Dasha Burns presses Mike Johnson on the economy, Iran and Trump’s agenda
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Politics
Category: Politics
The wave of populist energy propelling progressive Democrats to primary wins across the country reduced Wednesday morning to a ripple, just pushing Abdul El-Sayed to a narrow victory over his more moderate opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens.
Francesca Hong will try to keep the progressive momentum alive in another swing-state test in Wisconsin next week.
But if Hong, the democratic socialist frontrunner to claim her party’s gubernatorial nomination, wins her primary, she’s already recognizing the need to unite a broader coalition to win in November.
“We absolutely need every single vote, and we’ll be fighting to earn every single vote,” Hong said in an exclusive interview with POLITICO on Wednesday morning.
“I’ve talked to moderates and independents, Republicans, folks who don’t have a political home right now, and they have a lot of concerns about what’s going on in the state. They also have concerns about things I’ve said in the past,” she added. “But what we’re focusing on is how to come together to actually deliver for Wisconsinites, and that’s going to be electing Democrats down and up the ballot this cycle.”
Hong, a state Assembly member and former restaurant owner, this week faced criticism from across the political spectrum about a slew of old social media posts espousing far-left views, from declarations to abolish the police to a call to “cancel Thanksgiving.” And El-Sayed’s knife-edge win right next door is reigniting concerns among some Democrats that a battleground may not be ready for such a lefty leader.
Hong appears to be moderating on — or at least adding context to — some of her more controversial positions. She has walked back her stance on police abolition while emphasizing the need to better tackle the underlying causes of crime. She told POLITICO many of her old posts were “jokes,” including the one about Thanksgiving, which she said is actually her favorite holiday.
Still, Hong isn’t giving up her democratic socialist bonafides.
“The vision that we have for Wisconsin is one that my local DSA chapter shares,” she said, adding that “we’re fighting to make sure that we’re building the diverse coalition that we need to make sure that we win this for Wisconsinites in November.”
Hong has notched endorsements from several national progressives, including Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who rallied alongside her and the progressive podcaster Hasan Piker last weekend.
But she hasn’t been endorsed by the country’s two most prominent democratic socialists and standardbearers of the progressive movement: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Hong told POLITICO she has not spoken to either and attributed their lack of endorsement to their focus on federal races — though Sanders endorsed Troy Jackson in the Vermont governor’s race before he lost and became the Senate nominee, and both endorsed New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani last year.
“We have been focusing on winning a Democratic primary and staying above the drama,” Hong said.
Despite a major fundraising disadvantage, Hong has emerged as an unlikely frontrunner. She has led in the polls for months and became the all-but-presumed nominee after her main opponents, Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes and Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, both dropped out amid simmering scandals that embroiled their campaigns. Hong’s chief primary opponent next week is Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who dropped out of the race then jumped back in last month and has the endorsement of the state’s current Gov. Tony Evers, a moderate Democrat. Whoever wins on Tuesday will face off against the President Donald Trump-endorsed GOP Rep. Tom Tiffany.
Hong believes her lead is due to a grassroots campaign that has excited Democratic primary voters in Wisconsin. “Free child care, fully funding our schools, taxing the billionaires and a moratorium on AI data centers is what the majority of Wisconsinites have been telling us that they want, and we are the campaign that is listening,” she said in the interview.
The Crowley campaign is pointing to the Michigan results as a sign that they can still catch Hong. “There is still a long way to go in this race,” Crowley spokesperson Eddie Vale said. “If you can’t handle an easy CNN interview about Thanksgiving how can you possibly face the full wrath of the Republican attack machine?”
To beat Tiffany in the general, Hong would likely need to pick up support from more moderate Democrats and independents — all while dodging a deluge of Republican attacks digging up her old comments and seeking to paint her as “woke.”
“All Francesca Hong has to offer Wisconsin is bigger government, a plan to make Wisconsin the highest-taxed state in the nation, and a record of calling to abolish the police and prisons,” Tiffany said in a statement to POLITICO.
“They are trying to get a head start on labeling her ahead of the primary because they don’t see the result changing,” said Winnebago County Executive Gordon Hintz, who was minority leader in the state Assembly when Hong was first elected.
“There’s a very big discussion going on in Wisconsin, much as there was in Michigan, about whether a very progressive candidate can prevail in the primary and in the general election,” said John Nichols, a Madison native who wrote an anti-capitalist manifesto with Sanders. “It goes to a lot of questions about what’s been said in the past and how much people care.”
