On the night before Dr. Abdul El-Sayed narrowly captured Michigan’s Democratic nomination for Senate — a once-unlikely outcome that had come to feel increasingly unavoidable — he appeared alongside controversial online commentator Hasan Piker and took aim at one of the party’s best-known strategists.
“Why does anybody still listen to James Carville,” El-Sayed said Monday. “He said one smart thing once…”
Carville, the famed “Ragin’ Cajun” who helped define modern Democratic campaigning, has spent days railing against El-Sayed, arguing in effect that the party’s coalition may not be big enough for both men, no matter how expansive Democrats claim their tent has become.
Like many centrists in the party, Carville has voiced alarm over El-Sayed’s more polarizing positions, including his support for defunding the police, abolishing ICE, eliminating private health insurance and ending U.S. military aid to Israel.
El-Sayed’s association with Piker has only intensified those worries, particularly given Piker’s past remark: “America deserved 9/11, dude. F*** it, I’m saying it.”
Yet as Democratic leaders begin, however uneasily, to line up behind their nominee — with Michigan seen as essential to the party’s hopes of winning a Senate majority — Carville may have more in common with El-Sayed than he would care to admit.
In a twist, the Little Rock, Arkansas, campaign “war room” that Carville ran for Bill Clinton’s trailblazing 1992 presidential bid offered something close to a blueprint for El-Sayed’s own Michigan campaign.
“It’s the economy, stupid” remains the most famous line from Carville’s three-part campaign mantra. But the other two pieces are just as revealing in understanding the political shockwave now unfolding in Michigan — and the broader rise of the socialist-aligned flank of the Democratic Party.
As members of the Democratic Party reluctantly rally around El-Sayed, it is worth recognizing that James Carville has more in common with El-Sayed than he may like to acknowledge
‘Why does anybody still listen to James Carville,’ El-Sayed said on Monday in an appearance with Hasan Piker. ‘He said one smart thing once…’
‘Change versus more of the same.’
‘Don’t forget health care.’
Those were Carville’s other two catchphrases, and they are every bit as relevant to El-Sayed’s victory (and his chances to beat his Republican opponent Mike Rogers in the November general election) as they were to Clinton’s march to the White House.
El-Sayed’s mantra throughout the Michigan primary – ‘Get money out of politics, put money in your pocket, and pass Medicare for All’ – is simply an updated version of the Carville credo.
Political sources in both parties tell me that El-Sayed’s focus on special interest cash in government and campaigns is likely the main reason he beat out the establishment pick, Congresswoman Haley Stevens, and why he may well defy most expectations and win the Senate seat in the fall.
Much will be made of the candidates’ divide over Israel, with Stevens a longtime advocate of support for the Jewish state and El-Sayed a strong and vocal opponent, or of the fact that the Congresswoman, with her pronounced regional drawl and earnest entreaties on the stump, was a lackluster performer for most of the race, while her opponent displayed virtually nonstop dynamism.
Any reasonable back-of-the-envelope calculation and a gander at the shriveled public support for Israel within the Democratic Party electorate will tell you that the tens of millions spent on Haley’s behalf – no less than $30 million by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC – to defeat El-Sayed were a net negative for her.
The financial support provided a real-world use case for the doctor to cite as proof of his core contention that big-monied special interests are constantly trying to buy their desired outcome from pliant government officials.
El-Sayed’s denunciation of the influence of special interest money is a loud echo of Donald Trump’s effective 2016 maxim, ‘drain the swamp.’ El-Sayed aimed his indictment equally at Republicans and his own party, calling out Democrats for their addiction to establishment cash, painting a system of corruption and special favors that elevate, in his artful phrase, the money over the many.
The Ragin’ Cajun, has been ranting and, yes, raging for days about El-Sayed, suggesting there is not room for both of them in his party’s coalition, no matter how big a tent it has grown to be
The Little Rock, Arkansas war room over which Carville presided for Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential campaign provided the triptych roadmap for El-Sayed’s campaign
Mark Halperin is the editor-in-chief and host of the interactive live video platform 2WAY and the host of the video podcast ‘Next Up’ on the Megyn Kelly Network
‘Both parties take money from all the same people to do all the same errands when they get elected and then no one can afford s*** and then we wonder why everyone’s mad,’ El-Sayed said Monday in his appearance with Piker as Michiganders went to the polls.
The vast majority of elites, politicians and strategists of both parties, along with the journalists that cover them, will not register the resonance of this thesis.
They are inured to the system.
As Democratic strategist Paul Rivera recently noted in a dissection of the insulated Biden-Harris 2024 presidential campaign, consultants and lobbyists in DC have become ‘generationally wealthy off politics’ and resultingly myopic.
El-Sayed’s patron saint, Vermont Senator and two-time presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has toiled inside the Beltway for years, but he perceives what El-Sayed perceives, along with those who voted in Michigan on Tuesday.
‘The American people know that our country today is moving in a very, very bad direction,’ Sanders said on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ this past weekend, ‘at a time when we have more income and wealth inequality than we’ve ever had in the history of America.
‘What’s going on now makes the Gilded Age of Rockefeller look like an egalitarian utopia… And then you look at the Democratic Party leadership, which also gets their money, like the Republicans, from very wealthy people. And people are saying [of the Democratic and Republican leadership] no – they’re out of touch. We need a government that works for all people and not just for wealthy campaign contributors.’
The rise of left-wing populism mirrors almost precisely the rise of the Tea Party movement in 2010 and of Trump and MAGA in 2015. The Democratic establishment seems every bit as oblivious to the trajectory and velocity of the overthrow of the existing order.
They haven’t even begun to consider the ‘why’ of it.
The tens of millions spent on Haley’s behalf – no less than $30 million by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC – to defeat El-Sayed were a net negative for her
‘Both parties take money from all the same people to do all the same errands when they get elected and then no one can afford s*** and then we wonder why everyone’s mad,’ El-Sayed said Monday
Most Democratic elites will get in line and back El-Sayed, but that same group will stay in denial about why El-Sayed won, how scared and disgusted many Democratic party voters are and how closely they associated business-as-usual in Washington with the struggles they face in their everyday lives.
Naïve Republicans are no better. Those who smugly dismiss the chances of El-Sayed and other Sanders-backed candidates against their nominees in the fall, bring to mind the Democrats who rolled their eyes at the possibility that Trump would win in 2016 or 2024.
Sharper GOPers, however, see the danger. They know a movement is more powerful than a campaign. They know that their party is, in some ways, more divided than that of their opponents who appear poised to rally around El-Sayed, with only a few voices of dissent.
For their part, the Republicans are facing a covey of disputes, divisions and disruptions, some personal, some procedural, some political – and all quite pointed.
Those battle royales include Trump versus his party’s Senate leader, John Thune; conflict over former Trump aide and now Ohio Congressman Max Miller, embroiled in a public fight over allegations of spousal and child abuse; endangered Republican-held Senate seats, including in Texas, where some big party donors are not opening their wallets for controversial candidate Ken Paxton; and a generalized party anxiety over the president’s approval rating, the quagmire of Iran, gas prices and citizen malaise.
The outcome of this election in November, in Michigan and nationwide, remains very much in doubt. There are crosscurrents across the country. But it appears that the populists are on the march and the establishment in both parties, whether they recognize it or not, are in retreat at the tip of some very sharp pitchforks.
