How Michigan’s Uncommitted movement shaped a Senate race
Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. Let’s get into it. —Astead W. Herndon One big idea: The Uncommitted movement has already won During the 2024 presidential election, on the third night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, we recorded an episode of my election podcast The Run-Up that I still think about all the time. The premise was simple: I wanted to know whether Democrats were making a material change at the top of the ticket or just a cosmetic one. So we asked convention-goers a plain question — how would Kamala Harris’s Democratic Party be any different from Joe Biden’s? The tone of the piece reflected the optimism of the room. The activists, down to a person, thought Harris was showing a newfound openness to the administration’s critics. But underneath the hopium was a specific policy desire: that Harris would break from Biden’s unconditional support of Israel’s violent campaign in Gaza. That afternoon, I spent time with members of the Uncommitted movement, born in Michigan, who were trying to pressure the DNC into putting a single Palestinian speaker on the stage. They held press conferences with grieving families, and warned the party that the Democrats’ Muslim and Arab base in particular would not forget being sidelined. United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain made clear the confidence surrounding Harris at the time was tied to the belief her posture around Gaza would be different from Biden’s: “She’s made, obviously, a couple different comments on Gaza,” he said. “We called for a ceasefire in UAW back in November. And obviously, she understands the humanity issue of this. And I mean, my conversations I’ve had with Kamala Harris have been very good, very fruitful.” They didn’t get one. Not the speaker, not the policy shift, not the break from Biden. Harris famously refused to distance herself from her boss, whether it was Israel or anything else — and likely lost because of it. And while many of the most prominent voices of the Uncommitted movement (including current Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed) ended up publicly backing Harris in the end, some of Harris’s most ardent supporters have repeatedly blamed left-wing activists for undermining her campaign. Haley Stevens, the Michigan representative who’s running for the Senate as the party’s establishment choice, has sought to make El-Sayed’s support for Uncommitted an issue in that race, suggesting that the movement planted seeds of discontent ahead of a must-win presidential election. I want to argue the opposite. Two years after the Uncommitted movement shook up the Democratic Party, its impact has never been more clear. Public opinion of Israel has plummeted across the American electorate, to the point where the movement’s position is now a majority opinion. Per Quinnipiac, 77 percent of Democrats say they believe Israel is committing a genocide — an unthinkable number just two years ago. The Uncommitted movement also led to the growth and maturation of the Democrats’ Muslim left, which has already molded prominent elected officials like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. Even more, I think Uncommitted challenged the blame-the-voters framework that allows the establishment to avoid self-reflection. The movement was never only about a DNC speaking slot, but about the idea that every vote must be earned, not owed. It was a retort to “vote blue no matter who” — an argument that conditional support for the party is not only valid, but of moral importance. In 2024, that posture got you branded a spoiler. Today it’s just how Democrats talk. When I sat down with Hasan Piker — the most popular voice on the Democratic left — he told me he voted for Kamala Harris but pointedly refused to endorse her, and named exactly why: “The only reason for my refusal to openly endorse was because of…a continuation of the genocide in Gaza.” “I understand the harm reduction arguments…but it’s not a practical approach to winning elections, and demonstrably it’s been a failure with Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.” Piker put the mechanism plainly. October 7, 2023, and its aftermath, he told me, were “a seismic shift that gave a lot of confidence to the left, that as long as they stood by their positions…people would actually see the truth.” The movement didn’t move Biden. It moved the electorate Biden’s successors now have to answer to. And you can trace that shifted ground straight into this year’s wins. In New York, Zohran Mamdani rode exactly this coalition into City Hall — a victory Piker described as the proof of concept he’d been waiting for: “that’s why I was so grateful for Zohran’s victory…I can just point to him.” In Congress, progressives like Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York City and Melat Kiros in Colorado add to the growing evidence that acknowledging Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide is now a litmus test for Democratic voters gauging the trust and credibility of their candidates. Which brings us to Michigan, where the whole thing started. It’s easy to forget now, but the Uncommitted movement was born in the Michigan primary — and the general-election bill came due there, too. Kamala Harris got 36 percent of the vote in Dearborn, a city Joe Biden had carried with