Will El-Sayed’s Centrist Opponents “Vote Blue No Matter Who”?

Call it a sweep. On Tuesday, progressives ran the table in the Michigan Democratic primary, with Donovan McKinney, Will Lawrence, and Abdul El-Sayed each dispatching their corporate-backed opponents despite a barrage of dark-money-funded attack ads against them—including $70 million spent against El-Sayed, whose campaign overcame an 11-to-one spending disadvantage to secure his remarkable victory.

The big question, now, is whether the Democratic establishment that opposed these candidates so vehemently in the primary will rally around the nominees their voters elected—particularly El-Sayed, whose race is a must-win for Democrats if they are going to take back the Senate.

Fortunately, a number of major party leaders have already announced their endorsement of El-Sayed. Representative Haley Stevens released a classy concession statement saying she is “proud to offer” her support in the general election against Mike Rogers. Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who backed Stevens in the primary, also endorsed El-Sayed, saying, “We’re all united by our shared goal of getting things done for the people in Michigan.” Kamala Harris sent out a fundraising e-mail for him. And the machinery of the party is kicking into gear—the Democrats’ Senate Majority PAC has already put out a genuinely moving ad for El-Sayed, set to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing.”

This shows how far the center of gravity in the party has shifted—and quickly. After all, it was only last year when a number of centrist leaders, including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, refused to endorse Zohran Mamdani after Democratic voters in New York City decisively chose him as their mayoral nominee. Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand even went on to falsely claim that Mamdani supported “global jihad,” a message echoed by Democratic Representatives Tom Suozzi and Laura Gillen. Today, of course, Mamdani is one of the most popular Democrats in the country.

And yet, despite all this progress, it’s clear that we still have a long way to go until the left flank of the Democratic Party is broadly accepted as a legitimate, equal partner—and potentially a future senior partner—in the Democratic coalition, as evidenced by the significant array of party leaders who have not been so forthcoming in their support for the newly minted Michigan Senate nominee.

When asked, prior to Tuesday, if she would back the Muslim-American El-Sayed if he won the primary, Michigan Democratic Representative Hillary Scholten said, “I will not stand beside someone who has allowed distinctly anti-American sentiment to enter our public dialogue.” Since then, she’s refused to respond to a request about whether she would be endorsing him. Michael LaRosa, who served as press secretary for first lady Jill Biden and special assistant to President Joe Biden, went further. “If [El-Sayed] wins, I will do everything I can to make sure he loses,” he posted before the primary, a position he’s doubled down on since. Other right-leaning Democratic influencers have shared similar sentiments. Then there’s Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress—ostensibly the leading establishment think tank of the Democratic Party—who spent the last month relentlessly attacking El-Sayed on social media. So far, she has not changed her tune, offering no public statements of support for the Democratic nominee—just a bunch of posts implying that he lacks backing from the working class. Meanwhile the corporatist think tank Third Way responded to El-Sayed’s win not with a call to unify against the MAGA right but with the announcement of a $15 million campaign to “discredit” democratic socialism, despite concerns, as The New York Times put it, of “potentially undercutting Democratic nominees in swing-state races and undermining the party’s chances of retaking Congress.”

This refusal—whether real or threatened—to, in centrist parlance, “Vote Blue No Matter Who,” is particularly ironic given that it’s the very crime many of these same establishment figures spent months accusing El-Sayed of committing. The difference is that, in contrast to today’s centrist threats, El-Sayed never betrayed the Democratic Party. The attacks from the right focused on El-Sayed’s support of the Uncommitted movement, an attempt to push Biden on his disastrous Gaza policy during the 2024 primaries—and only during the primaries. As Waleed Shahid, an Uncommitted organizer, explained, “We weren’t trying to blow up the coalition. We were trying to keep it alive.” Indeed, El-Sayed endorsed Kamala Harris the morning after she launched her 2024 campaign.

It seems, then, that we will soon see what counts as a greater betrayal among certain members of the Democratic establishment: using your primary vote to try to persuade a presumptive Democratic nominee to change course on an issue that was (empirically) an electoral catastrophe, or actively undermining the general election campaign of your party’s confirmed nominee in a must-win battleground seat.

Just the fact that this is a question demonstrates the hypocrisy behind some centrists’ past evocation of “Vote Blue No Matter Who,” a line that’s long been used to discipline progressives. What made those admonitions so galling was that progressive Democrats have been overwhelmingly voting blue no matter who, election after election. A higher percentage of Bernie’s voters backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 than Clinton’s supporters in the 2008 presidential primary backed Barack Obama’s general election campaign. The same is true of the 2020 election, when progressives aggressively rallied behind Biden, and the 2024 election, when they did the same for Harris (as I can attest to firsthand, as one of the organizers of the “Progressives for Harris” effort).

The truth is, it’s very easy to say “Vote Blue No Matter Who” when that means voting for your own worldview and interests. It’s a lot harder when it requires supporting someone who is on the opposite side of issues that are deeply important to you. Progressives spend their entire lives swallowing their feelings to do the latter and still get attacked by the establishment for disloyalty. But the moment this dynamic flips—as occurred in Michigan this week, thanks to an array of superior candidates running superior campaigns with a superior capacity to meet this moment—key members of the centrist establishment have shown that their loyalty is not to the Democratic Party but to their side’s control of the party.

Hopefully, this time around, these figures will choose to act with more grace. Hopefully, Democratic elected officials like Scholten will put aside their factional grievances and join the majority of their party’s voters and leaders in helping Democratic nominees defeat the Republicans rubber-stamping Trump’s authoritarian power grabs. Hopefully, centrists can start taking a page from the most committed base of the Democratic coalition—the progressives who have again and again shifted gears from disappointing primary losses to supporting the Democratic nominees in the general election, the ones they had, at one point, campaigned against. If nothing else, hopefully the “Vote Blue No Matter Who” Democrats can muster the basic wherewithal to actually vote blue no matter who.