Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Can it work? Is it enough? How will El-Sayed overcome the other serious challenges he faces in this race? We’re really psyched to be discussing all this with Ron Brownstein, senior political analyst at CNN and columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, whose recent piece about the contest is a reminder that he’s the best in the business at explaining this stuff. Ron, great to have you on.
Sargent: So Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official who was born in Michigan, the son of Egyptian immigrants, just won the primary by less than a point over the more moderate Haley Stevens. El-Sayed is harshly critical of Israel, is running a left-populist campaign for Medicare for All and targeting billionaires and the establishment. Ron, El-Sayed won big among young and college-educated voters, but Stevens won in the more rural and working-class areas. Can you explain why that portends a serious challenge for him in the general election against Mike Rogers?
I mean, this was a pure wine-track, beer-track coalition. And the answer is that whether it was Stevens or El-Sayed who won, neither side of that is enough to win a purple state like Michigan. You need both. And in the first general election polling that’s out there, from EPIC-MRA, El-Sayed, not surprisingly, is underperforming among voters over 50, Black voters, and non-college white women. So he’s got to do some work to knit together the coalition the Democrat needs to win in November.
So it depends on the poll, but it’s maybe around five points, six points, seven points—Stevens is running by that much more. So he has to win that chunk of voters, the voters who would vote for Stevens against Mike Rogers, but not vote for El-Sayed as of now against Mike Rogers, right? Who are those voters?
In that EPIC-MRA poll, 63 percent of voters in Michigan now disapprove of Trump. You know, basically an amoeba should be able to win in that environment. There’s just no precedent for Republicans winning a Senate race in a state where Trump is that unpopular. But in that poll, El-Sayed is way underperforming among the disapprovers. What the political strategists call double haters are probably the people who are going to decide this race.
So how do they vote in the end? In the past, double haters have tended to vote against the party in the White House. But Republicans hope that El-Sayed is such a reach for those voters that they can win more of them than they usually do. And I think that will be the pivot point of this race—people who disapprove of Trump and are somewhat hesitant about El-Sayed.
Brownstein: Logically you would say yes, but we don’t really have detailed enough evidence for that. You know, I suspect there are also some college whites in there beyond the Democratic primary. I think it’s going to be pretty broad-based.
But Trump is not going to get much more popular between now and November in Michigan. And so that group of people who are dubious of both, I think, will be the tug of war in this race.
I think by socialist he means Haley Stevens, which is utterly preposterous, but whatever. Ron, we’re going to see hundreds of millions of dollars put behind that precise message that Donald Trump put in that tweet. They’re going to paint him as a radical, a terrorist sympathizer, someone who pals around with far-leftists like Hasan Piker. They’re going to highlight his support for abolishing ICE, et cetera. That’s aimed at the landscape that you described before, right? In other words, they’re conscious of what you essentially said the challenge here is going to be.
I mean, so there’s a lot of pressure points here. But you can’t lose sight of the other side of the equation. You know, Greg, in 2024, 51 percent of Michigan voters had an unfavorable view of Trump, according to the exit poll. And Mike Rogers won only 10 percent of them. That’s about what every Republican candidate in Trump’s first term, except for Susan Collins, won among people who disapproved of him.
Sargent: Let’s talk a little bit about how El-Sayed talked about Trumpism during his victory speech late Tuesday night. Listen to this.
Sargent: Ron, I like the way he depicts his Republican opponent as a Trump bootlicker, which indicts the deep corruption of that, and then goes after MAGA, which you don’t hear Dems do often in swing areas. The idea of the fusion of the neocon era and the MAGA era goes after what Trumpism really is, what Trump has created—a GOP that combines militarism and white nationalism and authoritarianism.
Brownstein: I think his description of Rogers is pretty effective, with the caveat that you mentioned about—look, this is a guy who in the first debate with Haley Stevens described childcare as a gender justice issue. I mean, he’s kind of got to get out of the library a little bit. And look, he has that experience, but you know, he does have that whiff of kind of the online self-closeted left, or self-reinforcing left. But I think that description of Rogers is effective.
I don’t think that is as much of a winning argument in 2026 as that Trump himself is taking the country in the wrong direction. And like a lot of the Bernie candidates, he doesn’t really want to lean on that. He wants to basically say the entire system is corrupt. Like many of the Bernie candidates, he often seems more energized criticizing the Democratic leadership than he does Trump.
And, I thought in his victory speech the other day, El-Sayed was talking about the movement that he’s inspired, how his election is going to change politics forever. Really? Like, you know, you won an election by 15,000 votes, and that’s going to change politics forever. There was a lot of “me,” not quite enough “you,” I thought, particularly for voters who are not tuned in politically. In a Democratic primary, railing against AIPAC is really powerful. For a swing voter who is worrying about paying the bills, it could not be less relevant.
