The New York Times has a new article headlined “Democrats Show Strength in Michigan Senate Race but Trail in Maine, Polls Find.” It highlights the divergent electoral prospects of two Democratic Senate candidates: Michigan’s Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and Maine’s Troy Jackson. Both Michigan and Maine are swing states that have voted statewide for both Democrats and Republicans in recent years, yet polls currently show El-Sayed leading his opponent, Mike Rogers, by five percentage points, while Jackson is trailing Republican Susan Collins by three percent.

We have to regard polls skeptically. In the primary, polls showing El-Sayed far ahead of his rivals turned out to be wildly wrong, and his ultimate victory was very narrow. But the paper’s report also presents some illuminating facts, beyond the raw polling data. They note that:

 

In Michigan, support for Dr. El-Sayed appears to be fueled by the popularity of his economic message and his vocal support for single-payer health care. He is more trusted to handle the cost of living by nine points, the only Democrat who is more trusted on the issue across the three states. And despite a bitter primary, a whopping 95 percent of Democrats are now supporting his candidacy. Dr. El-Sayed is also winning 8 percent of voters who supported Mr. Trump in the 2024 election, more than either of the other two Democrats in the survey. Abel Kang, a social worker from Grand Rapids, said he knew very little about Mr. Rogers other than his support of Mr. Trump. Mr. Kang said he planned to support Dr. El-Sayed largely because of economic issues and his support of single-payer health care. “He is talking about free health care,” said Mr. Kang, 47, an independent. “Personally, I think that is a necessity. It’s a basic human need.”

 

The paper spends less time trying to explain why Troy Jackson is not having as much success during an electoral cycle that is widely assumed to favor Democrats, who hold an 11-point national lead on the “generic” congressional ballot. They note that Susan Collins is seen by “a majority of Maine voters as more likely than Mr. Jackson to be an effective senator and as having better character.” But a recent report in New York magazine adds critical additional context to help us understand why the Jackson campaign isn’t catching fire. In it, Rebecca Traister documents that Jackson’s campaign has been directed in large part by establishment Democratic consultants who are crushing Jackson’s main sources of appeal: his populism, his authenticity, his ability to connect with ordinary people. Traister’s report is full of utterly damning findings:

• “These advisers are frustrated by Jackson and his backwoods cadence, his insistence on taking questions, and his unapologetically progressive stances. Jackson, a decent, marble-mouthed logger with a phone belt clip[…] has often deferred to their expertise, angering longtime allies and organizers who have their own thoughts on how he can win. “These people are very convincing… He’s being taken advantage of by people who have a lot of power and influence in this political sphere.”

• “[The] effect of the campaign on the 58-year-old Jackson is readily apparent. Typically an impassioned speaker, Jackson has become more tentative, with answers on Israel and ICE getting muddier. His political identity is now undergoing an awkward transformation before voters’ eyes as he struggles to incorporate new, seemingly foreign talking points. Internal campaign documents instruct him to say, when asked about his position that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, “No matter what you’re comfortable calling it, I think we can all agree this is senseless violence.”

• “The Jackson campaign’s wariness of in-person events seems to merge with a general suspicion of Mainers and their conviction that they know what’s best for Jackson. A handful of them who work as staffers at this point “are treated like garbage” by the campaign bosses, according to one source[…] “They think it’s going well when Troy is boring AF,” said another person with knowledge of the campaign.” […] “They want to run this campaign through numbers and spreadsheets. And wherever a campaign is connecting with people or doing anything quirky or unique, they’re like, ‘This is bad and weird.’” A lot of this friction comes down to competing theories of how to win elections. The people running Jackson’s campaign are relying on heavy vetting, poll testing, and data that pinpoints exactly who may be persuadable. They focus on ads, the messages neatly sculpted, while the candidate attends fundraisers and does call time, raising more money to pay for more ads. Emphasizing ads over a field operation is more profitable for the companies running that campaign. TKO and McCollister’s firm, Frame, make and sell ads for Jackson.”

 

In Traister’s telling, the problem is not that Jackson is an inherently bad candidate. In fact, she points out that he has a lot of advantages. He is from a working-class background, shares the frustrations voters have with the party establishment, has a strong record as a legislator, connects with people on a human level, and has respect from activists. In fact, you couldn’t have gotten a much better person to replace Graham Platner, the populist nominee Jackson replaced, who was forced to drop out after being accused of sexual assault. Platner’s fall was devastating for supporters who had been energized by his campaign against the party bosses. A lot of them were reportedly excited when Jackson was nominated, only to soon be deflated.

 

Jackson’s campaign manager is a Biden campaign veteran approved by Chuck Schumer’s Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), and brought in establishment consultants to help direct the campaign. According to Traister, they’ve essentially tried to muzzle Jackson. They’ve discouraged him from doing in-person events, and from being too harsh about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They’ve focused on advertising even though everyone hates ads. They’ve blacklisted anyone from Platner’s campaign from being part of the Jackson campaign, thereby spurning the most energetic progressive activists in the state. Some extraordinary incidents are documented in the piece, such as when Jackson announced at the end of a speech that he would take questions, only to be “practically tackled at the podium by a staffer” who said he would be doing a “group selfie” instead.

