Stick a fork in Abdul El-Sayed. He is done. He hates football. He hates the 4th of July. He hates the 2nd Amendment. Normal Michiganders will not vote for someone who hates everything they love. Mike Rogers just has to stand still and act normal to win handily in November. So goes the hand-wringing, anyway. Who knows, they could be right.
Since he won his party’s nomination for the open Senate seat last week, El-Sayed has suffered a series of media hits. In politics, if you are explaining, you are losing, and El-Sayed keeps explaining his views on Mackinac Island and defending his views on Sharia law and the separation of church and state. The most glaring post-primary oppo drop, however, is the contents of El-Sayed’s now-deleted YouTube channel.
This one seems unforgiveable, from a professional point of view.
The dirty secret of the ‘liberal media’ is that they rely on partisan political opposition research for most of their stories about political candidates. What, you thought mainstream reporters spent their time actually sleuthing out stories to research? How quaint. No, reporters develop contacts and work their contacts.
The reader may recall how the campaign of increasingly disturbing allegations against Graham Platner began only after the filing deadline for the open Senate seat. Maine Democrats found out about his alleged rape of an ex-girlfriend, but only after The New York Times tried to catch and kill the victim’s story, delaying release until after Platner won the primary.
By that time, Platner’s polling with white working class Maine voters — the demographic he was supposed to win back to the Democratic Party — had already cratered so badly that one can reasonably draw conspiratorial deductions about party shenanigans.
The more subtle point, though, is that Democrats did not release the story themselves during the primary, and then ‘the liberal media’ resisted telling it properly — until the incentives changed.
Money is the biggest incentive. Much of what the legacy media ‘reveals’ about candidates for office is oppo research that was funded by campaigns, parties, PACs, and other entities with an agenda. In normal times, the press gets free research from both sides.
Except this time, for these midterm primary races, I think maybe a lot of Democrats decided to spend the money on other things. I think they tried to replace traditional oppo research with AI in this primary, and rushed the work, if they even did the work. The result is shoddy work.
Michigan Democrats did not hold a truly competitive primary (go figure) in this dimension, and it shows. El-Sayed only beat Stevens by a single point. Imagine that everything we have learned about him in the last few days had been known by Michigan Democrats two weeks ago. Somebody dropped the ball.
