HAS ABDUL EL-SAYED JUST SAVED TRUMP?

Just a few hours before Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan last night, he told me that he was going to “beat the shit” out of his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, in the November general election. His tactic, he explained in a Detroit farmers’ market yesterday, would be to “staple his [Rogers’s] sins to his forehead.” What those sins were, El-Sayed wouldn’t say. He has in the past criticized Rogers as a “corporate shill” who prioritized pharmaceutical and corporate interests over Michiganders while in Congress.

In truth, although he did scrape to victory last night, it was El-Sayed who almost had the shit beaten out of him by Haley Stevens, a mainstream Democrat. Going into the contest, polls gave El-Sayed a 20-point lead. NBC have declared him the winner, but the vote is close. Ballots are still being counted and, at the time of writing, Associated Press has him on 48.6 percent versus Stevens’s 47.3. Stevens, it seems, couldn’t quite “stick it to ’em” as she vowed to do in a viral video.

El-Sayed inspired such little enthusiasm for his progressive agenda that it seems unlikely he can beat Rogers in November. Confidence is also falling in the much-predicted midterm “blue wave.” With so many Democratic candidates standing on a Democratic Socialists of America platform, the fear is that voters will view the party as too radical and it will miss the golden opportunity of slumping Republican poll numbers.

Don’t get cocky.