By Adrienne Pickett, TGP Founder
I don’t stay up late on election night. Ever.
I like to get my rest now that I’m in my mid-forties. Plus, I have kids. I was invited to several election-night parties Tuesday, including Abdul’s, but instead I stayed home in my Prop 3 T-shirt, planted on the couch, hitting refresh on Freep.com like it was a slot machine.
As I write this, several outlets still haven’t officially called Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary. The AP hasn’t. The Free Press hasn’t. MLive hasn’t. Much of Michigan’s Democratic congressional delegation has remained conspicuously quiet. Mallory McMorrow though, with grace, has thrown her support, and her substantial coalition behind Abdul.
The pundits on CNN and MS NOW are about to pick this victory apart like buzzards circling carrion.
They’ll ask whether Abdul is too progressive. Too divisive. Too inexperienced. Too Muslim. Too angry about Gaza. Too focused on working people. Too unwilling to kiss the appropriate rings.
They’ll analyze whether the Democratic Party has been overtaken by what they continue to call the “insurgent left.”
So, before everyone with a cable-news contract tells us what happened, let’s talk about what actually happened, particularly from a communications standpoint.
You Cannot Buy Your Way Out of a Bad Political Environment
More than $60 million was spent trying to defeat Abdul El-Sayed.
Sixty. Million. Dollars.
That is so fucking gross.
Think about what $60 million could do in the actual world. It could feed people. House people. Fund clinics. Support candidates up and down the ballot.
Instead, much of it was poured into television ads and political communications designed to tell voters that the candidate talking about getting money out of politics was somehow the dangerous one.
And it didn’t work.
Congresswoman Haley Stevens and the groups supporting her reportedly spent several times what Abdul’s campaign spent. One estimate put the overall difference at roughly $65 million to $7.5 million.
All that money could not overcome the political environment or the fundamental credibility problem facing the Democratic establishment.
People do not experience politics as a collection of legislative records and carefully assembled endorsement lists. They experience it through their lives. I have said this over and over to our candidates: endorsements only matter to your insular environment, not to the people who are worried about receiving their next paycheck.
They see images of starving children and families being blown apart by weapons paid for with their tax dollars, in wars they perceive as started by a foreign government.
They pay $4.59 for a gallon of gas.
Photo by Robert Couse-Baker
They stand in grocery-store aisles doing mental math.
They receive a medical bill and wonder which other bill will have to wait.
Then they see a candidate accepting millions from corporations, PACs and powerful interests, and they make a fairly uncomplicated assumption:
They are not with us. They are with the billionaires.
Let them eat cake.
The Democratic Base Is Fed Up
The base is fed up with Chuck Schumer. It is fed up with Nancy Pelosi. It is fed up with Hakeem Jeffries. It is fed up with being lectured about pragmatism by people who have been in Washington since fax machines were considered cutting-edge technology.
No one—and I mean no one—is sitting around Michigan right now saying, “You know who really understands what I’m going through? Chuck Schumer.”
Voters don’t care how many decades someone has spent accumulating a record if they cannot explain what they are going to do for people right now.
How are you going to lower my DTE bill?
How are you going to keep me from going bankrupt because I got sick?
How are you going to stop corporations from buying elections and writing the rules?
How are you going to make my life tangibly better?
Those are not radical questions. They are the basic questions politics is supposed to answer.
And those of us who were offended by the word “establishment” may need to sit with an uncomfortable truth: some of the people who entered politics as disruptors nearly a decade ago have now become the establishment.
As a person who considers myself an outsider insider, that is not necessarily an insult. It is a reminder.
Power changes people. Institutions absorb movements. Yesterday’s insurgent becomes today’s gatekeeper unless they remain intentional about who they are there to serve.
The Money Was Spent in the Wrong Places
Here is another lesson campaigns should tattoo somewhere visible, like backwards on their foreheads:
People are not getting most of their information from traditional media anymore.
Campaigns continue to spend staggering amounts of money on television because that is what campaigns have always done. Consultants recommend it. Media buyers profit from it. Everyone feels comfortable because the spreadsheet looks familiar.
But familiarity is not strategy.
Millions of dollars were burned on traditional media that fewer and fewer voters watch, trust, or remember. Running the same ads over and over can have a “point of diminishing returns.” It can actually blow up in your face.
