The Tribune

YESTERDAY morning brought to American TV screens and on-line news feeds some news that surprised many observers. It may presage results in the upcoming November elections that seem poised to bring an end to what has amounted to one-party rule in Washington since president Donald Trump was reelected nearly two years ago.

Taken together with some results from last week, Americans are beginning to see the outlines of what is to come politically at just about the time most of them are starting to stir around and actually pay attention to politics and how it may affect their economic, social, and political future.

In Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, primary elections for both Democrats and Republicans were held. These Upper Midwest states, all once part of a redoubtable ‘blue wall’ of reasonably reliably Democratic states, have shown themselves to be susceptible to Trump and the Republican message in more recent elections such as the one that returned Trump to the White House and accorded to him slender, but often effective, majorities in both American legislative houses of Congress.

Michigan voted last week. The big story here was the victory in the Democratic Senate primary of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed, 41, who was born in a Detroit suburb but whose political prospects would doubtless be strengthened considerably if his name were Tom Smith, graduated from the University of Michigan with Highest Distinction in 2007 and delivered that year's commencement address. 

Former US President Bill Clinton, whose commencement speech followed El-Sayed's, told the huge audience that "I don't want to embarrass your senior speaker, but I wish every person in the world who believes that we are fated to have a clash of civilizations, and cannot reach across the religious divides, could have heard you speak today." According to El-Sayed, Clinton approached him after the ceremony and encouraged him to consider public service.

This scene must have been reminiscent for Clinton of his own undergraduate encounter with then-US president John F Kennedy, nearly 50 years previously.

El-Sayed went on to earn graduate degrees from Columbia and Oxford Universities and served for several years as the medical director of Wayne County, Michigan, where Detroit is located. An ambitious political operator who is good in front of crowds, El-Sayed in victory last week dealt a major blow to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), whose political action committee spent more than $30 million to attack him. 

According to American census data, the US city with the largest percentage of Arab Americans is Dearborn, Michigan, a southwestern suburb of Detroit, at nearly 40%. The Detroit metropolitan area is home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the country.

El-Sayed supports regulated capitalism, Medicare for all, enforcing an arms embargo on Israel, and abolishing ICE.  He ran for governor in 2018, placing second to popular incumbent Gretchen Whitmer in the Democratic primary. He has called the humanitarian crisis still ravaging Gaza “a genocide” and is critical of US aid to Israel.

After El-Sayed’s primary victory in an unusually bitter, fractious campaign over a candidate actively supported by the Democratic party leadership in Washington, the Michigan Dems seem to have come together fairly quickly in seeking unity to retain a key Senate seat in November.

Minnesota and Wisconsin voted on Tuesday. In the Minnesota, there is continuing fallout over three developments during the past couple of years. First, governor Tim Walz was surprisingly picked by Kamala Harris as her 2024 running mate, reportedly in large measure because he was unlikely to upstage or rival her as alternative choices such as dynamic Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro might have done. 

Walz started strongly as a national campaigner, but began to fizzle down the stretch and is not generally regarded as having been of much benefit to Harris’s ultimately losing campaign against Trump. After their Democratic defeat two years ago, Walz quietly left the national stage and thoughts of his running for re-election as governor soon evaporated.

Walz is at the centre of the second development as well. On his watch as governor, the Democratic-dominated Minnesota state administration has faced intense criticism over its handling of fraud in several significant state-managed programs that federal prosecutors say could end up costing the taxpayers over $9 billion. This scandal broke at the beginning of last year and was largely overshadowed by the ICE invasion of Minneapolis, but it’s one of the most dramatic bits of evidence ever to support long-standing Republican charges of mismanagement and corruption in massive Democratic-supported social welfare programs all across the US.

The third, decisive, factor in Minnesota is ICE. We all are well aware of the Trump administration’s decision to make an example of traditionally left-leaning Minneapolis by deploying ICE agents in great numbers to the city and environs, essentially to make an example of the area. 

Operation MetroSurge was an operation launched last December by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with the stated purpose of apprehending undocumented immigrants and deporting them. Operation Metro Surge initially targeted the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and Saint Paul), and later expanded to all of Minnesota. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) called it "the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out.”

This operation was characterized by an escalation in the severity of ICE tactics, harassment, and threats against observers. It resulted in the killing of two US citizens and the arrest of more than 3,000 people. To describe Operation Metro Surge as a calamitous failure hardly does justice to how fundamentally stupid and misguided it was. 

But it did let the careless Dems off the hook for their stupendous program mismanagement and faith in the feckless Tim Walz, and Tuesday’s results seem to have ensured that the governorship and US Senate seat now in Democratic hands will remain blue after November.

In Wisconsin, the results in the Democratic primary election to pick a candidate for governor were startling. The contest had been tumultuous almost from the start, with contenders entering and even leaving the race during its twisting course. Meanwhile, the Republicans chose a sitting congressman, Tom Tiffany, who will carry Trump’s endorsement into a general election campaign he is almost certain to lose. Tiffany, boasting a 100 percent record of supporting everything Trump has demanded of his subservient Republican-dominated Congress, still clings to 2020 election denying as a badge of honour and as a mark of obeisance to Trump’s hegemony in the GOP. 

For the longest time, it looked like Tiffany would nonetheless prevail in November, as his Democratic opponent looked sure to be a state assemblywoman, Francesca Hong. Hong, born in Wisconsin to Korean immigrant parents and the first Asian American to serve in the Wisconsin state assembly, is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and quickly became a campaign tag line.

In a Nov 16, 2020, social media post Hong has since deleted, she said the US should get rid of Thanksgiving as an annual holiday. The event is “celebrating colonialism,” she wrote at the time, and by inference Thanksgiving excuses the diseases spread by European settlers that “killed [indigenous] people."

Even the most inept and inexperienced Republican operative would have relished the opportunity to write campaign ads impugning an opponent who advocated for abolishing America’s great autumnal feast holiday. But alas for the Republicans, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, a bespectacled black candidate, surged back into the race and won by just a relative handful of votes to re-calibrate the upcoming race for governor. 

Crowley dropped out of the governor’s race on July 8, saying he didn’t see a path to victory with Hong leading by as many as 20 percentage points in the polls. He rejoined it on July 18, less than a month before Tuesday’s primary, after strong encouragement from national and state Democratic leaders who foresaw the unimaginable in a Tiffany win despite Trump’s serious unpopularity.

With the backing of the Democratic incumbent governor Tony Evers, Crowley pulled out the narrow win on the argument that he was the better match-up against Tiffany. There can be no doubt that assertion is true.

There’s much speculation that if progressive and moderate Democrats can just get along, they’ll rout Trump and the GOP in November. The Upper Midwest just offered a possible template for success.