Asked if she planned to change her messaging strategy ahead of the primary, Hong flipped the question back to Tiffany. “When it comes to tailoring messaging, it’s important to recognize that what we have to offer are actual solutions, and what Tom Tiffany is bringing are clearly more Trump tariffs,” she said.
Tiffany, in his statement, hit back. “While she focuses on promoting socialism, defending inflammatory statements, and campaigning alongside terrorist sympathizers, I’ll remain focused on ending the 400-year property tax hike, rooting out fraud, bringing good-paying jobs back to Wisconsin, and making life more affordable after eight years under a Democrat governor,” he said.
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Politics
President Donald Trump’s most vocal opponents on the right were sowing the seeds for a future third-party political organization during a weekend get-together aimed at undercutting the Republican establishment.
The meeting at Tucker Carlson’s compound in Maine with Rep. Thomas Massie, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and others — captured in a photo posted by Greene on Saturday — served as a launch pad for a possible independent presidential campaign focused on unwinding U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts.
“We said no more foreign wars and we meant it and supported Donald Trump because he made that promise. But he’s betrayed us all,” Greene wrote in the post. “The movement has begun.”
Joe Kent, the former Trump national security official who resigned earlier this year and attended the weekend confab with Carlson, said the group congregated to strategize on how to best organize their shared opposition to the war in Iran.
“There’s a lot more nuts-and-bolts work that needs to be done there,” Kent said in an interview on “The Young Turks,” the progressive talk show. “Running as a third-party candidate is challenging. Not impossible, but it is very challenging. But that’s kind of the consensus that we came to, that the current system just simply doesn’t work, and we have to find something new to save our country.”
Carlson, Greene and Massie all backed Trump ahead of the 2024 election. But each one broke with Trump over the course of his second term as the Trump administration continued to coordinate military operations with Israel in the Middle East. Greene and Massie were also loudly critical of Trump’s opposition to releasing federal investigative documents relating to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, further drawing Trump’s ire.
It’s unclear who would lead the newborn movement. Kent said every attendee at the Maine meeting urged Carlson to run for president in 2028 with their group’s backing but noted that Carlson said he wouldn’t run.
“Hopefully he wakes up one day and Tucker says he’s going to run,” Kent said.
Carlson and Massie did not respond to requests for comment. Greene declined to comment.
The challenges facing third-party and independent presidential candidates are enormous. They must navigate different signature requirements and deadlines in each state just to get on the ballot. Past independent campaigns have been unable to compete financially with the two major parties.
The most recent third-party presidential campaign — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent bid in 2024 — ended months before Election Day when Kennedy endorsed Trump. At the time he dropped out, Kennedy was polling in single digits and fighting lawsuits seeking to block him from the ballot in multiple states.
Kent said the policy platform for the group’s hypothetical third-party campaign in 2028 would ignore most domestic matters and further emphasize their staunch anti-interventionism.
“I think it is having a very, very simple platform, and it’s acknowledging upfront, like, we are going to disagree on a lot of domestic policy and a lot of social issues,” Kent said. “At the end of the day, the president can talk a lot about all those things, but he really doesn’t have a lot of power.”
“We do agree that we don’t want Israel dictating our foreign policy,” he added. “We don’t want any more foreign wars.”
Carlson didn’t signal his involvement in any broader political project or back a third-party candidate for 2028 during his show Wednesday. Instead, he delivered an hour-long monologue laying out his worldview and aspirations for the country.
His vision covered familiar territory — including encouraging Americans to have more children, ending immigration and promoting healthy foods. In addition to denouncing Trump, he called Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth a “deranged, bloodthirsty monkey,” for his conduct during the Iran War.
Lisa Kashinsky, Alec Hernandez and Sam Benson contributed to this story.
Politics
Abdul El-Sayed has just three months to convince a fractured Democratic Party to unite behind him after a nasty primary.
Even before his narrow win over moderate Rep. Haley Stevens became official Wednesday, El-Sayed had begun the difficult process of trying to patch things up with a moderate wing of the party he’d spent months flaying as corporatist stooges as Republicans launched their first wave of attacks of the general election. He says he looks forward to “building relationships” with Jewish voters. And some top Democrats in Michigan and Washington alike are largely filing behind him in a show of unity ahead of November’s high-stakes election.
“To all of our supporters here tonight, watching on TV, tomorrow we begin to mend fences,” El-Sayed told a crowd of supporters early Wednesday before the race was called, asking them to show “magnanimity in victory.”