Meanwhile, social media creators and political influencers—with combined audiences in the millions—were shaping this race every day. Many of those voices were based here in Michigan, where organizations like Distill Social have spent years building relationships and bringing creators together.
Image credit: Alexandra Cascio on Instagram
These were not simply paid messengers reading campaign copy into their phones. They were trusted people translating the stakes of the election for their audiences. They explained. They reacted. They argued. They made the race culturally relevant.
Was digital the only reason Abdul won? Of course not.
But campaigns that treat social and digital media as the place where they dump resized television commercials are going to keep wasting money and wondering why nobody is listening.
The investment must move toward the places where people actually form opinions, participate in communities, and decide who they trust.
A Platform Is a Message
Abdul also had something too many candidates lack: a message that was inseparable from his platform.
Money out of politics.
Money in your pocket.
Medicare for All.
Those are specific. They are memorable. They tell voters what he believes and what he intends to do.
“Fix the damn roads” worked for the same reason. It was not a cloud of values floating over a stock photo of a family. It named a problem and promised action.
A campaign message should not merely describe a candidate’s personality. It should tell people what the candidate will fight for.
Voters do not need another paragraph about bringing people together, creating opportunity, protecting our shared values and building a brighter tomorrow.
That language has been sanded smooth by a thousand campaigns until it means absolutely nothing.
People are asking for material change. Speak materially.
Ground Still Matters
This was not simply a social-media victory.
Abdul’s ground game was visible throughout the state, not only in Detroit, Ann Arbor and Dearborn, but in Kent County and communities across northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula. They were out knocking doors long before anyone could even legally display his yard signs. And people remember that face time.
That matters especially going into a General Election.
Michigan is not won by parachuting into Detroit for a press conference, buying Grand Rapids television for three weeks and remembering at the last minute that an entire peninsula exists above the Mackinac Bridge.
A statewide campaign has to show up statewide.
The digital work created energy and expanded the message. The organizing gave that energy somewhere to go.
You need both.
Polls Are Dumb
That is the section.
Now Everyone Needs to Get Their Shit Together
A primary is designed to expose differences. A general election is designed to test whether a coalition can survive them.
So here is what comes next.
The factions of this party need to stop calling one another Zionists and Islamophobes long enough to recognize the actual threat in front of us.
There cannot be sore losers.
There also cannot be sore winners.
The people who backed Haley Stevens should not be treated as morally deficient or told they are no longer welcome in the Democratic Party. The people who backed Abdul should not be dismissed as naïve children who will eventually grow out of wanting health care and a government that cannot be purchased by the highest bidder.
Everyone needs to take a breath, put down the knives and move together.
Because bootlicker Mike Rogers is waiting.
John James previewed the Republican argument in his gubernatorial primary speech Tuesday night: Democrats caused the economic pain people are experiencing, Democrats are socialists and Republicans are the only ones who can fix it.
In reality, Republicans have inflamed the very crisis they now blame on everyone else—through endless wars, tax giveaways, attacks on health care and the gutting of the social safety net.
In other words, Republicans are committing a breathtaking act of political arson followed by an offer to sell us a fire extinguisher.
After hearing James’s speech reported on NPR, I switched to The Daily podcast and listened to people describe losing SNAP benefits because they could not get through the bureaucratic maze required to complete an “in-person” interview.
People are being starved through red tape.
On purpose.
And the cruelty will intensify if Republicans gain more power. Healthcare and safety net cuts will come after the election, when they hope voters are no longer paying attention.
That is the actual opponent.
Not the Democrat who supported a different candidate in the primary.
The opponent is the party that is systematically stripping people of food, health care, economic security and basic dignity—and then blaming immigrants, poor people and “socialists” for the suffering it created.
For Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and the coalition that carried him through this primary, the immediate opponent is now Trump loyalist Mike Rogers.
So congratulations to the insurgents.
Congratulations to the people who were told their candidate could not win.
Congratulations to the organizers who kept showing up.
Image Credit: Distill Social Instagram
Congratulations to the people who refused to believe that the biggest pile of money automatically deserved the biggest pile of votes.
But remember: being an insurgent is not simply about defeating an establishment candidate.
It is about remaining willing to challenge systems that stop serving people, even when we as organizers helped build those systems, even when our friends run them, and even when we have finally earned a comfortable seat at the table.
Insurgency is not an identity. It is a responsibility.
Celebrate the win.
Then widen the coalition, sharpen the message, and get back to work.
November is coming.