Transcript: What El-Sayed’s Narrow Win Tells Us About the Democrats

Political scientists Seth Masket and Julia Azari say the super-close contest between El-Sayed and Stevens shows a party where neither faction is dominant.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the August 5 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon, the host. Two great guests. Julia Azari is a political scientist at Marquette University. Seth Masket is at the University of Denver. They’re former colleagues at FiveThirtyEight, and they’ve been guests here at Right Now before. So Julia and Seth, thanks for joining me.

Julia Azari: Thanks for having us.

Seth Masket: Thanks for having us.

Bacon: These guys were on a couple weeks ago. We were talking about the big primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin, and now we’ve had one of them in Michigan—and one in which I pre-wrote my piece assuming a resounding El-Sayed victory, and then at one in the morning had to write a Haley Stevens won piece, because I genuinely was not sure what the results were.

It’s now about ten AM Eastern. The decision desk, NBC News, I think The New York Times—I think it now has been called by a lot of places. It appears that El-Sayed has won by around, looks like about one and a half percent right now. So it appears he is the victor, but it was a very close race.

And I’m going to talk about the race and what happened. So I’ll start off with talking about the map itself—because I think we get these election results, and I think it’s important to look at. And what I see is, I looked up the Detroit results, which is different than Wayne County, and it appears that, let’s see here, that in Wayne County, I think Stevens got sixty-one percent, and Abdul received thirty-three percent, I think.

So again, a proxy for the—and Detroit’s about seventy-five percent Black—getting at the idea, we’ve seen in the past that progressive candidates have struggled with Black voters in these primaries. That’s a good proxy for—we don’t have exit polls, but the Detroit results probably are a good proxy for that: Haley Stevens probably won the Black vote is my guess.

There’s one thing I wanted to see. Otherwise, looking at the map, it looks like Stevens won a lot of the smaller rural counties. In Wayne County overall, they were almost close to tied, suggesting Abdul won maybe areas that are not Detroit in Wayne County. Abdul did very well in Ann Arbor, which is not surprising. That’s kind of the college-educated base of the state. That’s kind of my general thoughts. Any thoughts about the results you all saw, in terms of, like, where each candidate did well?

Azari: I haven’t had a chance to dig into the geography. I have an anecdotal data point, which is that my husband is from Michigan, and he spent the weekend in Western Michigan, and he saw a lot of ground game, where it appears that El-Sayed did pretty well, which is the western part of the state. It was actually a much more conservative part of the state.

But I want to use that as my jumping off point, to talk about how, when we talk about how candidates do, we should talk about not just who lives there, but what the campaign looked like.

The other thing that jumped out at me was—my observation, I got the election night kind of jones, and so I was following The New York Times rather obsessively in the early evening. Then I went to sleep. I was not up at 1:00 AM writing. But during the time that I was following—and it seems like this is true in the final vote count—the percentages changed, but actually El-Sayed’s vote lead remained about the same, between 20 and 25,000 votes. Which I don’t really know, I haven’t really had a chance to think about whether that’s significant, but it struck me as a kind of interesting thing, that it was really steady throughout the night, the difference between the candidates.

Masket: The one thing I would add to this—again, I also haven’t had a chance to really pore through the maps, but some of the demographics you’re describing and the votes—there’s been a lot of talk of, like, this is a very new type of primary, and this is a radically new type of moment for the Democratic Party.

But in some senses, this is a very sort of standard establishment versus progressive setup that we’ve seen in state races, that we’ve seen in presidential races, going back decades, where you have a progressive of some sort candidate who does pretty well among, you know, university towns, does well among college students and professors, can be in some ways like a media darling. And then you have the more establishment Democrat that does very well among, particularly, like, just very longstanding Democratic constituencies like Black Americans.

So we’re seeing kind of that. I think the one difference is that also the sort of establishment Democrat usually does very well among labor unions, and that might be more split this time around, potentially, given El-Sayed’s labor history.

Bacon: Yeah, I wish we had an exit poll. I know we’re going to have a debate about polling being bad, because the polling was off in terms of the results. But we have this big youth divide in the Democratic Party right now, and we can’t see that by looking at a map, because on a map there’s no college towns or younger. In general, we can’t tell—we don’t have good age data, and that’s a limitation here.

So I guess big picture, what does this result tell us about the Democratic Party? I think whether he won by fifteen or one, Abdul won. So I think that is worth noting. So talk about what this tells us about where the party is.

