Populist Abdul El-Sayed shocked the Democratic Party establishment by beating an incumbent Congresswoman for a Senate nominating contest, despite being outspent nine to one. What comes now?
| Matt Stoller Aug 5, 2026 |
There is a rebellion afoot in America. Last night, there was a Senate primary election in Michigan, and while there are frequent elections these days to choose candidates for political parties, this race was generally understood by political insiders as the most important contest in terms of setting the economic and political direction of the Democratic Party. And the anti-monopolist side narrowly won.
The candidates were a doctor and public health official named Abdul El-Sayed, and a Congresswoman named Haley Stevens, who had worked for Obama during the auto rescue. Stevens was the candidate of the establishment, endorsed by the Governor, the incumbent Senator (Gary Peters), and Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer. She had $60 million of outside corporate or AIPAC spending, perhaps the largest amount ever spent in Michigan, a nine to one advantage. Her argument was that a moderate was best-equipped to oppose Trump, while pressing for incremental change and retaining traditional U.S. relationships in the Middle East.
El-Sayed, by contrast, ran on Medicare for All and getting money out of politics, as well as ending U.S. funding for Israel. He frequently used the slogan, “Money out of politics, money in your pocket.” And that platform was enough to overcome the immense wealth and prestige put on the line against him.
There were a number of similar outcomes in other races last night; two Democratic socialists won primaries in Michigan as well, one toppling the incumbent Congressman Shri Thanedar.
And these results, especially El-Sayed’s win, are quite shocking. One thing has always been true about the Democratic Party in my experience over the last twenty years, and that is that Democratic leaning voters have tended to support their Democratic leaders. They rarely vote out incumbents, and they usually pick the safe moderate choice endorsed by party leaders and establishment publications like the New York Times.
But since 2024, that dynamic has changed. Democratic voters are angry and want something different. So far this year, four incumbent Democratic House members have lost to challengers. It had been rare enough for even one to lose, and usually beating an incumbent required immense amounts of focus and money. This time, an incumbent Colorado Democratic Senator, John Hicklooper, almost lost to a challenger who barely ran a campaign. So this shift is a big deal.
The current framing of the political insider class is to characterize the wins as emanating from the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA. And there’s a reason for that; Bernie Sanders is a DSA member, and he’s been endorsing a number of the challengers, including El-Sayed. But El-Sayed is not actually a socialist. He is, by his own words, an anti-monopolist. Here’s a response to a question in the New Yorker in which he was asked about his political philosophy, in which he says just that.
Abdul, your name has been connected quite often with the kind of left-leaning energy in the Party—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani. And yet you have not joined the Democratic Socialists—the D.S.A. Why not?
Too much of a scientist, I guess. I’m a capitalist who reads about capitalism. And when you read about capitalism, it is very clear, even to the originators who coined the idea, that the biggest risk to capitalism was not going to be government regulation, as much as the corporatists want you to think it is. It was always going to be monopoly. And we know that hyper-capitalism tends toward monopoly. We also understand that that happens in part because, when a corporation gets big enough, it has enough power to start “rent seeking,” which is a fancy way of saying influencing government action to protect its own interests. And that’s the place we are right now in capitalism. I think small business is amazing. I think it’s a really efficient way to move capital into the areas where it can be really efficient to create a lot of jobs. I’m just not a socialist. And so I want capitalism to work the way it was supposed to work, not the way that the corporations tell us it’s supposed to work.
Seven months ago, El-Sayed released a video about frozen food giant Sara Lee’s acquisition of Chef Pierre pies. Michigan grows about 70% of the country’s tart cherries, so the consolidation of food processing companies like Sara Lee hit the farmers. El-Sayed’s main point was that the underlying increases in groceries Americans are facing are a result of corporate power, the mergers that increase the pricing power of the processed food giants. The story he is telling, from money in politics to mergers, is about the excesses of corporate power.
