‘Voters are fed up’: Michigan primary forces Democratic party to accept leftwing shift

Standing before The Spirit of Detroit, a landmark bronze statue in the city’s downtown, in the early hours of a Wednesday morning, Abdul El-Sayed channelled boxing great Muhammad Ali. “We shook up the world,” he declared.

The 41-year-old former public health official had just delivered a knockout blow to the Democratic establishment, defeating the US congresswoman Haley Stevens to claim the party’s nomination for the Senate in swing state Michigan.

El-Sayed had campaigned on a boldly progressive agenda of universal healthcare, halting military aid to Israel and sweeping campaign finance reform. The moderate Stevens had received $60m from outside groups, including $30m from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) and its affiliates.

It was the latest and possibly biggest tremor in a political earthquake consuming the Democratic party. Its leftwing insurgency was no longer confined to deep blue coastal cities; it had breached the walls of a critical midwestern swing state. Now it is forcing a reckoning about the party’s leadership and its ideological direction ahead of the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election.

Matt Duss, executive vice-president of the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to the leftwing senator Bernie Sanders, said: “It’s dissatisfaction with the status quo. It’s dissatisfaction with the establishment. This is an anti-system moment.

“We see this not just in our country but in democracies around the world. Voters are fed up with an elite establishment that is simply not delivering for them, that doesn’t feel their pain, that doesn’t seem to know or care about their struggles, and that’s part of why Abdul succeeded.”

The past decade of US politics has been dominated by the rightwing populism of Donald Trump. But leftwing populism has been running – and flourishing – on a parallel track since Sanders’ outsider campaign for president in 2016 was ultimately beaten back by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment.

Duss added: “The 2016 Sanders campaign was sort of the Big Bang for the rebirth of the progressive left in the United States. We’ve got a lot of others who joined Bernie. We’ve got a lot of great leaders on the progressive left now and are glad to have Abdul El-Sayed run.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a bartender who was an organiser for Sanders’s 2016 campaign, pulled off a stunning upset two years later against an incumbent in New York’s 14th district, becoming, at 29, the youngest woman ever to serve in the House of Representatives. She was joined by a small but vocal group of progressives known as “the Squad”.

Sanders ran again in 2020 and, though he lost to establishment figure Joe Biden, his team had significant input into the surprisingly progressive agenda of the Biden presidency. But the events of 2024 – Biden’s abortive run for a second term, Kamala Harris’s coronation and Donald Trump’s return to power – exposed a chasm between the party leadership and the grassroots.

Last November, Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist laser focused on affordability, beat establishment favourite Andrew Cuomo to become the first Muslim mayor of New York. He then helped three insurgent candidates win Democratic primary elections in New York. The “Mamdani effect” swept through Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Washington state, Wisconsin and Washington DC.

The driving factors include frustration with Trump, the cost of living, corporate money in politics and the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Reuters/ Ipsos polling showed Israel’s favorability among Democrats plummeting from 59% in 2018 to just 22% in May 2026. The influx of Aipac money into political campaigns has become toxic for younger voters.

In Michigan, which has the highest percentage of Arab Americans relative to population, El-Sayed accused Israel of committing genocide and built his campaign around a demand to end unconditional US military aid to the country. This positioned him directly against Stevens, who defended the US-Israel relationship and benefited from massive Aipac spending.

El-Sayed’s ultimate victory – coupled with wins for progressives Will Lawrence and Donavan McKinney in House races in Michigan – marked a watershed moment, a high-stakes proof of concept challenging the myth that leftwing populists cannot win elections outside Democratic strongholds.

Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, perceives a general break within the party flowing from various sources including the “staleness” of its current leaders, Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House – both ardent supports of Israel. “Gaza and Israel has become a lightning rod for all the other issues,” he added. “There’s a sense that the Democrats have been patsies in the face of Donald Trump. When Democrats say they want to fight back, they mean it.

“Donald Trump has radicalised the Democratic party,” he said. “This revolt within the party would not have happened without Donald Trump. He is provoking a kind of earthquake, raising lots of unsettling questions within the Democratic party - its direction, its leadership, its policy priorities, its beholdenness to big donors.”

Trump has rattled the old orthodoxies that prevailed in US politics for decades. If the right can conceive a radical programme in documents such as Project 2025, why can the left not be similarly ambitious? There is little appetite to return to the pre-Trump era, a broken system that led to his rise in the first place, but rather to reimagine wealth redistribution, stronger unions, democratic reform and a just foreign policy.

Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution, a group born out of Sanders’ 2016 run, said: “You’re seeing a maturation of the progressive movement. You’re seeing the infrastructure that’s been built over a decade come into play. There’s a resonance of the message in reaction to the failed populism of the right but you’re also seeing increased sophistication in the organisation of the left.”