Sargent: Right. I think the problem is that he is torn between, on the one side, going after the GOP-MAGA, which is something that is really ripe right now, especially in a place like Michigan where Trump is at sixty percent disapproving. And then on the other side of the equation, he wants to indict the whole system. And there’s sort of a strain in this type of left-leaning thinking that holds that if you’re talking too much about Trump and MAGA, you’re not talking about the more systemic problems.
Brownstein: Well, no, I agree. I mean, I think that, like as I said, like many of—like Sanders himself and many of the candidates he’s inspired—he doesn’t really dwell on Trump. I mean, El-Sayed explicitly said on Friday night, in kind of a closing-argument rally, I view Trump as a symptom, not the disease. The disease is that there’s all this money corrupting politics, and it’s symbolized by all the money that AIPAC spent against me. And there is an audience for that, but the core—what is the tailwind for Democrats this year? What is the core argument? It’s that voters feel that Trump has not delivered on what he promised.
Sargent: Right. And underscoring your point, let’s listen to what El-Sayed said to reporters. It’s another rendition of the Trump bootlicker line. Check this out.
Sargent: So, Ron, there he’s doing what I think we want to see more of, which is cast this race as a referendum, or a choice, between someone who will rein in Trump and stand up to Trump on the one hand, and someone who licks his boots on the other. And it also goes after Trump in a deeper sense. He’s essentially saying Trump requires Republicans to corruptly act as the servants of him and the servants of corporations. He should probably talk more like that, right?
Again, like, he can win. I mean, there’s no question he can win. Trump’s disapproval is at a point where he doesn’t have to do anything special to win. He only has to win somewhere a little north of 80 percent of people who disapprove of Trump, which should be very doable.
Sargent: Yes, I fear that that’s the case. Agree that it’s totally doable. Let’s listen to one more stretch of El-Sayed talking here. Listen to this.
Sargent: Ron, I don’t think it’s an accident that he juxtaposed the need to go after Trumpism with this kind of rhapsodic take on the diversity of his audience and the Americanness of his two kids and of himself, despite his kids being half Indian and half Egyptian. That again kind of goes to the core of what people are angry at Trump about, which is that Trump is he’s essentially trying to wreck that aspect of what makes America great—diversity, immigration. He’s a white nationalist, in short.
Brownstein: Well, I think that, you know, ultimately, the voters who are available to a Democrat, realistically, even in a state like Michigan, overwhelmingly believe that. I mean, that is the idea of the coalition of transformation—that Democrats ultimately rely on the voters who are comfortable with the way the country is changing demographically, culturally, and economically. The issue isn’t that message.
Sargent: I want to point this out, though, Ron. I think he’s talking about this idea of his kids being 100 percent American and himself being 100 percent American, juxtaposed with Trumpism, as the beginnings of a rebuttal to the attack he’s going to face.
Brownstein: But Greg, think about the difference. That is the core. Obama directly dealt with it.
Brownstein: And El-Sayed is basically saying live with it.
I just want to sort of underscore that that’s where he thinks he’s going, and maybe ask your opinion on what he really needs to do with that.
I mean, he is not running as Barack Obama did in 2008, as many people have pointed out to me, who I’ve talked to in the last couple of weeks. And I think he will try to get there. But this is not that. This is, like, this is a very different—this is a more narrow-casting kind of political strategy. And it proved to have a lot more limits. It proved to be a lot more narrowly cast, even in the primary, than they expected.
Sargent: Right. I agree. I think, though, that in his head he’s moving beyond the Bernie campaign, at least to some degree. I think he thinks he’s doing that with the paeans to Americanism and so forth. I guess what you’re saying here is there’s going to have to be some sort of very clear articulation of something much more Obama-like than he’s doing right now. Is that the essence of your point?
There are reasons why there are a lot of voters, including on the Democratic side, who worry about him appearing with Hasan Piker. I don’t have a huge opinion on that, but it’s clearly something that is troubling for a lot of even Democratic voters. And his instinct is to say you’re wrong. That’s his instinct.
Brownstein: There’s only so far you can move. There’s only so far you can move with him still in the picture.
Brownstein: Yeah. Well, but it’s not just that, right? I mean, I think he very much in his campaign—whether it’s on the foreign policy stuff with Israel, or the way he frames the domestic political situation—he identified very much in that Bernie lane.
Sargent: OK, Ron. So what does the winning coalition look like in granular terms?
If he only wins 35 percent of non-college whites, he is not going to win. I mean, he’s probably got to win a little more than that. He’s got to win north of 85 percent of Black voters, and he’s got to turn them out. And then he’s probably got to win a majority of college whites. I mean, that would be the winning coalition, I think, for him. And all of that is doable in this environment, but none of it will be easy, especially with the way he has presented himself to this point.
If she wins the nomination but doesn’t win the general election, I think the interpretation of Democrats in states they absolutely must have to get the White House back in ‘28—I think the interpretation of their experience is going to be very different than if they do win. So this is like the undercard. The main event is still to come.
Brownstein: Always great to be with you, Greg.
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