Bernie Sanders: El-Sayed’s Win the Most ‘Extraordinary Victory in Modern American Politics’

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has been talking about a progressive political revolution for more than 10 years. On Wednesday, Sanders told reporters on a post-Aug. 4 election press call that his revolution has finally come to Michigan.

Each of Sanders’ endorsed candidates — Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, 13th Congressional District nominee Donavan McKinney and 7th Congressional District nominee Will Lawrence — won their primaries Tuesday, although El-Sayed’s and McKinney’s races were not called until Wednesday morning.

Sanders famously won Michigan’s 2016 Democratic presidential primary against Hillary Clinton, who would go on to become the party’s nominee. Sanders’ victory then, however, was no small feat, and El-Sayed, in particular, was able to grow some areas of the coalition that helped win the state a decade earlier.

This year, El-Sayed will face enormous challenges in his general election bid against the Republican nominee, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers of White Lake — and the GOP has already started to portray El-Sayed as too liberal, highlighting his ties to Sanders and his progressive policies.

The Republican-aligned Senate Leadership Fund on Wednesday called El-Sayed “a dangerous threat to the safety and freedoms of every American,” claiming that his “radical agenda to defund and disarm the police, abolish prisons, and unleash terror and violent criminals is a direct attack on Michigan families.”

In response, the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC, highlighted the newly crowned nominee in a new ad to the backdrop of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” an adopted Michigan anthem.

Sanders, to reporters on Wednesday, was undeterred, and clearly proud of his endorsed candidates’ success. Regarding El-Sayed, Sanders said the Democratic nominee’s victory was the most extraordinary that he has seen in modern American politics.

“I just want everybody to take a minute to think about the dynamics of this race. Abdul took on the entire Michigan Democratic establishment,” Sanders said. “He took on the entire national Democratic establishment, and perhaps even more significantly, he took on in an unprecedented way almost $70 million of outside spending, half of which or almost half of which came from AIPAC [the pro-Israel super PAC] and other special interest groups. Frankly, I have never, in my life, and I may be wrong on this, I cannot recall in a major campaign any candidate prevailing under that onslaught of money and political pressure.”

Sanders said the reason he believed El-Sayed won was his focus on “the need for real change.”

“You don’t have to be a Ph.D. in economics to know that the very wealthiest people have never done better, more income and wealth inequality than ever in the history of America,” Sanders said. “While 60% of our people are struggling to put food on the table, pay for healthcare, pay their rent or their mortgages, people want change.”

Sanders has long talked of a coming progressive revolution in the face of monied, corporate and oligarchic interests dominating modern American political systems and preventing working and low- to middle-income people from getting ahead.

Michigan Advance asked Sanders if his revolution had finally landed, with big wins from his endorsed candidates around the nation this year, not just in the Great Lakes state.

Sanders at first knocked the polling outfits watching the race, which in 2016 had him trailing by 20 percentage points before he ultimately won against Clinton, and the way that some pollsters heavily overstated El-Sayed’s eventual margin of victory, some of which had him winning by more than 15 points. El-Sayed’s actual margin of victory was a hair over a percentage point against U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens of Birmingham.

He then turned to say yes, his revolution was taking root, and even in swing states, because “the system is broken.”

“I think the ‘inside the Beltway’ people don’t get it. I think unfortunately a lot of media people don’t get it. The establishment doesn’t get it,” Sanders said. “Nibbling around the edges is not going to address the enormous crises facing the American people. Whenever I speak, wherever I go around the country, I ask people, ‘Please raise your hand. How many of you think the American healthcare system is working?’ And you know what? Almost nobody raises their hand. OK, so we don’t need to nibble around the edges. … People in America understand that.”

If El-Sayed is elected, Sanders will have a powerful new ally from a key state to start pressing for a progressive agenda in the upper chamber of Congress — that is, of course, if Democrats can take back the Senate in November. The same goes for the House of Representatives, also currently in Republican control. 

The heavily Democratic city of Detroit, which McKinney represents as a state legislator, is expected to strongly favor him in November after he unseated incumbent U.S. Rep. Shri Thanedar, D-Detroit, in Tuesday’s primary.

Lawrence, meanwhile, has a tougher fight against U.S. Rep. Tom Barrett, R-Charlotte, in November, but the seat is highly competitive.

If both Lawrence and McKinney are successful, they will join other Sanders allies like Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Detroit, in Congress, widening the influence of progressives in the lower chamber.

When asked what their wins meant as a message to the Democratic establishment that opposed their campaigns, Sanders said the party is now in the midst of a massive transformation.

“We began this discussion by talking about a political revolution,” Sanders said. “I think that’s right. The transition is that, instead of having a top-down party, in which wealthy campaign contributors have enormous influence, we’re going to transform the party into a broad-based party of working people, of young people, people of color, of people who have not previously been involved in the political process. And the other thing that we will do is revitalize American democracy.”

He pointed to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani with 100,000 people “in the streets working on his campaign,” before then pointing to El-Sayed.

“Look what El-Sayed did yesterday,” he said. “Tens of thousands of people, out on the streets all over America. That’s what we’re doing. So the message here is that the days of a top-down party, I think, are finished.”