nearly 69 percent in 2020. She lost the state by about 80,000 votes. The voters the party told to fall in line didn’t, and Michigan is where that refusal was most legible. Now look at who’s competitive in this week’s Senate primary. Abdul El-Sayed is running on the precise argument Uncommitted was making in the streets of Chicago — except now it’s a statewide campaign with real money behind it, against a candidate backed by tens of millions in pro-Israel spending. He turns the foreign-policy question into a pocketbook one and refuses to soften the language. As he said on America, Actually: “There is an electoral cost to backstopping genocide and apartheid.” “If you can’t call a genocide perpetrated by our tax dollars the moral abomination that it is, then at some point it’s hard for me to believe that you’re gonna fight for anything,” he told me. Whether or not El-Sayed wins today, the fact that a candidate running explicitly against AIPAC and unconditional aid is fighting for a Senate seat in a swing state is the clearest possible measure of how far the ground has moved since that convention floor. In the coming months, it may be that the Democrats’ moderate wing — think tanks like Third Way, party leadership, and those offended by the electorate’s rising leftist tide — will adopt some of the same tactics they criticized. Already, Rep. Hillary Scholten, who is supporting Stevens in Michigan, has signaled she may refuse to support El-Sayed in a general election, due to his association with Piker. It seems “vote blue no matter who” has its limits. For progressives. For centrists. For everyone. What I’m hearing With Michigan’s primary set to conclude today, that leaves the Wisconsin governor’s race as the next big election on the Democratic calendar. This week, I reached out to Dan Shafer, a reporter in Milwaukee who has been covering the race for months. Schafer writes for The Recombobulation Area, where he’s political editor and writes a weekly opinion column. It looks like Francesca Hong, the DSA-aligned state assemblywoman, has a commanding lead in the Wisconsin governor’s primary. This would’ve been a shock a year ago. How did this happen? The short answer is that Francesca Hong has simply run the best campaign. She has run circles around the consultant-brained conventional approaches of her opponents, and has found success by doing things decidedly differently. From the very beginning, I characterized her as the “wild card” in the race. And while I certainly did not envision her having a commanding lead in the polls in the final stretch in the primary, I knew that, given her background in the restaurant and hospitality industry, she wouldn’t let anyone out-work or out-hustle her on the campaign trail. Her relentless ground game and digital organizing energy essentially issued a challenge to every other campaign to step up. The rest of the field failed that test. She’s also absolutely dominating this primary with younger voters. In the Marquette University Law School Poll from last week, the data showed her with the support of 66% of likely primary voters in the 18-29 age group, and 51% in the 30-44 age group. No other candidate was even in double digits. I write a breakdown of every new Marquette poll, and these are just preposterous numbers. For Gen Z and millennials, she is the candidate. Hong has made data centers and AI backlash a centerpiece of this race. How important is this issue specifically in this race? I think it’s been the No. 1 issue [since] she’s taken off in this primary. She backed a data center moratorium in January, and began running on this issue early. It’s been a very animating issue in Wisconsin, first for all the reasons the anti-data center backlash is coming to so many Great Lakes states, but also because of the failed Foxconn project in Racine County that happened during the first Trump administration under then-Gov. Scott Walker. It came with the promise of thousands and thousands of jobs, Trump called it the “eighth wonder of the world,” and it’s just been a miserable failure on so many levels. Hong just filmed her most recent ad at the Foxconn site — a project the Republican nominee Tom Tiffany voted for while in the state Senate at the time. Politically, though, what really helped Hong on this issue is that no other candidate running backed a data center moratorium. One of the most significant moments of the primary happened in a June 3 candidate forum focused on working-class issues, where moderator JT Cestkowski asked a yes-or-no question on whether the candidates back a data center moratorium. Only Hong said yes. If any other candidate had said yes, that would have given the anti-data center voter options in the primary. Instead, they all went to Hong. There is an assertion that Hong is a weak general election candidate. Is there evidence for this? This is Wisconsin. Anyone pretending a statewide election in this of all states should be considered anything other than a toss-up is kidding themselves. Many have argued that her likely Republican opponent, Tom Tiffany, is a uniquely weak general election candidate in his own right. But it can’t be denied that there would be a whole lot of risk involved with her as a general election candidate: The “socialism” of it all will undoubtedly be a challenge. But Francesca Hong continues to be a wild card, and she might have what it takes to play a winning hand.