WILLIAMSTON, Mich. — Kent Tisdale spent most of his life voting for Republicans before he started voting for Democrats, even backing Donald Trump in 2016. The 70-year-old retiree can even remember that his biggest concern backing Mitt Romney in 2012 was that the GOP presidential nominee wasn’t conservative enough.
He is now seriously considering supporting Abdul El-Sayed in Tuesday’s Senate Democratic primary.
Tisdale, now a member of his local Indivisible chapter, said Trump’s presidency and the deluge of money in politics led him to El-Sayed, whose passion has impressed him even if the candidate’s politics are further left than he’d like.
“I don’t feel I’ve changed that much,” said Tisdale, who spoke to NOTUS while attending an event for a local House candidate. “But I feel the environment has changed.”
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In Michigan and across the country this year, voters like Tisdale are transforming Democratic primaries — and potentially putting the party on a different path as it heads into the 2028 presidential campaign.
Rank-and-file Democratic voters who once naturally inclined toward establishment-backed candidates are instead supporting — or at least showing an openness to — lefty candidates they would have previously believed to be outside the political mainstream. They’re driven by disappointment in old-guard Democrats’ inability to beat Trump in 2024 and a growing sense that the country’s politics need a fresh direction.
It’s that change in the electorate that, more than anything this year, explains why El-Sayed is now favored to beat Rep. Haley Stevens in Tuesday’s Senate primary in Michigan. Stevens is running the type of campaign — backed by key party endorsements, support in the Black community and plenty of money — that has helped centrist Democrats like her defeat progressive challengers for years. That pattern held for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.
But the voters on the receiving end of that effort are in a much different place than they were in 2024, much less 2018 or 2016.
“So many people feel the same way I do, that something needs to be done,” said Jan Cohen, who founded a local Indivisible chapter last year. “And the only reasonable thing seems to be: Burn it down and start over, and make it different. We have to take the stands and do everything we can.”
Cohen voted against El-Sayed in 2018 when he ran for governor against Gretchen Whitmer. But she said she’s grown frustrated with Michigan Democratic leaders recently, worried they no longer seem to be pushing progressive policy through the state and upset at their support for Stevens.
The frustration normie Democratic voters feel with their own party is in part responsible for the defeat of establishment-backed politicians like Janet Mills in Maine’s Senate race, or the handful of defeats of Democratic incumbents in safe blue House seats. In nearby Wisconsin, Democratic voters look poised to nominate a democratic socialist for governor in that state’s open gubernatorial race despite protests from party leaders like Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers.
El-Sayed, a former Wayne County, Michigan, health director, earned just 30% of the vote against Whitmer in 2018. That sort of defeat had become the norm for progressive Democrats, most crucially during each of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns. In those races, the senator from Vermont was unable to break through with many middle-of-the-road Democratic voters, especially in the Black community, and was ultimately pushed back by a party establishment that emphasized electability and realistic policy goals.
Polls now show El-Sayed in a strong position ahead of Tuesday’s primary, leading Stevens by a double-digit margin in a spate of recent surveys, despite tens of millions of dollars spent against his campaign by outside groups.
Stevens officials maintain the congresswoman has a chance to win Tuesday, dismissing polls as underestimating the support of her core voters. Some of the frustrated voters, including Tisdale, have also not actually made up their minds despite their openness to El-Sayed, expressing some reservations about his ideology and electability in the fall.
And even progressive activists say privately they think the movement of these voters toward candidates like El-Sayed is less about a newfound acceptance of lefty policy platforms like single-payer health care and more about their anger with the Democratic establishment.
Some Stevens supporters acknowledge that El-Sayed has tapped into a deep frustration in the party, pushing his candidacy to a stronger position than many expected was once possible for a candidate with his politics.
“Abdul has drafted behind that uneasiness with our party,” said Lon Johnson, a veteran Democratic strategist in the state. “He has done a good job of drafting behind it, and corralling it.”
“This year is very, very different than 2024,” said another Democratic strategist supportive of Stevens’ campaign, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “And I don’t like what that means for our party’s prospects, but that’s the way it’s going. People are pissed.”
In a gaggle with reporters after a campaign event last week, El-Sayed said he personally had changed a lot since his 2018 race, noting he’s gone from a 32-year-old first-time candidate to a 41-year-old with two kids. He said he believes his message resonates much more deeply with the electorate now than it did then.
“The bigger change is not really me,” he said. “The broader public has come through a lot. In the ensuing eight years, we’ve had a pandemic. We’ve lived through one full Trump presidency and then another quarter of one. We’ve watched an inflation crisis. And the central point that I was making is that Trump is not the disease, he’s the symptom. And I think this time around, after his ... first reelection, I think people understand that.
“There’s something about having been saying the same thing for the better part of 10 years, since I jumped into public service,” he said.
El-Sayed said he didn’t think the party’s failure to defeat Trump in 2024 was the root of voters’ frustration, instead blaming the simmering rage on Democrats’ inability to make people’s lives easier in tangible ways.
El-Sayed’s pitch to voters hasn’t deviated this campaign. Before talking to reporters last week, he rallied with supporters in Lansing with a message focused on Israel’s wrongdoing in the Middle East, a single-payer health care system and a vow to take money out of politics. His final campaign ads feature progressive leaders like Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York).
“I want you to remember that you’re walking the same exact path as all of those folks who fought for everything coming from abolition to native rights to women’s suffrage to LGBTQ rights to religious freedom to ending Jim Crow, to building an America where we had unions, the folks who showed up to sit down and stand up for rights, the folks who gave us Medicare and Medicaid,” El-Sayed told supporters last week in Ypsilanti. “You are walking that path.”
Polls indicate that El-Sayed still has some of the same struggles that have traditionally plagued progressives, especially with middle-aged and elderly Black voters. Stevens is counting on their support, along with older white union voters, to give her a chance at victory, and has developed her campaign to win them over.
But Democrats say that many suburban voters who once considered themselves ideologically and temperamentally moderate before Trump’s victory in 2024 have entered their own state of rebellion. Their anger can be harshest for candidates like Stevens, Democrats say, who was first elected in 2018 but hasn’t been able to stop the GOP’s advance since entering office.
“The base is so angry at normal Democrats who were around back then and are exactly the people who said, ‘We’ve got this,’” said a second Democratic strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “And they didn’t.”
Tisdale, a resident of Williamston, is still interested in candidates with more centrist politics, too: He spoke to NOTUS here at a meet-and-greet event for Matt Maasdam, a moderate Democrat running in the state’s 7th Congressional District. (Maasdam and Bridget Brink, another candidate with the support of local Democrats, are both in danger of losing to a progressive activist.)
But even as a man who said he’s never voted for Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin, despite living in her old House district, Tisdale said El-Sayed’s “passion level” might give Democrats a needed jolt to take on Trump. It’s why he says he and others, including his wife, are considering voting for the insurgent.
“We think that kind of energy is how you fight back,” he said.
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