Just before Dr. Abdul El-Sayed edged out a win for the Democratic Party’s Michigan Senate nomination — a result that once looked unlikely before it began to feel unstoppable — he appeared alongside polarizing online commentator Hasan Piker and took a swipe at one of the best-known strategists in Democratic politics.
‘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 sounding the alarm over El-Sayed’s rise, arguing in characteristically blunt fashion that the party may not be big enough for both his brand of politics and El-Sayed’s insurgent progressive movement.
Like a number of moderate and establishment Democrats, Carville has pointed to El-Sayed’s most controversial policy positions, including support for defunding the police, abolishing ICE, ending private health insurance and cutting off U.S. military aid to Israel.
El-Sayed’s ties to Piker have only intensified those concerns among critics, particularly given the streamer’s past comment: ‘America deserved 9/11, dude. [Expletive] it, I’m saying it.’
Yet as Democratic leaders begin, however uneasily, to line up behind their nominee — with the Michigan Senate race viewed as essential to the party’s hopes of winning a majority in the next chamber — there is an uncomfortable irony in Carville’s crusade: El-Sayed’s campaign may owe more to Carville’s own political playbook than the veteran strategist would care to admit.
Carville’s Campaign Playbook
After all, the famous Little Rock war room that Carville ran during Bill Clinton’s trailblazing 1992 presidential campaign offered a three-part blueprint that now appears strikingly relevant to El-Sayed’s Michigan campaign.
“It’s the economy, stupid” remains the line most closely associated with Carville’s strategy, but the two lesser-remembered pieces of that message help explain the political tremors now being felt in Michigan and beyond, as the socialist-aligned wing of the Democratic Party gains new momentum.
‘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.
Money in Politics
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.
‘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 [expletive] 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.
The Rise of Left-Wing Populism
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.
What It Means For Both Parties
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.