“We need to move forward and start bringing this party together,” El-Sayed reiterated on MS NOW’s Morning Joe hours later.
And, in a speech formalizing his victory after it was called at 10 a.m. Eastern, he said: “Whatever differences that we might have had in the primary, they pale in comparison to what unifies us.”
El-Sayed has little time to force a reconciliation before he faces off against Mike Rogers, a Donald Trump-endorsed former representative with the backing of Washington’s GOP Senate apparatus. Michigan is one of the nation’s top battlegrounds, a state Trump has won twice but where Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin narrowly defeated Rogers in 2024.
Early voting begins in five weeks.
Already prominent Michigan Democrats like Slotkin and Rep. Debbie Dingell are working to consolidate support behind El-Sayed, showing efforts from both the moderate and progressive flanks after a bitter primary that put tensions over Israel and campaign finance in the spotlight.
“We do have to unite,” Dingell said in an interview. “Abdul’s got to figure out how he’s going to bring people that were part of Haley’s coalition and have them know that he cares about the values that they have, which I know he does, but he’s got to talk to them. This coalition has got to be a very broad coalition.”
Michigan Democrats plan to hold their so-called post-primary “unity breakfast” Thursday morning in Southfield, where they will rally behind party nominees. The contest was separated by less than a percentage point when the AP called the race Wednesday morning. Stevens immediately conceded and called for unity. And state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who dropped her U.S. Senate bid a month before the primary, had already endorsed El-Sayed, saying she wanted to enter November “as a unified party” after “a brutal primary.”
“We must elect Democrats up and down the ballot,” Stevens said in a statement Wednesday, promising her support to El-Sayed after calling her primary with him “a thorough and rigorous campaign that brought out the full span of views within the Democratic Party.”
The primary was animated by charges of sexism, racism and religious bigotry. Splits over Israel played prominently in the race: El-Sayed attacked Stevens incessantly for relying on outside spending from groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which spent a record $32 million on her behalf. In the race’s final days, Stevens and her allies accused El-Sayed of antisemitism and sexism, and El-Sayed’s allies accused Stevens of Islamophobia.
Outgoing Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), who had endorsed Stevens, said he spoke with El-Sayed Wednesday morning and congratulated him. He said he will “work hard to make sure” Democrats coalesce behind El-Sayed.
“The party has to all come together right now,” he told POLITICO. “We don’t have a lot of time, but everybody has to come together and understand that as Democrats, whatever differences we have between us as Democrats are minor compared to the differences between our Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate.”
Republicans are already plastering the airwaves with their preferred attack: Painting El-Sayed as “radical” and “dangerous” while emphasizing the full name of the American-born son of Egyptian immigrants.
“Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, the most radical Senate candidate in America,” a new National Republican Senatorial Committee ad says.
“Abdul El-Sayed: Dangerously radical,” says a new Senate Leadership Fund ad.
In a statement Wednesday morning, Rogers called El-Sayed an “extremist” who “campaigns with people who refuse to condemn terrorism” — likely a reference to comments made by his ally, far-left streamer Hasan Piker, which Piker has since said he regretted. “I spent years hunting terrorists and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice,” said Rogers, a former FBI special agent. “Never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11.”
Cullen Schwarz, a longtime Democratic strategist in Michigan, said Democrats need to portray Rogers as the extreme one if they’re going to emerge victorious in the must-win Senate race.
“As Democrats move forward, I hope we remember that in politics, the real battle is over moving the Overton window,” he said. “The Republicans are going to try to paint progressives across the country as extreme. It’s extreme to support Donald Trump.”
If that is the frame, Schwarz said, he doesn’t think Democrats will have any issues reunifying. “Democrats will immediately remember the fight we’re facing in the fall,” he said. “There’s been no force more unifying for Democrats than Donald Trump,”
El-Sayed could have the most work to do in rural, working-class areas and among Black voters. He won just 34 percent of the vote in Detroit, according to unofficial returns. And Stevens won a majority of votes across counties where less than 30 percent of adults have a college degree, according to a POLITICO analysis.
Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), said Democrats — from Michigan to Washington — need to line up behind El-Sayed.
“Frankly, the Democratic establishment needs to very quickly consolidate around him — all of them,” said Duss, executive vice president at Center for International Policy. “If they believe what they say about needing to take Michigan for Democrats in the Senate, they can show us by getting all in behind El-Sayed right now.”