The rise of groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has occurred in tandem with a crisis of confidence and identity within the centrist wing of the Democratic party. At a moment when Trump paints the landscape in big and bold primary colours, the moderates are widely seen as timid incrementalists who lack ideas or superstars to compete with El-Sayed, Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez.

Geevarghese commented: “Because some of their funding depends on corporate donors, moderates have to pull punches. They are not able to articulate the causes of people’s problems. You’ve got progressives who are able to call out the corporate class and the corruption of our politics and how that affects people’s standard of living.”

Even as they recognise the ground shifting beneath their feet, progressives warn that centrists are not likely to surrender the power they enjoy courtesy of Wall Street and Silicon Valley without a fight.

Norman Solomon, director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, said: “One might say that hell has no fury like corporate Democrats scorned. I’m thrilled by the results in Michigan but at the same time I’m a bit apprehensive about the blowback from the powerful forces that have been accustomed to literally running the national Democratic party for many decades, arguably since the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was so successful at the beginning of the 1990s.”

The DLC was founded by Al From, who in 1989 handpicked Bill Clinton to steer the Democratic party toward the centre ground, creating the “Third Way” movement that was pivotal to his 1992 victory and later emulated by Tony Blair in Britain.

From reflected this week: “We’ve been focusing on beating Republicans and the democratic socialists have been focused on beating us. We’ve got to fight back. We’ve got to make it harder for them.”

When Clinton first campaigned for president, 43% of Americans thought of themselves as moderate, compared to 36% conservative and 17% liberal. That picture has changed radically in the intervening years of polarisation.

“Our formula is the right formula,” From insisted. “Obviously we’re in a different world and you have to communicate it different and you’ll need ideas that further the same underlying values, as we did, but they’ve got to be modern ideas, maybe different ideas because circumstances have changed. Our platform was for the 1990s, not for the 2030s, but the principles are the same.

“The democratic socialists want a different system. They don’t want to further democratic values. You look at their platform: they want to get rid of the Senate, the presidency, the supreme court; they want ownership of business; they want to get rid of police; they don’t want to fund the military.”

“That isn’t the historic Democratic party. It’s not the party of Roosevelt that saved capitalism and saved democracy in the world in World War II. It’s a different ideology, it’s a different party. “

The true test of viability for El-Sayed – a Rhodes scholar, doctor and son of Egyptian immigrants – will come in November when he faces Mike Rogers, a former Republican congressman, in a race that could determine the balance of power in the Senate. After an unusually rancorous campaign, El-Sayed was quick to urge “the things that unite us are so much bigger than the things that divide us,” and Stevens was equally quick to back him.

Indeed, progressives and moderates across the country are likely to maintain an uneasy co-existence for the midterms as each plays to their demographical and geographical strengths in common cause against Republicans. Trump and the House speaker, Mike Johnson, have been seeking to revive a cold war-style panic by branding democratic socialists as “radical Marxists” and “godless communists”.

Donna Brazile, a political strategist and former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, said: “The question is, can two different wings of the same party function, unify and function as a governing majority if the Democrats win the majority? I contend that the answer is yes. We’ll agree on very important matters like the economy, improving the lives of the American people, making things more affordable again and not focusing on vanity projects, so the extent that we’re all running on the same message of affordability, the answer is yes.”

But then comes 2028 and a time for choosing. The centrist group Third Way is planning a new $15m effort to discredit democratic socialism between now and the next presidential election, the New York Times reported. Some Democrats argue that progressives have won only a handful of races – albeit high-profile ones – among hundreds taking place across the country and the extent of the insurgency is exaggerated. Others believe the Michigan result means the leftwing lane just got wider.

Geevarghese commented: “All of the electoral energy and enthusiasm is on the left and, at the end of the day, for a candidate to be viable in the 2028 presidential, they’re going to have to articulate a full-throated economic populism. That’s what’s needed to make it through the primary and ultimately that’s what’s going to be needed to be the antidote to Donald Trump.”

Speculation is already swirling around who might carry the progressive banner into the next presidential primary. Mamdani, born outside the US, is not eligible to run, and said he does not want to. Congressman Ro Khanna of California, who campaigned for El-Sayed, is frequently mentioned but the most intense focus is on Ocasio-Cortez, who is 36.

Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “If I were AOC’s advisers, I would look her in the eye and say, ‘Do you want to be president? If you want it to be president, the time is now. You will never have a better chance to own a lane that wants a leader.’

“One of the things we’ve seen across the world in the last decade is young female leaders captivating the left. Why not a 39-year-old AOC?”