SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
On Monday, congresswoman Haley Stevens held an event at a brewery in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on her final night of campaigning to become the state’s Democratic candidate for the US Senate.
That same evening, Pux Cider Taphouse issued an apology on Instagram. It said it thought the function was associated with Democratic Party women, not Stevens.
“We are heartbroken as we pride ourselves on being not only a queer friendly space, but have also advocated and continue to call for a free Palestine,” the venue said. “We do NOT endorse Haley Stevens … In the future we will be more vigilant.”
Grand Rapids is hardly Brooklyn or San Francisco in its politics. But Democrats there comfortably preferred Abdul El-Sayed, the insurgent left-winger, to Stevens, the establishment moderate. They helped him become the first Muslim to be endorsed by the Democratic Party for the US Senate.
The progressive wing of the Democrats has been growing for years, most notably in New York with congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and mayor Zohran Mamdani. But now, its candidates are winning in Colorado, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Some are avowed democratic socialists, and it is shaping up to be an election-defining trend.
In the hours after El-Sayed’s narrow win on Wednesday (US time), Republicans unleashed a torrent of negative ads. One featured left-wing internet streamer Hasan Piker, a friend and ally of El-Sayed, saying: “America deserved 9/11, dude. F— it, I’m saying it.”
Mike Rogers, the Republican who will vie for the seat against El-Sayed in November, captioned the video: “You are who your friends are, and Abdul El-Sayed’s are radical leftists who hate America.”
Republicans have begun using his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, a trick he has dismissed as cheap and ineffective Islamophobia. But the GOP’s strategy – tying El-Sayed to the excesses of the broader progressive and far-left movement – is likely to stick.
Examples are not hard to come by. Next week, Democrats in nearby Wisconsin will select their candidate for state governor. The forerunner is 37-year-old assemblywoman Francesca Hong, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, which wants to abolish the US Senate and the presidency.
In 2020, Hong called for Thanksgiving to be cancelled. “Should have done this in 1621,” she said on Twitter, now called X. “If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realise we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed Indegenous [sic] folx [sic] and women so be it.”
Thanksgiving is one of America’s most treasured holidays, typically celebrated by meals with family and friends. Asked this week on CNN whether she still believed it should be scrapped, Hong did not say “no”. She gave a confusing answer about her background as a chef and how Thanksgiving could be “incredibly painful” for many people.
A day later, she told Politico that it was her favourite holiday, claimed the post was a joke and said she did not want it to be cancelled.
Such matters are far from the main issues facing people in America’s midwest – the cost of living, unaffordable healthcare, jobs, the opioid crisis – but they make it clear to voters that this crop of progressive Democrats is often well outside the mainstream.
That’s not to say they are out of whack on everything. Indeed, polls show Americans increasingly think the US supports Israel too much – especially Democrats. They are deeply suspicious of the influence of private money in politics, including that which comes via the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the dominant pro-Israel lobby group.
On those issues, El-Sayed is in line with his party’s base, and closer to the average American than his establishment rivals.
He ran a disciplined campaign – like Mamdani – with a tripartite slogan centred on Michiganders: “Money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for all.”
It is utopian and simplistic, but it cut through. And he backed away from his previous statements about defunding the police.
Progressive Democratic strategist Douglas Farrar says El-Sayed’s victory was an “unbelievable achievement in American politics”, given how critical funding usually is to election outcomes.
“The people of Michigan have spoken,” he says. “And what they said is: we don’t want corporate money, we don’t want AIPAC money and we don’t want establishment candidates peddling the same old boring stuff.”
Farrar is not convinced that by choosing candidates like El-Sayed, Democrats are making it harder for themselves to defeat Republicans in November.
“The electability argument is not holding up these days,” Farrar says. “What people want is change – and they don’t trust the establishment Democrats to deliver on that.”
That might be true in a Democratic primary. But can the same be said for independent voters in a swing state? We’ll find out in three months.
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Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.