El-Sayed’s emergence from the contentious primary — which saw record levels of outside spending in one of the nation’s key battlegrounds — will require some Washington Democrats who previously kept him at arm’s length to now embrace him. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). said he preferred Stevens in the primary, but he released a statement Wednesday saying he and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Kirsten Gillibrand “look forward to working with Abdul and Democrats across Michigan to win this seat in November.”
And the narrow result is forcing progressives who had been expecting a dominant, double-digit victory to recalibrate their expectations as their attention shifts to the general.
“Tough result for Democrats,” said Adrian Hemond, founder of a Michigan-based bipartisan advocacy and outreach firm. “The promised populist wave was a dud… If you think the primary was nasty, just wait until next week. General election voters are less college educated and less ideological, so they have to find a way to sell ideology to normal people.”
Jessica Piper, Adam Wren, Ali Bianco and Mia McCarthy contributed reporting.
Politics
President Donald Trump’s endorsed candidate lost a top battleground Republican primary in Michigan — to a candidate who suspended his campaign last month.
Amir Hassan, a Navy veteran and former law enforcement officer from Flint backed by Trump, finished significantly behind Tom Smith on Wednesday. Hassan rallied with Trump in Milford, Michigan, just last week.
Smith, a retired engineer, had dropped out in mid-July and endorsed another candidate who ended up in third in the primary. Smith told POLITICO that he would now return to challenge first-term Democratic Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet for the purple 8th District.
“I look forward to working with Speaker [Mike] Johnson and the entire Republican team to expand our House majority and advance President Trump’s America First agenda to lower costs for working families and make America affordable again,” Smith said in a statement.
McDonald Rivet is among the more than a dozen Democratic incumbents seeking reelection in a district Trump won in 2024. But a GOP strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly, characterized her as a “powerhouse.” The strategist added that Hassan had “clear flaws as a candidate” and the “GOP base was reluctant to support a dude named Amir Hassan.”
A handful of Trump-endorsed candidates have lost state-level races this year — including the governor’s races in Iowa and Georgia — but Hassan is the first congressional candidate to lose despite the president’s support this cycle.
Politics
Michigan Rep. Shri Thanedar lost his primary to democratic socialist Donavan McKinney on Wednesday — the latest victory for progressives who’ve been on a hot streak of ousting incumbents in safe-blue districts.
Thanedar’s 13th District was a top priority for groups like Justice Democrats that are committed to primarying incumbent members that they believe aren’t in line with the areas they represent. Justice Democrats helped recruit McKinney into the race and spent nearly $1 million on his behalf, making his campaign one of its biggest targets this cycle.
McKinney, a state representative, had secured the backing of a number of progressive House Democrats, including some members of the Congressional Black Caucus who bucked party leadership, which was standing behind Thanedar in the heavily Black Detroit-based district.
Some of Thanedar’s colleagues were also frustrated by his efforts to force a vote on impeaching President Donald Trump last year, an effort he ultimately backed away from.
The district is a safe seat for Democrats, and McKinney is expected to win easily in November.
Politics
Abdul El-Sayed is Democrats’ Senate nominee in Michigan, a seismic victory for progressives that carries massive implications for both the Senate battlemap and the Democratic Party’s future.
The progressive former public health official on Wednesday narrowly defeated establishment-backed Rep. Haley Stevens, who was boosted by a record-breaking $32 million in spending from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
His margin was far slimmer than progressives had anticipated based on polling that had shown him with a double-digit lead ahead of the election, blunting what they hoped would be an emphatic capstone to a series of high-profile wins that had tilted the party’s ideological civil war in their favor.
El-Sayed will have to work overtime to convince skeptical centrists that a progressive can win in purple territory against former GOP Rep. Mike Rogers in a critical battleground that will decide Senate control.
His victory comes after a contentious primary that was defined by clashes over everything from Israel to immigration to health care. Stevens and her allies lobbied accusations ofsexism and antisemitism against El-Sayed, whose supporters in turn accused the moderate Democrat of Islamophobia.
Wednesday’s result is a setback for the pro-Israel lobby as well as for leaders within the Democratic establishment — most notably Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — who had thrown their weight behind Stevens.
El-Sayed’s win has the potential to scramble Schumer’s gameplan for November; Democrats need to keep retiring Sen. Gary Peters’ seat if they have any hope of retaking the chamber.
