DETROIT—Primary elections this week are reflecting a fighting mood across the country against the Trump agenda, with voters saying they are fed up with excuses and apologies from lawmakers who are not working for them. They see the billionaires getting away with everything while they pay for skyrocketing costs and lose both jobs and healthcare.
One of the clearest examples of this is the primary election this week in Michigan. The results will show not just the anger of voters but can determine who it is that controls the U.S. Senate after the Midterm elections.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a strong supporter of Medicare-for-All, has widened his lead into double digits in pre-primary opinion polls among Michigan Democrats in the nomination race for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat. The primary is August 4.
If he wins the primary, he will oppose Republican Mike Rogers, a former U.S. representative and a multimillionaire who casts himself as a friend of workers even though he owns a mansion in Florida and two yachts.
In the Democratic primary, Rep. Haley Stevens is the so-called establishment candidate in a year when Democratic voters have shown little appetite for dictates from party leaders and big donors. Stevens has that backing, from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., incumbent Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and the heavy-handed and toxic American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its horde of campaign cash.
The Michigan race is important for progressives and their congressional allies. Incumbent Gary Peters (D) is retiring, and the party must hold onto his seat if it hopes to regain majority power in the Senate this fall. It also must retain all its other incumbents and flip four GOP-held seats elsewhere.
El-Sayed has taken strongly progressive stands against the Trump-Israeli war on Iran, Israel’s war on Gaza, and for Medicare For All, among other issues. On Medicare For All, he draws on his experience in repairing and renewing the public health system in Detroit—and seeing the current non-system fail.
He is a physician and says his position as such motivated him to demand a cutoff of U.S. military aid to Israel as long as the Israeli government continues its murderous war on Gazan civilians. That position has energized both campaign volunteers and the Detroit area’s large and growing Muslim-American community.
One of the leaders of the pro-Stevens effort in the primary is AIPAC. It’s spent millions of dollars nationally to try to defeat any candidate, challenger or incumbent, who does not genuflect to its strident and pro-right-wing-Israeli government stance. As a result, the war—which is underwater in U.S. polls—and AIPAC’s $30 million ads supporting Stevens have become top campaign issues.
Backing El Sayed is a wide-ranging alliance among Democrats, led by progressives such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., and Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich, who represents Detroit and nearby suburbs, and Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., who represents much of Boston.
It also led former Rep. Andy Levin, D-Mich., a critic of the Israeli government whom AIPAC and Stevens beat in a redistricting-forced primary matchup in 2022, to back El-Sayed. And so does the United Auto Workers, a political force in the Wolverine State.
“The startling moment we’re living through proves we need one thing above all in our leaders in Washington–moral courage and clarity,” Levin, a longtime union organizer and deputy organizing director of the AFL-CIO, wrote in a Detroit News op-ed last December.
“Know who you are. Know what you stand for. Know who you’re fighting for. And actually fight for them, brilliantly, creatively, relentlessly,” Levin said. “That’s Abdul.”
The Auto Workers agree and also back El-Sayed. “UAW members in Michigan want a fighter in Washington who isn’t afraid to push forward a strong working-class agenda with moral clarity,” the union said in June. “Having never taken a dime from corporate PACs, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is someone we can trust to have our backs, including when we need it most—like come May Day 2028.”
That’s when the union is trying to create a nationwide general strike threat by having union contracts in various industries expire on the same day.
“From Medicare for All to banning stock buybacks, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is ready, eager, and well-equipped to move our core issues in the U.S. Senate,” the UAW said.
Notably, the Michigan Building and Construction Trades Council is neutral in the Senate race, but backs Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson in the gubernatorial primary. Like Whitmer, Benson was physically threatened by lurking and dangerous Trumpites before the 2024 election.
The UAW backs Benson, too. “More than ever, we need to elect a leader in Lansing who stands alongside the UAW against corporate interests—and we know what side Jocelyn Benson is on,” the union said. “As Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson has proved she’s not afraid to stand up against the most powerful billionaires in the name of working-class Michiganders across the state. UAW members need that kind of energy in Michigan’s Capitol.”
Stevens, meanwhile, has also aimed fire at Rogers. Her latest ad salvo includes the disclosures about his wealth and his lack of support for factory workers.
The Senate race has overshadowed other races in the Wolverine State, notably the race to succeed term-limited Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the contest in a Detroit-based congressional district between incumbent Shri Thranedar, 58, and State Rep. Donovan McKinney, 34.
Thranedar, who is also a multimillionaire, basically bought the seat in an open-seat race in 2024. Like the overwhelming majority of Detroiters, McKinney is African-American. Thranedar isn’t.
McKinney is also campaigning on Medicare For All, increased aid to education, and other progressive causes. Both teachers unions—the Teachers/AFT and the NEA—back him, as do the Working Families Party and National Nurses United.
The same day as Michigan votes, Missourians in what is now a red state will decide on whether to put state taxing powers in a straitjacket. A proposed constitutional amendment would “reduce the state individual income tax, based on revenue growth, until the tax is eliminated,” Ballotpedia reports.
The amendment would also “reduce personal property and other local taxes when local revenues increase, while prohibiting reductions in funding for public schools, prohibit future state individual income taxes once eliminated and limit expansions of sales and use taxes, unless they are used to reduce income tax.”
Two days after Michigan votes, Tennesseans go to the polls on August 6. There’s a fight on the GOP side for the gubernatorial nomination as GOP U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn has watched her once-large lead disappear. In the latest development, state investigators are probing reported ethics violations by her campaign staff.
And there’s also a question about whether progressive State Rep. Justin Pearson, D-Memphis, can defy GOP gerrymandering and keep one Memphis-based congressional district in Democratic hands.
The GOP-gerrymandered state legislature, kowtowing to Trump, split majority-Black Memphis between three congressional districts, drowning its African-American voters in a sea of rural, white and right-wing Republicans. Pearson faces three opponents in the August 6 primary.
The redistricting fiasco also forced incumbent Rep. Steve Cohen, a veteran white Democrat and civil rights crusader from Memphis, to retire. Pearson led protests and walkouts against the gerrymander, and state troopers, at the behest of the white Republican state House Speaker, arrested him and several others for “disrupting” the legislative session.
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