The reaction so far among establishment Democrats to Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow win in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary has been surprisingly encouraging. Almost instantly after the race was called Wednesday morning, Governor Gretchen Whitmer endorsed El-Sayed, saying in a video, “Congratulations to [gubernatorial nominee] Jocelyn Benson, Abdul El-Sayed, and every Democrat who won up and down the ballot. They’ve got my support as we fight like hell together to win in November.” Centrist Senator Elissa Slotkin wrote a Facebook post expressing unequivocal support. Primary foe Haley Stevens backed El-Sayed instantly, and he spoke graciously of her at his first post-win speech, calling her a “friend.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who had supported Stevens, praised El-Sayed’s “very, very strong campaign” and said, “I’m not looking back, I’m looking forward.”

This is good. It also may end up posing a challenge to El-Sayed over the course of this election, as he walks the tightrope between a progressive base that brought him to this point and the establishment that he’ll need to make peace with to win in November. But right now, we need to speed through some recent history and examine the conventional wisdom within the Democratic Party that, if unchecked, may be a bigger problem for El-Sayed than anything Republican Mike Rogers throws at him.

That conventional wisdom, for about 40 years, ever since the Reagan realignment that left liberalism discredited in the eyes of many Americans, has been simply that only centrist candidates can win general elections in swing states. Has it been right? Mostly, yes. It’s hard to think of many proud progressives who’ve won Senate seats in swing states in recent history. Paul Wellstone pops to mind. He was elected narrowly in 1990, when Minnesota was much swingier than it is now.

Interestingly, Schumer himself sort of qualifies in this category. He first won his New York Senate seat in 1998, in a race I covered closely. There were three candidates in that Democratic primary fighting for the right to challenge incumbent Al D’Amato. Mark Green was definitely the most liberal. But Geraldine Ferraro was without question the moderate candidate. Schumer was in-between, but, as a Jewish Brooklyn congressman whose big issue at the time was gun violence, he coded more liberal than not. I remember people laughing at me when I told them that summer that I thought Schumer would win the primary and could beat D’Amato. A gun-confiscating Brooklyn Jew, winning votes in Rochester and Schenectady? You’re nuts.

But it happened. Things change.

Things have been changing in the Democratic Party since, really, the wake of the 2008-09 Great Meltdown. First up was Occupy Wall Street. Then the Fight for 15. Then Senator Bernie Sanders’s run for president in 2016, and his groundswell of ferocious support that surprised a lot of people, me very much included. Then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s House win in 2018, along with a few others. Then Sanders’s second run. Then Joe Biden’s 2020 pivot to the left on economics, when he started speaking of the need for a new New Deal. And most of all, of course, the election, twice—the second time narrowly but unequivocally—of Donald Trump, which is about as much evidence of a furious electorate as one could ask for.

So the Democratic Party has been moving “to the left.” But it isn’t doing so because people are enraged about the lack of gender-neutral bathrooms. It’s because average, hardworking people are furious at a system that isn’t doing enough to keep them from falling behind. I could insert here a raft of statistics about wage stagnation, the explosion in economic inequality, and so on. Moderates and progressives argue about all that too, but what cannot be denied is what poll after poll after poll, and interview after interview after interview, tell us about what working people themselves feel. They feel screwed, and they feel no one is listening.

And today, this election cycle, rank-and-file Democrats are veritably crying out: We want you to do something about these billionaires getting obscenely richer and amassing all this power. We want reinvestment in us. We’re sick of getting nickel-and-dimed by corporations with all their hidden fees and price-gouging. We’re kind of freaked out that AI is going to further destroy our lives and towns. We hate these data centers the size of the Pentagon. We want people, goddammit, who’ll fight for us.

That’s why El-Sayed won Tuesday’s primary. Yes, Israel was a factor. El-Sayed spoke, again, graciously on Wednesday morning about fighting antisemitism arm in arm with his Jewish “sisters and brothers.” But he’s made other statements over the course of the campaign that have worried some Jews, even some whose politics are close to his, like his statement after a thwarted terrorist attack on a Michigan synagogue in March. El-Sayed noted that the assailant’s niece and nephew had died recently in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, adding, “We can and must condemn the attack on Temple Israel, and we can and must condemn the violence 6,000 miles away.” El-Sayed had to know at the time that some would interpret this contextualization as an attempt to justify the assailant’s motivations. But when people—your would-be constituents, no less—almost get mass-murdered, just express sympathy.