And it’s emboldening Republicans who hold a cash advantage heading into November and are growing bullish about their chances for a flip against a progressive who was their preferred nominee. State Republican Party Chair Jim Runestad said the GOP plans to paint him as a “far-left democratic socialist.”
Jason Roe, a longtime Republican operative in Michigan, previously told POLITICO that “El-Sayed is not doing very well outstate and I think that’s what a lot of Republicans are banking on. It will be very difficult for him to beat Rogers with those rural counties.”
Still, El-Sayed’s emergence from the bruising primary that became ground zero for Democrats’ ideological war stands as progressives’ biggest win yet in a year when the left has harnessed a wave of anti-establishment angst to deliver a series of stunning upsets. And it carries significant implications for how Democrats will approach a state that will have an outsized role in picking the party’s next presidential nominee in 2028.
El-Sayed has sought to position his win as a springboard for growing progressives’ influence ahead of 2028.
Politics
Progressives didn’t get the earthquake they expected. Moderates are relishing in their stronger than expected showing.
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, with Michigan’s marquee Democratic Senate primary still in limbo, one of Democrats’ key questions of the midterms remains unresolved: Can the party’s most progressive faction successfully compete — and go on to win — in a battleground state?
The razor-thin margin between progressive Abdul El-Sayed and moderate Rep. Haley Stevens will leave Democrats arguing about the answer regardless of who ultimately prevails.
The finger-pointing within the party has already begun.
“These guys are unbelievably cocky,” said a Democratic operative granted anonymity to speak candidly. The person was frustrated over El-Sayed’s decision to attend a pool party with progressive streamer Hasan Piker on Monday, hours before polls opened.
El-Sayed led by three points by the time both candidates addressed their supporters around 1 a.m. Wednesday, with thousands of votes yet to be counted. He performed best in the state’s wealthiest and most highly-educated places, while Stevens outperformed him in areas with lower average incomes and where fewer voters have college degrees.
But that marginal lead was a far cry from what El-Sayed and his allies had expected.
Public polling in the campaign’s closing stretch showed El-Sayed ahead of Stevens by double digits. And his campaign projected confidence they would deliver a decisive win that would cement the strength of the progressive movement in Michigan, a state crucial to the Democratic Party’s prospects of retaking the Senate in November and, eventually, the White House in 2028.
The progressive wave never materialized on Tuesday night, igniting fresh questions about the potency of the movement. Progressive candidates have notched a series of wins throughout the spring primary season in safe and competitive districts, from California to Maine. Michigan, however, was widely viewed as their biggest test yet.
“The Democratic Party is a coalition that spans everything from center to socialist,” Democratic strategist Tré Easton wrote on social media Wednesday morning in response to Tuesday’s results. “Each part needs the other.”
El-Sayed has maintained a steady lead after the polls closed, and could very well still pull off a win for his progressive coalition and advance to the general election — but instead of kicking off the next phase of his campaign with a victory lap, he’ll emerge limping out of a closer-than-foretold primary.
Even beyond the Senate race, the results were mixed: Progressive Sunrise Movement co-founder William Lawrence won his primary for Michigan’s 7th District, but largely because two more moderate candidates had split the vote. Democratic socialist Donavan McKinney is still locked in a tight race with incumbent Rep. Shri Thanedar for Michigan’s 13th District. And over in Missouri, progressive Cori Bush’s comeback bid fell apart.
“Bottom line is if [El-Sayed] wins, the DSA brand beyond major urban areas is not popular,” a national Democratic operative granted anonymity to speak candidly said early Wednesday morning. “Certainly puts a dent in the movement especially with Cori Bush’s loss.”
Stevens sent her own supporters home on an optimistic note Wednesday morning: “I’m feeling good about this race.”
El-Sayed, for his part, quickly recast his narrow lead as a victory against the barrage of spending against him from pro-Stevens groups — despite projecting enough confidence to declare he would beat Rogers “by seven” percentage points in the general election earlier on Tuesday.
“I wish I could tell you that I was declaring victory right about now. Turns out it takes a long time to count some votes in Michigan,” El-Sayed told supporters at his election night party in Detroit.
For some El-Sayed allies a win is a win, even if the final margins are close. “Any win is good, as long as it’s called tonight,” Bhaskar Sunkara, a 2020 Bernie Sanders surrogate and former DSA vice chair, told POLITICO.
Regardless of the final outcome, the race’s narrow margin ensures that the winner will have significant work to do to unify the party after an acrimonious primary riddled with personal attacks from both sides — a reality both candidates appeared to acknowledge in remarks to supporters.
