It Wasn’t a Blowout, but El-Sayed Won. Get Behind Him, Democrats.

It’s an earthquake to have Bernie Sanders’s candidate defeat Gretchen Whitmer’s candidate in Michigan. But the real goal is to keep Donald Trump’s candidate from winning this seat.

Coming into Election Day, Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary was widely expected. A blowout seemed possible. Instead, his victory margin will likely be less than two percentage points. (NBC News declared him the winner early Wednesday morning but other outlets were still holding back.) But his triumph over Representative Haley Stevens, while far narrower than polls were predicting, is still a monumental event in both Democratic and national politics. And it sets up major tests for both the progressive and center-left wings of the party over the next three months.

El-Sayed did not deliver a resounding defeat to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and other parts of the center-left Democratic establishment who backed Stevens, as his supporters hoped. The election returns suggest that El-Sayed struggled with rural voters in particular. Looking forward to the general election, that data has to worry Democrats, who tend to lose elections to........

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