Eoin Higgins is the author of “Own: How the Right’s Tech Billionaires Bought the Left’s Loudest Voices.”
Puma spirit Back. In 2008, the Democratic protest movement was enraged by supporters of Hillary Clinton who believed that Barack Obama had stolen the nomination from their primary candidate, who despised his general election campaign and embraced the slogan “Party unity, my ass.”
This time, that energy is directed at candidates favored by the Democratic Socialists of America.
Progressives aligned with the DSA have won multiple party primaries and will help Democrats gain a majority in Congress. But once in power, they are likely to make demands — demands that could upend decades of carefully crafted policymaking that favors donors.
For moderate Democrats, “party unity” is simply a goal worth pursuing in order to bully the left wing of the party into aligning with their preferred candidate.
For moderate Democrats, “party unity” is simply a goal worth pursuing in order to bully the left wing of the party into aligning with their preferred candidate. It’s another thing entirely when they come out and vote for someone who may have different goals, and some centrists even want Republicans to win the House this November if the alternative is to empower DSA Democrats.
James Carville was a rigid Cajun strategist who was involved in Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 national political campaign to win the White House. He told The Bulwark podcast on Sunday that he would prefer a firm Republican control of Congress rather than a narrow Democratic majority.
“If it gets 225 seats in the House, I’ll be disappointed,” Carville told host Bill Kristol. “I would rather the Republicans hold on to the House by 5 than the Democrats win by 5, because if that happens, they become hostages to the DSA.”
To her credit, Kristol was promoting Sarah Palin in her PUMA moment, but now that he calls himself a Democrat, it shows that people know how the wind can change. Kristol fired back, saying he would rather win.
Carville is the first of his cohorts to explicitly call for a Republican win rather than more power for the party’s left wing, but he’s not the only centrist to downplay Republican prospects in November.
Maine Gov. Janet Mills has yet to endorse Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson since she lost to the now-disgraced Graham Plattner. (Mills and Jackson have a long and bitter history with state government, which may have played a role.)
Perhaps most importantly, in Michigan, Democratic Senate candidate Abdul-Sayed has faced an uphill battle since winning his party’s tough primary. He is now focused on winning the election and becoming the first Muslim U.S. senator, but the boycott of his candidacy remains a concern.
Much of the difficulty comes from members of his own party and other liberals. Their distaste for a candidate whose positions are not all that inconsistent with the rest of the caucus raises questions about what is so objectionable about him. El-Sayed may lean toward the progressive wing of the party, but he is not a socialist and is not a member of the DSA; his stance on domestic policy should put him alongside supporters of Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Until recently, much of the outrage after El-Sayed’s early August primary was limited to X and occasional cable news coverage.
That changed on Oct. 16, when David Kramer and Lon Johnson, two of the most powerful figures in the Michigan Democratic Party, urged voters in an op-ed in the Detroit News to leave El-Sayed’s seat open, effectively handing the Senate seat to Mike Rogers, one of the Republicans who denied being a Senate elector.
The article linked El-Said to Islamic extremists and suggested that his opposition to Israel’s genocide, war crimes and occupation was based on hatred of the Jewish diaspora.
“Our most serious concerns are El-Sayed’s ties to figures who excuse or downplay terrorism, his reluctance to explicitly condemn dangerous rhetoric, and his support for extreme policies,” Cramer and Johnson wrote. “In an era of rising anti-Semitism, Democrats deserve leadership that unequivocally rejects rhetoric that threatens the Jewish community.”
Comedian Mike Drucker accurately described the centrist rejection of El-Sayed on Tuesday as “no matter who is blue,” and “unless brown, blue.”
But the panic among Democratic leaders like Carville, Cramer, Johnson, and others goes beyond their explicit Islamophobia—they can see the writing on the wall far beyond Michigan. It’s a full-blown existential crisis.
Former Intercept writer Jon Schwarz once opined about what he calls the Iron Law of Institutions: “Those who control institutions are concerned first and foremost with their power within the institution, not with the power of the institution itself.”
What we are seeing now is ironclad white blood cells fighting what they see as a threat that cannot be easily integrated into existing power structures. This poses a threat to their status and power.
Their attacks on the left will backfire, leaving the center of the Democratic Party less powerful than before.
This result is ideal for the party, the grassroots, and the country. For centrists, this is a disaster—but they can’t get that far if the way to stop them from becoming irrelevant is to vote for progressive American Muslims who oppose genocide.
In the end, all their complaints may not matter. El-Sayed has regularly polled slightly ahead of Rogers, with 95% of Michigan Democrats saying they plan to vote for him. Like Jackson in Maine, if El-Sayed wins, he will be less influenced by those in the party’s power structure who are desperately trying to prove he needs them, rather than the other way around.