“To all of our supporters here tonight, watching on TV, tomorrow we begin to mend fences,” El-Sayed said. “If your instinct is to be like, ‘I told you.’ Nope. Let’s come together to build a movement that’s even bigger, that’s even stronger, that’s even more powerful, that reaches into the very depths of this state, that reminds us the best of who we are and who we can be.”
Democrats across the state had already set their focus on uniting their deeply fractured party ahead of another likely bruising contest in the general election.
“It’s no secret that this has at once been a contentious and bruising primary, but Democrats through it all have shown resilience towards coming together following primaries,” said Chris Herweyer, an organizing director for the Kent County Democratic Party.
Michigan State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who ran for Senate before suspending her campaign a month before the primary, endorsed El-Sayed early Wednesday as he maintained a narrow advantage over Rep. Haley Stevens — another sign of swift efforts to reconcile, even as the race remained in limbo.
Republicans, meanwhile, are still hoping for an El-Sayed win. Rogers’ primary proved a bright spot for Republicans on the Senate map, where the party successfully avoided a costly and heated primary of their own and could focus early on the general election.
“El-Sayed is the preferred candidate” for Republicans, Jason Roe, a longtime Republican operative in Michigan, said in a text message. “El-Sayed is not doing very well outstate and I think that’s what a lot of Republicans are banking on. It will be very difficult for him to beat Rogers with those rural counties.”
Andrew Howard and Will Steakin contributed to this report.
Politics
Two years after former Rep. Cori Bush told the American Israel Political Affairs Committee she’d be back to “tear your kingdom down,” voters in Missouri’s 1st District again rejected her staunch criticisms of Israel and AIPAC.
Rep. Wesley Bell (D-Mo.), who unseated Bush in a 2024 primary after she became one of the first members of Congress to call the Israel’s actions in Gaza in its war with Hamas a “genocide,” trounced the former member of “the Squad” on Tuesday night by a yawning margin.
It’s a snag for Democratic progressives who have otherwise seen a slew of primary wins campaigning on ending military aid for Israel, and who have sought to make support from AIPAC into political poison.
The race had some key differences from when they squared off two years ago. An AIPAC-backed super PAC still spent $2 million boosting Bell, but that was a far cry from the $9.3 million the group spent two years ago, according to data from ad tracker AdImpact.
And Bush got no backup this year on the airwaves from the constellation of progressive groups that rallied to her cause in 2024.
The size of Bell’s victory suggests that Democratic primary voters’ anger toward politicians who remain supportive of Israel isn’t limitless, despite public sentiment nationwide broadly moving against Israel.
Bell, who has affirmed support for Israel’s relationship with the United States, beat Bush by about six points in 2024 and appears on track to win by even more.
On Tuesday night, AIPAC reposted a POLITICO story about the fight over AIPAC in the district, writing simply: “Congratulations, Wesley Bell!”
Bell also enjoyed the backing of establishment Democrats this year, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and the Congressional Black Caucus PAC. Bush on the other hand, solidified her progressive bonafides with endorsements from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Politics
South Dakota Democratic Senate nominee Julian Beaudion dropped out of the race Tuesday, a move that comes following heightened pressure from within the party to clear the way for a stronger independent candidate, according to paperwork filed with the South Dakota Secretary of State’s office.
Beaudion’s decision comes on the same day as the deadline to withdraw, and just days after he told POLITICO he was not going to leave the race. Now, independent Brian Bengs will face a one-on-one battle with Republican Sen. Mike Rounds in November.
In a statement, Beaudion likened his decision to the failed Apollo 13 mission to the moon.
“It is with a tremendous amount of gratitude to everyone who has supported our campaign mission and a great amount of sorrow, that I say, ‘Houston, we have a problem,’” he wrote.
Beaudion is the third Democrat in a deep-red Senate race who has left in order to give independents — who have polled better and raised more money — a better shot at defeating Republicans. Already, Democrats in Idaho and Nebraska have dropped out and endorsed independents.
But Montana Democrat Alani Bankhead has steadfastly insisted she will not suspend her campaign for the better-funded independent Seth Bodnar in what otherwise could be the best shot for an independent candidate to knock off a red-state Republican this fall.
Bengs, a former Democrat who was crushed by Majority Leader John Thune when he ran for Senate in 2022, has touted internal polling showing a competitive race with Rounds — but only if Beaudion exited.
Politics