Let’s be honest: Some non-leftist Democrats kind of want Abdul El-Sayed to lose his Senate race in Michigan. That’s not the world’s most noble impulse; it strikes me as kind of like wishing for the guy who edged you out for a promotion to get Me Too’d. Of course, El-Sayed doesn’t help things by being — in my assessment — a dickish know-nothing whose best trait is simply that he’s not Mike Rogers.
Still, it’s rational to wonder if an El-Sayed loss might be good for Democrats in the long run. The logic is simple: Leftists want more influence in the party, but they’re unpopular, so if the most prominent leftist candidate loses on a night when most other Democrats win, the party will reject leftism and be better poised to win in the future. It’s even starting to look like Democrats could lose Michigan but win the Senate, so an El-Sayed loss will not necessarily enable Trump’s Thousand Year Retarded Reich.
It’s a sound theory…I just think that it’s wrong. The problem is the last step: believing that the left edge of the Democratic Party will learn lessons from an El-Sayed loss and make rational adjustments. I don’t think that will happen — I have endless faith in people’s ability to misinterpret, misconstrue, and not learn frosty fuck-all from even the clearest of signals. Honestly, if political parties were good at learning from evidence, we wouldn’t be having this debate in the first place.
