The Electability Hustle
Centrist arguments about who is or isn't "electable" have always been about disciplining the Democratic base rather than actually winning elections
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By the time you’re reading this, voting will be well underway in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. At time of writing, I can’t say for certain what the result will be but the race appears to have broken wide open for insurgent challenger Abdul El-Sayed — who looks poised to defeat establishment favourite Haley Stevens by a considerable margin. That this has even become a competitive race at all, in fact, is pretty remarkable. The dark money has been flowing fast and loose and you can probably guess which candidate it’s backing. As Mother Jones here reports:
No Democratic congressional primary in history has ever attracted so much super PAC cash. The overwhelming majority of the outside money has gone toward ensuring that Stevens, a moderate, pro-Israel Democrat, defeats El-Sayed, a Bernie Sanders-endorsed champion of Medicare for All and Israel critic.
If you haven’t followed the race closely, I cannot stress enough how much it has ultimately become a retread of the Democratic presidential primaries in 2016. The difference, of course, is that in this case the insurgent challenger is a Muslim and the contest has seen Democratic alignment with Israel take centre stage. Among other things, this has often made things very ugly and evoked memories of the Clinton ‘08 campaign’s truly hideous dog-whistling strategy against Barack Obama (Stevens, incidentally, worked on said campaign).
