Wild election results in Michigan have many Democratic Party establishment figures worrying about insurgent socialists taking over their party, with uber progressive Michigan Senate candidate Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed being the latest to score a win over an established Democratic candidate. But for author and investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, the real question is not whether the Democratic Socialists of America are “making inroads” in the party or not.
It is whether establishment Democrats can stop the socialists without joining them.
“We’ve seen socialists win this year in places like California and New York, but this is the first DSA victory in the Midwest,” says Schweizer on the latest episode of The Drill Down. Coming in a swing state in America’s heartland, “This is a massive sea change in where American politics is heading,”
El-Sayed’s key to victory was the “coalition strategy,” Schweizer adds. El-Sayed appealed to the deeply anti-Israel and pro-Hamas Muslim enclaves in Michigan’s cities, while also capturing the overwhelmingly white progressives in the state’s university towns of Ann Arbor and Lansing. He comes from the Muslim-majority city of Dearborn, which also sends Rep. Rashida Tlaib to Congress.
His campaign overcame the state’s Democratic establishment, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and retiring Senate incumbent Gary Peters, who supported progressive Rep. Haley Stevens of Rochester Hills in the race. Stevens campaigned against her opponent’s “path of anger.”
El-Sayed denied to the Wall Street Journal that he is “technically or practically” a DSA member. However, democratic socialist lawmakers such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) campaigned aggressively for him even as establishment Democrats poured funds into his opponent’s coffers. That didn’t appear to work.
“I saw the stats,” Schweizer says, “and $83 dollars per vote was spent on behalf of the Haley Stevens campaign as opposed to about $4 per vote for El-Sayed.”
Schweizer also observed that the DSA is, “by its own internal membership surveys, 85 percent white. El-Sayed’s opponent, Haley Stevens, won the African American vote” in Michigan.
House Democratic Whip Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), who is black, told reporters he saw nothing compelling about El-Sayed’s socialist, anti-Israel rhetoric and told reporters, “I don’t see anyone who looks like me” at El-Sayed’s rallies.
For Schweizer, the most apt comparison is to then-President Bill Clinton’s famous “Sister Souljah” moment back in 1992. Clinton shocked many Democrats by denouncing violent anti-police statements made by a famous rapper of the time. Many political observers believe that pushback by a Democratic moderate may have won him the election.
“But there won’t be a replay of the ‘Sister Souljah moment’ this time, because the center of the party is now so far to the left,” Schweizer tells co-host Eric Eggers. “Where are the moderate Democrats in the Senate? The party is now controlled by leftist unions such as American Federation of Teachers and the SEIU [Service Employees International Union] and not the Teamsters, who are more culturally conservative.”
Besides being overwhelmingly white, the DSA’s voters are “largely Millennials who don’t remember history and did not grow up during the Cold War,” he says. “They grew up with prosperity, and they have no understanding of the failings of socialism, whether it’s the Soviet variety, the Cuban variety, the Venezuelan variety, or the Angolan variety,” Schweizer says.
Schweizer also mentions the theory of “elite overproduction,” which an academic first theorized in the 2010s. “When revolutions take place, they are generally led by people who think they belong in the elite. So, they get the training, they get the education, and they have the family background. And then, when they try to get into the elite, they realize that they’re not going to make it and they get angry,” Schweizer says.
“So, they blame the American system. They blame capitalism, and they take their anger out politically on the system, rather than maybe engage in some self-reflection and realize that they’re all not all that they think they are,” he adds.
The hosts play a clip from a Twitch streamer named Hasan Piker, who campaigned hard for El-Sayed. Piker tries to argue that the DSA’s socialism comes not from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders but from the “liberation movements” of Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Still, Stevens won the black vote in Wayne County (Detroit) by a lot.
Michigan has been a very important swing state in recent national elections, supporting President Trump in 2016 and 2024 and President Joe Biden in 2020. Polling in the state shows El-Sayed trails the Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers, who narrowly lost a Senate race in 2024.
“I’m going back to a speech that Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas gave earlier this year talking about progressivism in America and where our rights come from,” Schweizer says. “He said that the problem with progressives and with the left, including the Democratic Socialists of America, is that they don’t believe our rights come from God. They believe our rights come from government.”
“Clarence Thomas said that, growing up in the segregated South, ‘I saw what it looked like when what our rights were determined by the government.’ In other words, the experience of segregation. So, it’s going to be interesting to see.”
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