When Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination for Michigan Senate in a nail-biter, there was some talk about this actually being a disappointing outcome for the insurgent left given late polling that suggested El-Sayed running away with the race. This struck me as basically centrist cope -- one doesn't get to claim a moral victory of losing more narrowly than expected when you outspent your appointment by approximately seven trillion dollars -- but it did race significant questions about what went wrong for the pollsters.
Tonight, David Crowley narrowly upset Democratic Socialist Francisca Hong to win the nomination for Governor of Wisconsin in another race where late polling had given the progressive a commanding lead. In contrast to the Michigan race, I think this really does reflect poorly on Hong, as for an "outsider" candidate she couldn't have asked for more a glide path to the nomination watching her field of competitors implode around her (Crowley actually dropped out of the race a month ago before jumping back in, which is wild).
(Meanwhile, in Minnesota, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan easily won the Senate nomination over Rep. Angie Craig in another progressive/moderate showdown, though this felt more expected.)
So we now have two major midwestern Democratic primary races that were defined by huge polling misses, both in the form of vast overstatements of the strength of the lefty candidate. The big question is what does this mean for November? Does this suggest an electorate that is more conservative than polls are letting on? Or is it actually just showing that there are more "normie libs" whose voices are being drowned out? More than the results, that's the question that's going to keep me up at night.
