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- [00:00]
A
I think people assume that things that he says that will seem radical or very left wing and not acceptable to Michiganders. Actually, some of it is surprisingly acceptable to Michiganders.
- [00:13]
B
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark, and this week we're going to Michigan because if Democrats are going to take the Senate, the open seat that Senator Gary Peters is vacating needs to go blue again this fall. If you're not from Michigan, that's a Michigan University of Michigan joke, I guess. But you have a primary with two candidates with a lot of baggage. You have Abdul El Said, who's trying to notch another win for hard lefty candidates around the country. And you have Congresswoman Haley Stevens, who's thought to be more establishment and who has been roasted up and down on the Internet. Uh, and we're going to talk about how regular people see her and whether or not the regular people and the Internet have the same opinion. Because I suspect, as is often the case, the way Michiganders view her is a little bit different from how she's seen online. I'm not going to lie. This primary is one I really wish had been over for months. I. I just think Michigan, I need you to hold your primary earlier. These guys are going at each other hammer and tong, and it's not going to have. Not going to have a lot of time to kind of heal all these wounds before the general election. My guest today is Jonathan Cohn, the one and only author of the newsletter the Breakdown here at the Bulwark. Jonathan has a couple of skills that are very well suited to this episode. One, he lives in Michigan. I don't think that qualifies as a skill, but it is. But Connor included it as a skill. He's also, and this is a skill, the wonkiest person I've ever met in my life, including about this primary. Like he's a wonk about healthcare policy and science, but also about this primary. Jonathan, thanks for being here.
- [02:10]
A
Thank you for having me. And I'm honored to be the wonkiest person you know. That's great. That makes me feel wonderful, which is
- [02:16]
B
sort of saying something like, I am surrounded by political nerds and policy wonks, whatever. And you, my friend, wonk the hardest. Okay, here's. Here's what I'm going to start with. I'm going to start with one of my favorite questions to ask on these shows, which is, what do you think is the difference between the national narrative on this race and the narrative happening on the ground. Like, are they the same? Are they different? Lay it out for us. You're there.
- [02:45]
A
They're very different on a number of levels. I would say the first thing is the national narrative and is very much informed by two things. It's informed by social media vibes, right? You know, this person has a video on people reacting to it and it is also informed by what people think is going to what matters in the national conversation. Translating immediately down to Michigan. In reality, most people in Michigan are not terminally online. A lot of them are, but not a lot of, you know, there's a significant chunk of people who are terminally online and who are very engaged.
- [03:22]
C
And I shouldn't say terminally online.
- [03:24]
A
That sounds more negative than I mean it. You have a politically engaged group that are online, but they decided about this race a long time ago. They knew who they were going to vote for. There is a large number of people who are undecided. They care about local issues as well as national issues. And what they like in a candidate doesn't necessarily correspond to what people in Washington like for a candidate. And so, you know, for the longest time in this race, you know, Haley Stevens, I think if you, if you were online and you were following Twitter especially or Instagram, you would have thought Haley Stevens was just awful and had no chance at all. Who could like this person? The reality is she is, you know, very much in the traditional mold of what has won elections here. She's like Gary Peters, the retiring senator and Debbie Stabenow. This sort of, you know, knows to the grindstone. Not particularly, not necessarily the greatest communicator, but someone who is, is well known in the union halls, who works her district, brings back appropriations, that kind of old school politician. And so that, you know, that works. You know, at the same time, Abdul El Sayed, like he is also genuinely part of Michigan and we can get into this. There's a whole identity politics level to this. And in ways that I think people assume that things that he says that will seem radical or very left wing and not acceptable to Michiganders, actually some of it is surprisingly acceptable to Michiganders. So I think, you know, on a lot of levels, if you're just following this race on Twitter and you're probably
- [05:03]
B
not getting it, is it fair to say Abdul El Sayed feels like he's running like a national race, like he is endorsed by these national figures, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. A lot of the issues sort of tag on to the way that people who are interested in politics writ large, especially on the left right now, he feels maybe more directionally where the engaged set wants to go. And Haley Stevens maybe feels like she's running a more localized race where she just talks about auto bailout. Auto bailout, Right. Him, Medicare for all, her auto bailout. And I would say one of the things that's funny about voters in a bunch of the races that we have done, including Maine and including Texas, is their response to these candidates. Like, we've people nationally sort of fight ferociously on their behalf. I think it is. You know, obviously it gets ferocious on the ground, but when you talk to average voters, their response, like in Texas, this was very clear. They were like, oh, I like Jasmine Crockett and James T. Rico quite a bit. In Maine, they were like, they wanted to vote for Graham Platner because he was new and fresh, but they all really liked Janet Mills like they were. And Michigan's a little like that, too, where when I listened to the voters, they were like, yeah, they both have some good ideas. And, like, there's things I like about both of them, and it's not quite the going for the jugular. If you like this person, you identify with this, and if you like this person, you identify with that. Just a level set on this. As we get into the voters, and we're going to get into them pretty quickly because we got a lot of voter sound from Michigan. We've done a lot of different groups in Michigan because we've been sitting. We've known we were going to do this episode for a number of months. And so everybody you're going to hear today are Democratic primary voters in Michigan. So they've said they're going to vote in the primary. But I do want to stipulate a couple of things. These groups were generally more pro el said than pro Stevens. But they're also, on average, they were whiter groups than Michigan and a lot whiter than I think the Democratic primary electorate is likely to be. And I think the polling really bears this out, that Stevens is doing a lot better with black voters than white voters. But before we get to that, I just wanted to pick your brain about one other dynamic of this race, which is you wrote a piece about Mallory McMorrow dropping out. I was a McMorrow, but just cards on the table. I was mostly interested in McMorrow because I'd met her, she came to some bulwark events. She was kind of a bulwarky, split the difference candidate there in this primary, and she was also new, was focused on affordability and she just kind of flamed out. Why did that happen?
