Wild election results in Michigan have many Democratic Party establishment figures worrying about insurgent socialists taking over their party, with uber progressive Michigan Senate candidate Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed being the latest to score a win over an established Democratic candidate. But for author and investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, the real question is not whether the Democratic Socialists of America are “making inroads” in the party or not. It is whether establishment Democrats can stop the socialists without joining them.
“We’ve seen socialists win this year in places like California and New York, but this is the first DSA victory in the Midwest,” says Schweizer on the latest episode of The Drill Down. Coming in a swing state in America’s heartland, “This is a massive sea change in where American politics is heading,” El-Sayed’s key to victory was the “coalition strategy,” Schweizer adds. El-Sayed appealed to the deeply anti-Israel and pro-Hamas Muslim enclaves in Michigan’s cities, while also capturing the overwhelmingly white progressives in the state’s university towns of Ann Arbor and Lansing. He comes from the Muslim-majority city of Dearborn, which also sends Rep. Rashida Tlaib to Congress.
