Progressive primary wins force Democrats to rethink who can win

NEW YORK (MNTV) — For years the Democratic Party has run on a rule of thumb: progressives win safe seats, moderates win the hard ones. Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate primary victory in Michigan, a state Donald Trump carried in 2024, is the clearest recent case against it.

El-Sayed’s win came alongside House primaries that went the same way. Sunrise Movement founder William Lawrence took the nomination in the competitive 7th District; Donavan McKinney unseated incumbent Representative Shri Thanedar in the heavily Democratic 13th.

They follow a summer of similar results — Janeese Lewis George’s mayoral win in Washington, DC, Chris Rabb’s House primary in Pennsylvania, and Graham Platner’s Senate primary in Maine before he withdrew.

Pollster Evan Roth Smith reads the pattern as voters losing patience with candidates chosen mainly for perceived electability, and says the 2024 losses — the Senate and the White House both gone — have drained confidence in the play-it-safe model that produced them.

The wins are not uniform. In Missouri, moderate Representative Wesley Bell beat former progressive congresswoman Cori Bush, and El-Sayed’s own margin came in thinner than some polls forecast — a gap Trump seized on to argue, again, that surveys miss the real electorate.

That polling question now hangs over Wisconsin’s Democratic governor primary, where progressive Francesca Hong leads and moderates warn a left nominee could drag down the ticket.

The midterms are the real test.

If progressives hold competitive states in November, the case that Democrats need moderates to win starts to collapse. If they don’t, the old rule survives. Either way, the primaries show Democratic voters are done being told the safe choice is the only one.