- [07:51]
A
When we started the race, I think
- [07:53]
C
a lot of people naturally thought, you
- [07:54]
A
know, they looked at the profile and they thought, okay, you have el sayed, you know, I'm going to say real quick, I'm going to call them all by their first names because we call them all by their first names here.
- [08:02]
C
They're all pretty young candidates. It's Abdul, Mallory and Haley. Not meant as a term of disrespect, just I sort of fall into that habit. I think a lot of people who watching this nationally, you looked at the profile and Mallory just sort of seemed like the obvious perfect compromise between these two extremes.
- [08:19]
A
Right?
- [08:20]
C
So you have this progressive who can really inspire people, but a little, you know, maybe too extreme for the electorate. You have this classic, classic Michigan workhorse who can get stuff done, but really not a great communicator. That's one who's going to inspire a lot of people. And Mallory, that's someone who, you know, she gives great speeches. She's a very gifted communicator, young and energetic, has some really strong stands she's taken in the past. You know, people may remember she kind of gave that great speech pushing back the grooming, groomer accusation. That's when she first kind of became a national celebrity. At the same time, she's in the state legislature. She worked on bills, she got a gun, helped get a gun bill passed. She thinks kind of in a hard, you know, a kind of pragmatic way about what can I get done? You know, and the problem is in a primary, especially the middle can be tough because you have these sort of committed progressives and they're like, yeah, you know, I kind of like Mallory, but I like Abdul Moore. And you have the people who are just, you know, they're concerned, they like that old school model or maybe they're concerned about electability. They want the safest choice. They're like, well, Mallory, yeah, you know, she's pragmatic, but she's not as experienced as Haley. And by the way, she did take some progressive stands and maybe that's going to hurt her. So I'm going to go with Haley. And so there just, there wasn't a lot of space there. And then I also think, and Sarah, you do politics all the time. You can appreciate this. I think we all tend to undervalue how much experience matters in campaigning. She made a couple unforced errors early places where she said things that didn't really come off well, that just Sort of suggested she wasn't that practiced at being in the national spotlight or in the state spotlight under that much scrutiny. Abdul had run in a statewide race before because he had run against Gretchen Whitmer in the 2018 primaries. And he's been a podcast host and he's been really just, he's been in sort of communication for a long time. And of course, Haley Stevens has run four congressional races. And I remember there was a quote and I did a story when this all started kind of laying out and I sort of talked about how Mallory looks like the Goldilocks candidate, but did she have the experience? And there was a. I can't, I'm trying to remember who said it now. I can't off the top of my head, but somebody made the point that there's a lot of really promising minor league baseball players who can't hit a major league fastball for a year or two. I think we had a little bit of that. You know, this was her first time running at this level. She'd only run in a small state legislator district. And I think that showed.
- [10:41]
B
Okay, let's get to these voters. And I will just remind you guys, since I made it clear that these, these focus groups did end up just being by the virtues of how we find people for the groups, in this case, they ended up being whiter than the electorate. And so I, this is where I want to remind people. We do not use focus groups to be predictive. Okay? We know the contours of this race. We know that Haley is overperforming with black people. And for working class voters without a college degree, we know that Abdul is overperforming with white college educated voters. And so like those are facts in this race. And so our job is to understand why, why do they, why are they appealing to these different cohorts of voters? And so that's why we talk to them, not to be predictive about who's going to win the race. Keeping that in mind, let's listen to what the pro el sayed sentiment sounded like from these Michigan voters.