And while a lot of his approach has been boiled down to “Medicare for All,” he has taken a broad position against hospital mergers, and supports Elizabeth Warren’s and Josh Hawley’s Break Up Big Medicine Act, to take apart companies like UnitedHealth Group, CVS and giant drug wholesalers. There is a real coherence here, at least on policy.
Part of his platform in the agricultural space is to cap subsidies to big farms, and to move Federal funding away from the corn/soy standard and towards specialty crops. He also supports a national right to repair law.
A touchstone issue, for El-Sayed and the insurgents across the board, is an intense focused on ending U.S. funding and military support for Israel, a parallel in some ways of how the right criticized Joe Biden as focused on Ukraine instead of problems at home. When El-Sayed, the son of Egyptian immigrants, was framed as hostile to American foreign policy interests, he took an America First approach, arguing that he wanted taxpayer money from people in Michigan spent in Michigan.
While there is a lot of commentary about this race, a year ago, very few people would have predicted that El-Sayed would have won the primary. But that was also true about Zohran Mamdani in New York City, and he had a shocking upset victory last summer against a similarly better funded and supported establishment candidate, Andrew Cuomo.
There’s still the general election, but political insiders on both sides of the aisle, whatever they might say publicly, think there’s a wave coming against the GOP. So these primary wins are more important than simple political contests. They show that the Democratic voting base wants a different political economy framework, and that means Democratic candidates next cycle, including Presidential candidates, will try to appeal to them using some of the same arguments that these insurgents used.
To put it differently, the Democrats are undergoing some of the same changes that happened to the GOP. Donald Trump in 2016 represented a break from the old Bush corporatist approach. But Democrats at the time did not do a rethink.
Joe Biden invited some populists into his administration, recognizing that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren had pull in the party. But Democrats by and large continued with the Obama-era attitude that big tech was mostly benign. And the important stuff, at Treasury, the Fed, and Commerce, was still run by Wall Street. For instance, the most important economic official, private equity baron Jay Powell, was appointed to run the Federal Reserve by Trump and then reappointed by Biden.
Moreover, populists had to clothe their agenda in technocratic garb, pretending that it was consistent with the social issue-focused Wall Street philosophy determining the big stuff. The health care antitrust work did not mesh with the lack of interest from Biden policymakers at the Health and Human Services Department. The industrial policy didn’t deliver the jobs and was at cross-purposes with high financing costs meant to tamp down on inflation.
The result was incoherence. Working people felt left behind. The number of billionaires in America doubled due to Biden’s Federal Reserve, while Wall Street and Silicon Valley elites were furious over antitrust policy and consumer protection choices
The cause of this incoherence was the politics. Primary voters, and thus the political leaders in Congress, did not consider economic questions meaningful. They were too in thrall to supporting their leaders funded by big business. And so the Democratic Party, from mayors to Congressional leaders to the White House, just did not prioritize the problem of corporate power.
But after the 2024 electoral fiasco, the primary voters themselves are in revolt. And so the question is whether this time, the politics and the voters will support an actual attempt to constrain corporate power. If the voters do care, then so will the politicians. What insurgent victories suggest is that the attitude of voters is changing. That is not just a result of anger at their own leaders, but also a result of changes in the economy. They are hostile to big tech and data centers, and feel cheated as the cost of living goes up.
Moreover, the transformation on the right, as it turns out, has not taken. Trump has made some changes from the Bush era, but he still prioritizes Wall Street and wars in the Middle East. The result is that he is running into the same buzzsaw of every incumbent presiding over a dislikable status quo. Change elections have become routine. In 2006, 2008, 2010, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024, and likely 2026, one or both houses of Congress changed parties. That’s twenty solid years of “throw the bums out.” Trump broke a lot of norms, but he didn’t break that one.
At some point, someone will get elected and deliver. Perhaps it will be this set of populist Democrats. I can see the outlines of a new and much better society they might create, but I also have my doubts that they will be able to figure out what levers to pull. Regardless, what we learned last night is they will likely get their chance to try in the next few years.
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cheers,
Matt Stoller