We’re in this latest, in the slate of primaries where the kind of insurgents, outsiders, anti-establishment, progressive, socialist—pick your term here—have won some races. At the same time, my guess is the average Democratic member of Congress still sounds more like Joe Biden than Bernie Sanders. So talk about where we are right now. Julia—

Azari: Oh, yeah. I have a lot of thoughts here. I think what it tells us is that this anti-incumbency vibe is certainly ascendant, and that’s not terribly surprising, given the last administration didn’t end terribly well. The timing of this all makes a lot of sense, and so I think that’s what we’re seeing with the Democratic Party. I think overreading the ideological valence is a little bit of a danger.

And one thing I want to say about primaries, just reading what people are saying in different primary contests, is that I think we don’t have a really neat and packaged way to talk about how cross-pressured your average primary voter is, where they’re likely going to see things that they like about both candidates. And so their considerations are going to be really affected by the political environment. And I think for us as sort of big picture political geeks—

Bacon: In other words, the average primary voter is not Hasan Piker, who hates Haley Stevens and loves Abdul. It’s probably somebody who has more—it’s probably a Black mom who likes both candidates, is, like, more likely, yes.

Azari: Exactly. And those different considerations might not map on neatly to ideology, because it doesn’t tend to be how most people operate, and also because the differences even between a pair like Stevens and El-Sayed is going to be a lot smaller than the sort of full range of the larger political spectrum. And so they might think, I’m pissed at the establishment. Sorry, can we say pissed on this podcast?

Azari: And—yeah, you need to send me a swear sheet before we do these.

Bacon: The banned words are—although I know you don’t like the word establishment. So that’s why I’ve been trying to avoid that word, actually, since you said it that way. But yes.

Azari: But I think there is this anti-incumbency vibe, and I do think that one thing it tells us is, states like Michigan have been hit very hard with the worst parts of the status quo. So I think that’s what it tells us about the political environment in general, and by extension, the Democratic Party.

Masket: I’ll go with hardly the hottest take, but a lot of the similar matchups that we’ve seen so far this year with progressive insurgents, left insurgents in Democratic primaries, have been in places—some districts in New York, California, Colorado, mostly very blue areas—where—

Bacon: Seth—so you live in Denver, we’ve met earlier, so you’ve witnessed this personally.

Masket: Yes, I literally live in Diana DeGette’s district. And she just lost by double digits to Maliek Kirvas. And the one thing that sort of establishment Democrats have had, the one argument they’ve been using, is, this type of stuff is not electable. Voters won’t like this in November, so don’t go that way. That hasn’t carried a lot of weight in contests so far.

Michigan, of course, is different. Michigan has voted two out of three times for Donald Trump. It’s much more of a wild card for the November election, and so that’s where people—I’m throwing another banned word, electability—that’s where this has really come in a lot, in this argument. And it’s a question regardless of whether it’s correct, right?

Regardless of whether we can actually tell which candidate’s going to do better in November, I’ve been curious to see how much voters actually listen to that. How much voters who are really on the fence between these two candidates, and aren’t really following the ideological splits, don’t really understand the policies too well, are receptive to the idea that maybe one of these people has a better chance of winning in November. One of these people—this race could make or break Democrats controlling the Senate next year. That adds a lot to it. The polling isn’t showing a huge advantage for Stevens on that—but, and also, the polling hasn’t been great on the outcome of this race so far.

Bacon: I was going to talk about electability later, and I want to come back to that, but I want to talk about this perception of it with you specifically. Because I was out in 2019, talking to voters all the time, particularly female voters who would say, I love Senator Warren. I love Kamala Harris. I cannot vote for her, because only Joe Biden can win. Only a man can win, etc. And Seth, you wrote a book that made a lot of these arguments—about the 2020 primary was very much shaped around these perceptions of electability: Hillary lost because she’s a woman, the party must pick a man. Are voters still thinking that way? Because I guess you haven’t gone out and—you haven’t flown to Michigan and asked everybody. But are voters still confident they know who’s electable, in the way they seemed to be in 2019 and 2020?

Masket: 2019 was a very particular environment, in which Democrats were still smarting from Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump, which was a huge surprise to the political system. She had been polling well ahead of him, and all the evidence suggested she could win, and then she didn’t.

They were really going through it at that time, and a lot of them were willing to just throw out ideas about who they thought could win, and they were going back to, We got to go with the old, safe, tried and true sort of candidates. I don’t know that the party is still in that place. That said, they are still thinking about what happened in 2024. There’s plenty of theories about it.

They are concerned that, OK, maybe Kamala Harris seemed too out there on some dimension, or........

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