Progressives scored a win over establishment Democrats in the Michigan primary election for Senator on Tuesday’s election. Abdul El-Sayed beat Haley Stevens by 1 point, despite many polls predicting that he would win by 7 or more. And Stevens beat him soundly in Wayne (Detroit), Oakland, and Macomb counties, where the most Democratic votes will be in the general election. Without getting blacks in Detroit on board, he is toast. And a defeat in the general for the candidate who campaigned on Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and ending aid to Israel would also support the argument of the establishment wing of the party, that progressive issues are too far left to win in Michigan, which features an almost exact 50-50 split between the Democrats and the GOP.
Yet on any issue other than Israel that would actually come up for a Senate vote, El-Sayed and Stevens would not vote much differently. Although El-Sayed throws off DSA vibes, he is not a member and calls himself a capitalist. I suspect that many of El-Sayed’s votes came from the considerable segment of Democrats who are upset with their party because it lacks “fight,” and are treating candidates who take what are seen as very progressive stances in an aggressive tone of voice as a proxy for being tough fighters. But that conflation is a serious mistake. It confuses a certain style of performative politics with having a real grasp of how to change things so that public policies that help ordinary people can be enacted.
El-Sayed is not really my target here, since he is a very smart and talented politician who will gladly vote for many policies short of Medicare for All that will extend health care coverage to more people and make it affordable. (Which is necessary, because Medicare for All has no chance of making it to the Senate floor, given that it would require a huge tax increase.) He is a pragmatic, goal-oriented politician, and knows how to compromise and build unity.
I want to contrast El-Sayed with the progressive winner of Ann Arbor’s Democratic mayoral primary, Yousef Rabhi, a DSA member who decisively beat establishment Democrat Christopher Taylor. The leading issue here is affordable housing. Taylor has been mayor for 12 years, energetically implementing an abundance agenda. Affordable housing units have tripled, rents were down 6% in 2025, they continue to drop, and lots of housing, including workforce housing, is still under construction or in planning. Like many deep-blue locations, Ann Arbor has a long way to go, especially given a huge post-pandemic surge of homelessness. But it’s building many units for the homeless, too, along with support services.
So what does Rabhi say about this? Check out his victory speech. His campaign against Taylor objected to the fact that private developers are building a lot of the housing. That, apparently, makes Taylor a stooge of corporate overlords because the Man is making profits, which are coming back to him in the form of vast “dark money” donations. With Rabhi’s victory, “the people” have finally taken power!
To what end? Rabhi’s housing agenda has two planks. First, indefinitely pause Taylor’s plan to upzone single-family home neighborhoods so triple deckers will be built. In other words, NIMBY. It’s keeping renters out of homeowners’ neighborhoods. And not yuppie renters either. Yuppies will rent apartments in the fancy downtown towers. Triple deckers are workforce housing. Stopping them is not a progressive policy. It’s popular among those Ann Arborites who worry about “changing the character of the neighborhood.” There is “fight” on the right, too. (In an open-primary state, some Republicans will vote in the Democratic primary because the Democratic nominee for Ann Arbor mayor and practically every other city post is assured of victory in the general.) Yet I also know some people who consider themselves progressive and are so on many issues, but support Rabhi on housing.
Rabhi’s second housing plank is public housing, so the Man can’t make profits from it. There is a legitimate role for public housing. But with taxes already high in Ann Arbor, this is can only meet a small fraction of housing needs. In addition, insiders on housing policy in Ann Arbor report that Rabhi doesn’t know what he’s talking about. There was a meeting where he literally screamed at some local housing policy experts who’ve been working on affordable housing for years, because they pointed out flaws in his idea for public housing on a particular city-owned lot (this had already been studied in depth and deemed infeasible for the location). It didn’t help that the experts were women. Mansplaining isn’t progressive, either.
I’m worried that Rabhi is signaling “fight” through a very performative style of intraparty us vs. them politics that (a) paints a progressive veneer over unprogressive, even reactionary policy, (b) is dogmatic rather than informed and detail-oriented, and (c) tries to shut up actual progressives who know stuff. If this is what DSA is up to, watch out.
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