Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan for the Democratic left, and in the same nine days it lost Wisconsin and St Louis

Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate in Michigan. Bridge Michigan reported the win over Representative Haley Stevens on 5 August 2026, and Michigan Public described the victory as narrow. El-Sayed ran for governor in 2018 and finished second to Gretchen Whitmer with 342,179 votes to 588,436. He was endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who appeared together at a rally in Lansing in July 2026. He says he is the only candidate running for the Senate in Michigan who has never taken a dime of corporate money, and he runs on Medicare for All, campaign finance reform, a higher marginal rate on earnings above $1 million and a tax on wealth above $1 billion. Michigan Public describes him as the first Muslim nominated by the Democratic Party to run for the United States Senate, and he will face the Republican Mike Rogers in November.

That is an obvious candidate for the night the party's left broke through. The trouble with that reading is the week that followed it.

On 11 August, Wisconsin Democrats chose David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, as their nominee for governor over Francesca Hong, a Madison state representative and the candidate of the left. Wisconsin Public Radio, which reported the Associated Press call at 2.34am on 12 August, described the result as a narrow upset. Crowley had suspended his campaign on 8 July and re-entered it on 18 July with the backing of Governor Tony Evers, whose endorsement tripled Crowley's late July fundraising. Recent polls, WPR reported, had shown Hong leading by anywhere from 20 to 30 percentage points. Crowley's own framing rejected the frame the race was given: this election is not about insiders versus outsiders, he said, it is not about the establishment versus progressives. Hong conceded by telling supporters that Wisconsin had built something that will change politics forever. Representative Tom Tiffany won the Republican nomination.

In Wisconsin's congressional primaries the same day, the pattern held. Representative Mark Pocan easily defeated Douglas Alexander in the second district. Representative Gwen Moore easily held off Amy Donahue in the fourth. Rebecca Cooke won the third district nomination and will face Derrick Van Orden again after losing to him by 2.7 points in 2024. Incumbents were not swept out.

A week earlier, in Missouri's primary on 4 August, Representative Wesley Bell beat the former congresswoman Cori Bush in the first district, the rematch of the 2024 contest that removed her from Congress. St Louis Public Radio's Jason Rosenbaum reported on 5 August that Bell's victory was convincing and that money was the wrinkle, with Bush unable to rebut advertising from Bell and allied groups that ran across streaming platforms including Hulu. On the same ballot, Missouri voters rejected Amendment 5, Governor Mike Kehoe's plan to replace income tax with expanded sales tax, by more than 80 per cent statewide and in every county in the state, a margin one consultant called the worst defeat ever for a ballot initiative with an organised pro side. State Senator Curtis Trent, who handled the amendment in the Senate, lost his own primary to Lori Rook.

So three big Democratic contests in nine days produced one clear win for the left, in the state where its candidate had a decade of public profile and a national fundraising base, and two losses in states where the establishment candidate had institutional backing and money. Neither the takeover story nor the flop story survives that contact. What the results have in common is more prosaic than ideology: in Missouri the better funded candidate won, in Wisconsin the candidate a sitting governor put his machine behind won from 20 points down, and in Michigan the candidate with the larger small dollar operation won a close race.

Michigan also produced a number that should be read carefully. Michigan Public reported that more than 2.5 million people turned out in the state's primary and that there was a big gap between the number of Democrats and the number of Republicans who voted. Primary turnout is a measure of contested races as much as of enthusiasm, and the Democratic Senate primary was competitive while the Republican one was not, so the gap is not a forecast.

El-Sayed's general election has already turned on his religion. Michigan Public reported on 13 August that Representative Nancy Mace posted that every single Muslim holding public office in America is a Trojan horse and a threat to both national security and the republic. Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of the Council on American Islamic Relations, said there had been a very concerted backlash to the progress Muslim Americans had made. El-Sayed's answer was that we all pray for the same things, and that opponents will use Islamophobia because their ideas are tired. Bridge Michigan separately fact checked Rogers's claim that El-Sayed wants to do away with fireworks, football and the Fourth of July, and found that El-Sayed had criticised aspects of each but never advocated abolishing them, and that some attacks took his comments out of context.

What remains unresolved is the arithmetic. The reports available do not give certified vote totals for the Michigan Senate primary or the Wisconsin governor primary. The Missouri result may not even be final: Rosenbaum reported that Secretary of State Denny Hoskins rejected a redistricting referendum, that a lawsuit was filed to force it onto the ballot, and that some congressional primaries may have to be rerun if the Missouri Supreme Court reverses him. Until those numbers are certified and published, the margins that would settle how close any of this was are not on the record.