Let’s be honest: Some non-leftist Democrats kind of want Abdul El-Sayed to lose his Senate race in Michigan. That’s not the world’s most noble impulse; it strikes me as kind of like wishing for the guy who edged you out for a promotion to get Me Too’d. Of course, El-Sayed doesn’t help things by being — in my assessment — a dickish know-nothing whose best trait is simply that he’s not Mike Rogers.
Still, it’s rational to wonder if an El-Sayed loss might be good for Democrats in the long run. The logic is simple: Leftists want more influence in the party, but they’re unpopular, so if the most prominent leftist candidate loses on a night when most other Democrats win, the party will reject leftism and be better poised to win in the future. It’s even starting to look like Democrats could lose Michigan but win the Senate, so an El-Sayed loss will not necessarily enable Trump’s Thousand Year Retarded Reich.
It’s a sound theory…I just think that it’s wrong. The problem is the last step: believing that the left edge of the Democratic Party will learn lessons from an El-Sayed loss and make rational adjustments. I don’t think that will happen — I have endless faith in people’s ability to misinterpret, misconstrue, and not learn frosty fuck-all from even the clearest of signals. Honestly, if political parties were good at learning from evidence, we wouldn’t be having this debate in the first place.
There is already ample evidence that moderate Democrats outperform leftists. Choose whichever naturally-occurring experiment you like: Overperformance/underperformance by moderates/leftists relative to a baseline, effects of a moderate message in places it was used versus places it wasn’t, exit polling in successful elections versus unsuccessful ones — all of this evidence indicates that moderates perform better. I write about this often and honestly never hear any convincing (IMHO) counter-arguments from leftists; I get confident assertions that Bernie would have won and pleas that Kamala’s big mistake was to not prioritize a foreign conflict that voters repeatedly and loudly tell us that they do not care about very much.
And we already know what the leftist argument will be in the event of an El-Sayed loss: The Establishment fucked him. Are there things in this world that can’t be blamed on that awful, capital-”e” Establishment? It doesn’t seem so. I’ll bet when a leftist prematurely ejaculate, he says “It’s because of the ESTABLISHMENT!!!” And the “the Establishment fucked him” argument is already proliferating in anticipation of an El-Sayed loss or closer-than-it-should-have-been win. Of course, the reality is that The Establishment is moving mountains to drag El-Sayed over the line: They’ve spent big on him and aided him by dispatching every Establishment figure short of Jimmy Carter’s cadaver. And honestly, if the DNC thought Carter’s cadaver would make the difference, I have no doubt that they’d dig him up and get him out there.
Political science doesn’t produce clean data. There just aren’t enough events — we have to glean what we can from a few races, each with its own idiosyncrasies. Over time, though, it’s possible to tease out basic trends, which is how we know that America is populated by normies, not secret Maoists. But any individual race can be explained away — screaming “AIPAC!!!” is truly all a leftist needs to do to convince other leftists that a result can be discounted. And not for nothin’: I believe that Republicans have been pursuing a suboptimal political strategy for more than a decade, because one idiosyncratic Trump win convinced them that America yearns for nativist insult comics with the IQ of a garden rake.
But the main reason that leftists won’t learn is that the movement has self-selected for anti-empirical thinkers. If you’re a person who develops their views by processing information and developing mental models that fit that information, then you’re probably not a leftist to begin with. Leftists believe that rent control works, France has undergone “neoliberalsim”, and that a wealth tax can balance the budget with room to spare — those are not things that any empirically-minded person can believe. So, if El-Sayed loses,1 an explanation that blames anything except his unpopular views will be just one more irrational log on the delusional fire. It’s hard to know what to root for in Michigan; this truly might be the worst pair of candidates since Kang v. Kodos in ‘96. But if you think that an El-Sayed loss could be the wakeup call that ends the leftist insurgency in the Democratic Party, I hate to say: I just don’t think that’s on the ballot.
I think he’ll win by a few points.