It’s also a little demagogic to say things like, “Rather than sending your money somewhere else to drop bombs on other people and their kids, we can keep that money here at home.” Historically, that’s how right-wing nativists talk. He needs to do better. Everyone expects him to criticize AIPAC and the Israeli government. He should just do so on the basis of the things they say and do. Lord knows there’s plenty to criticize, and I’d imagine most Michigan Democrats and independents would agree with him most of the time.

But Israel isn’t why he’s the Democratic nominee. He’s the Democratic nominee because he compellingly speaks the language of economic populism (why he, and all these lefties, don’t get more working-class votes is a question to which I have an answer, but that’s for a future column). And I cannot understand why anyone who calls themselves a Democrat or a liberal would oppose this.

We’ve sat here for decades watching the share of wealth owned by the top 1 percent mushroom from 22 percent in 1990 to 32 percent now. We’ve seen CEO pay over roughly the same time go from 50 times the salary of the average worker to 300; we’ve seen employers try to (mostly successfully) get away with calling people “contractors” who are obviously employees; we’ve sat here powerless as free trade deals and mega-mergers have destroyed jobs, killed communities, and concentrated economic and political power to levels way beyond the Gilded Age.

If you’re a Democrat or a liberal (or a leftist), you’re against those things. So why would you be against a candidate who is himself against those things?

In any case, opposing all this at this point in history is like opposing the tides. Even if you sincerely and devoutly believe that this is a bad direction for the Democratic Party, it’s very hard to deny that this is happening. After a very long and dormant period, the left in the United States is awake again—as it was for most of the twentieth century. FDR and LBJ had to consider the leverage of the left. Roosevelt brought a number of socialists into his administration, and Johnson put the socialist Mike Harrington on his War on Poverty task force. It’s a pretty normal thing in American history, actually.

I have my own reservations about aspects of the left’s renaissance. “Defund the police” and “eliminate the border”—and sure, throw in “cancel Thanksgiving”—are disastrous stands for anyone seeking office to take. Big-D Democrats shouldn’t come within a mile of some of those national DSA platform positions.

But overall? Far and away the most important thing politicians can do in this country over the next 10 or 20 years is reverse the concentration of wealth and political power that has characterized this polity’s last four decades and make working people’s lives better and more hopeful. Any ally in that fight, however they want to fight it (within obvious lawful and constitutional limits) and under whatever label, should be welcomed.

So it’s dismaying, to put it mildly, to see Third Way announce in the wake of El-Sayed’s victory that they’re going to spend $15 million over the next two years to wage a “war” on democratic socialism. Guys: You are not going to win this war. Each coming decade will bring more and more young people into the electorate, and each of these cohorts will be more and more supportive of socialism, until such theoretical time as the socialists have had their chance to govern and have screwed things up on their own. But that’s a good ways away.

In the meantime, is securing the general-election defeat of El-Sayed—who, by the way, isn’t even a socialist and has been, in fact, extremely thoughtful and well-spoken about why he is a capitalist and what’s wrong with American capitalism today—a “win”? Really? Electing yet another Republican election denier to the Senate is victory? This I do not get. People can fight for a vision of the party they believe in without aiding and abetting the party of fascism. And I can imagine the righteous howls if the left submarined a moderate candidate in such a fashion.

Maybe you sincerely believe El-Sayed can’t win. I think that’s wrong. I think that if he’s skillful enough, he can keep the base energized, spend loads of time at Black churches, and maintain a cordial-enough relationship with the party establishment that he can win. He couldn’t have six or eight years ago. But as I saw as a young(er) reporter in New York in 1998, there comes a moment when things change.

But even if you’re a Democrat who doesn’t think El-Sayed can win—well, it’s one thing to express your honest opinion, but it’s quite another to say provocative things that help will his defeat into being. Schumer, Whitmer, and Stevens get the stakes. Their response to El-Sayed’s win was mature and big-picture. I wish Beltway moderates would just follow their cue.