Can I claim to have predicted, way back in 1988, the result of Michigan’s fiercely contested Democratic primary for U.S. senator this week? 

That’s a stretch and not just because the results are incomplete. As I write, Abdul el Sayed is just barely ahead of Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), by less than 15,000 votes out of more than 1.5 million cast.  The New York Times analysts think, plausibly, that lead will hold up when the last 100,000 or so votes are reported.

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But the developments that have made el Sayed — who lost the 2018 gubernatorial primary to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) by 20 percentage points — a potential winner were visible in the 1988 contest for Michigan’s delegates to the Democratic National Convention, in which Jesse Jackson ran far ahead of eventual nominee Michael Dukakis by a 24-percentage-point margin.

Let’s flash back 38 years to see what I mean. Then, as a member of the Washington Post editorial page staff, I wrote an article in the Post two weeks after Jackson’s surprise victory, starting out by describing the unusual process.

“The Michigan Democrats’ ‘firehouse primary’ caucus system allowed any eligible voter claiming to be a Democrat to cast a vote—but only between 10 and 4 on a Saturday and at only 576, rather than the usual 11,000, voting locations. In 1988 some 212,000—from a state that cast 3.8 million votes in the 1984 general election–came in and voted.”

In........

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