Progressive Michigan

· Reason

Medicare for Whatever: Will progressives eke out a big victory in Michigan?

The state held Democratic primary elections yesterday, and progressives pinned their biggest hopes on epidemiologist Abdul El-Sayed, who has campaigned to be a Senate nominee for the party. Nate Silver says that El-Sayed, who is ahead by a small margin, will probably win. El-Sayed's campaign is claiming victory.

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El-Sayed's campaign has been cast as a test for whether the party's insurgent left flank has real national reach. It's also a test for how far leftist healthcare nonsense will go. 

El-Sayed, a former public health official, holds many of the usual positions associated with the Democratic Party's young left flank: He talks a lot about big money in politics, sharply criticizes U.S. aid to Israel, and wants to raise taxes on the rich. He's been endorsed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), and campaigned with Mao-fanboy Hasan Piker. 

El-Sayed's stance on U.S. aid to Israel has dominated conversations about his campaign. But El-Sayed's campaign has also focused aggressively on his support for government-run healthcare: His oft-repeated slogan is "Money out of politics. Money in your pockets. Medicare for All."

El-Sayed recently told The Bulwark's Jonathan Cohn that he was moved to focus on healthcare after witnessing disparities in the system while working at a hospital in New York City. He later became a public health director in Detroit and Wayne County. 

Now, as a candidate in a high-profile race, healthcare is part of his rallying cry. 

In 2021, El-Sayed co-wrote a book, Medicare for All: A Citizen's Guide. But despite having written a book and made Medicare for All a key part of his campaign slogan, he has not exactly campaigned on the details of how a massive healthcare overhaul would be implemented. As Cohn put it: "The pitch El-Sayed makes in his speeches and appearances doesn't get into the policy weeds; it is more like a general pitch for the idea of universal coverage."

This sounds to me like El-Sayed, as with so many progressives, supports a policy he either doesn't understand or won't elucidate, because the specifics would be unpopular and unworkable. 

This is a problem that has bedeviled Democrats and Medicare for All supporters for years. As a senator, Kamala Harris co-sponsored Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I–Vt.) Medicare for All bill. When she started running for president, she was asked about some of the proposal's policy specifics, including the little fact that it would outlaw nearly all existing private health insurance in the United States. As it turns out, "if you like your health care plan, you absolutely cannot keep your health care plan," is not a very popular slogan. So Harris quickly backed off the idea, and then struggled to articulate what, exactly, she was for. (This is a recurring problem for Harris.) 

Beyond the near-total elimination of existing health insurance arrangements, there's the cost. Medicare for All plans are all astronomically expensive, with multiple estimates finding that a Sanders-style law would cost over $30 trillion over a decade, and as much as $100 trillion over a longer time horizon. 

Even in a world where government spending sometimes seems to not matter, where laws and budgets with eye-popping spending and deficit figures attached pass as a matter of routine, those are the sort of figures that give lawmakers actual pause. They would require essentially upending the federal budget, and much of the economy, as we know it. 

Indeed, rather tellingly, when Sanders' own home state of Vermont tried to implement its own Medicare for All–style plan, the effort collapsed. It was simply too expensive. Even sympathetic lawmakers couldn't make it work. 

The progressive faction now seeking to take over the Democratic Party appears to have learned none of these lessons. They are choosing to avoid hard questions and policy specifics and embrace vague, unworkable nonsense because they have no answers, just slogans. 

Evening redness: Elsewhere in Michigan, leftists won a clear victory in a House primary.

William Lawrence, a progressive candidate, defeated two more moderate Democrats in a hotly contested House district. Lawrence represents the not-officially-socialist (but still pretty socialist) left flank of the Democratic Party: He told The New York Times that he does not currently identify as a democratic socialist, but his campaign admits that he used to be a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. His primary victory means he will take on Republican Rep. Tom Barrett in the general election. 

Notably, Lawrence, 35, is a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, a left-leaning activist organization that bills itself as representing young people. Sunrise began with a focus on youth climate activism but morphed into an all-purpose progressive agitprop shop, embracing a kind of apocalyptic omnicrisis/everything bagel theory of politics and pushing the Democratic Party to do so too. 

It's not surprising, then, that Lawrence focused his campaign energies on attacking data center development, according to Politico. Data center opposition is the lefty issue of the moment, and Lawrence, as is often the case with the Sunrise crew, seemed ready to hop on board.

Scenes from the Greater Boston area: Boston looks to be moving forward with automated speed cameras; the Massachusetts Senate has allocated $575 million for the tech, per Axios.

QUICK HITS

  • Remember the "Squad"? One of its members, Cori Bush, lost to a moderate Democrat by 22 points yesterday. As Nate Silver points out, "It's clear that progressives are rising in the Democratic Party overall. But it's also clear that there's a fair amount of race-by-race variance."
  • Ann Arbor will have a DSA mayor:

  • New York continues to be a demonstration of what happens when DSA-friendly candidates are elected to office: Mayor Zohran Mamdani is cutting ties with the city's business community, reports The Wall Street Journal. 
  • Sen. Susan Collins won't vote to confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general.

  • DSA for…free trade????!?!

  • Steak. Sauerkraut. That's basically it. What it's like to eat the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. diet for a week. There are more descriptions of bowel movements than you might expect. 
  • Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin has apparently been having some health troubles, which have caused him to fall further behind on finishing his epic fantasy novel series.  

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