The whole report is deeply depressing to read. Traister documents the air going out of rooms as Jackson gives word-salad answers to questions that could allow him to take bold stances and energize a crowd. In Drop Site News, Nathan Bernard and Ryan Grim fill out some more details of the picture, which they call “a portrait of a populist politician being molded into an inoffensive, vanishing name on a ballot—the platonic ideal of a generic Democrat”:

The funding strategy for the campaign has also changed. After Platner powered his way to the Democratic nomination in Maine at the head of a volunteer army powered by millions in small dollars, the new nominee, Jackson, effectively disbanded the volunteers, focusing instead on high-dollar fundraisers over grassroots supporters. Jackson has canceled media interviews and Q&As with the public while putting Jackson primarily in front of wealthy donors[...]To establish leverage for moderating Jackson on Gaza, as Traister’s piece acutely explains, the consultants have sought to bring in donor dollars from pro-Israel sources. In the last three weeks, documents reviewed by Drop Site reveal Jackson’s campaign has held at least three fundraisers with prominent Democratic fundraisers with favorable views of Israel’s military actions in the Middle East. The consultants appear to believe that by surrounding Jackson with big donors who have a sympathetic view of Israel, they will be able to pressure Jackson into moderating his public statements on the genocide in Gaza.

I don’t think it’s completely fair to put all the blame on the consultants. After all, Jackson ultimately has responsibility for his own campaign. He comes across in the piece as weak, unable to assert control over his own Senate campaign staff. I think he should fire these people and do his own thing, bring in people from the Platner campaign (after all, Platner’s wrongdoing wasn’t their fault) and try to get some energy into this thing, go on the offense. It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

In Michigan, El-Sayed has (mostly) not played it safe. He has not softened his statements on Gaza, Ed Sheeran-style, into meaningless platitudes, despite immense pressure to do so. Just a few hours ago his campaign posted on Facebook: “We've watched billions of our tax dollars get spent to do a genocide in Gaza — money that could have been spent to put glasses on kids, rebuild schools, and provide healthcare.” Now, it’s true that El-Sayed has a level of charisma that Jackson lacks. But Traister’s report suggests that the Jackson campaign is purposely trying to make sure their candidate never says or does anything that causes controversy. Meanwhile, El-Sayed’s choice to campaign with Hasan Piker during the primary doesn’t seem to be stopping his momentum the way Piker’s haters hoped and expected it would.

Now, there are still some warning signs about El-Sayed. As a socialist, I don’t care for his defenses of capitalism, but those have been there from the start. Slightly more concerning is campaigning alongside Kamala Harris, who represents every kind of platitude-spewing, morally bankrupt tendency in the Democratic party, the very thing people want El-Sayed to repudiate. As Jennifer Welch writes in her new book Not Today, Fascists:

Kamala Harris’ platform ended up being anything but leftist: It was pro-police, pro-Israel, and pro-business. She reversed her original promises to ban fracking and decriminalize illegal border crossings, not as an abdication of values, she said, but in the interest of ‘seeking consensus.’

The Democratic establishment who tried so hard to stop El-Sayed in the primary have actually mostly supported him now that he has won. El-Sayed might be tempted to welcome their support, but I think he should be careful, because the closer he gets to them, the more it will limit his ability to make the criticisms of the party leadership that are a big part of what draws people to him in the first place. Already, when he was asked how he squared his support for the “Uncommitted” movement with his embrace of Harris, El-Sayed ended up giving an unsatisfying answer that appeared to let Harris off the hook for her grotesque betrayal of Palestinians. The more El-Sayed accepts these establishment figures’ support, the less he will be free to speak critically about them, and the more he will disappoint those who were attracted to his campaign because of his independence.

I do respect that El-Sayed isn’t backing down on his core positions. He was accused in both Jacobin and the Atlantic of watering down his advocacy of Medicare For All (turning it into a mere “public option”) but when I asked him about this in a recent interview (available in our new print edition), he said that he entirely stood by his advocacy of Medicare For All as a completely universal program rather than something you “buy into.” But insurgent progressive candidates have to be very careful. As you succeed, the establishment will go from trying to destroy you to trying to co-opt you, and if you aren’t fiercely resistant at every stage, you’ll wake up one day finding yourself taking selfies with smiling genocidaires.

If Jackson loses, we’ll know exactly why: the Democratic establishment would prefer a losing candidacy based on the usual method of saturating the airwaves with TV ads to one that engages and mobilizes the public around issues that horrify top party donors (Medicare For All, ending U.S. support for Israel). If El-Sayed wins, it will be because he (mostly) resisted this pressure and kept the momentum of his successful primary alive, running a campaign powered by ordinary people rather than D.C. PR firms. We shall see. The one thing we do know is that the worst thing any candidate can do for their campaign is bring in a bunch of Washington’s finest experts, who know only how to teach candidates how to lose.