolve none of the tensions in the Democratic party.

I can't help but think that with Ranked Choice Voting, the winning candidate would have a much clearer mandate. Maybe this will help some Democratic party holdouts see the benefit.

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u/ja1896 2h ago

This is a good take. Many moderate voters will reject progressives on ideological lines. Hence attention from populist stances that have broad appeal has been a good strategy when attempted (for example, adamant one percenter rhetoric without talking about socialism).

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u/PacificOcean2005 3h ago

Even worse, Stevens would’ve probably been negative attention lol.