Democratic primaries in Wisconsin and Michigan reveal limits of socialist ideas

Open this photo in gallery:Democratic gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong after speaking to supporters during a primary election night watch party Tuesday in Madison, Wis.Nam Y. Huh/The Associated PressDemocratic voters have just released a preview of the blockbuster drama coming to America only 12 weeks from now. The glimpse of this fall’s midterms came in two swing states that Donald Trump took each time he won the White House. And the lesson from the high-profile primaries in Michigan last week and Wisconsin this week is that political messages carrying anti-establishment tinges of socialism may be easy to love in the Trump era − but they are unreliable objects of voter support once the actual balloting begins, vulnerable to a late wave of undecideds moving toward more conventional candidates and tantalizingly easy to attack.For weeks Francesca Hong, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), held a commanding, seemingly unassailable lead in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin. In a stunning upset, she was defeated Tuesday by a mainstream moderate in a race that demonstrated the vulnerability of the socialist message that only weeks ago seemed in the ascendant. Wisconsin Democrats nominate moderate Crowley for governor, while Trump ally Lindell loses in MinnesotaA week earlier, Abdul El-Sayed, who artfully distanced himself from the DSA but still endorsed many of its ideas, barely prevailed in the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan after holding what pollsters suggested was an impregnable lead over another establishment figure.Overall, the midsummer primaries demonstrate the struggle within the Democratic Party to settle on a response to the rightward drift of the Republican Party and to craft an identity for the remainder of the Trump era and whatever comes next. Together, the two Midwestern races showed that substantial numbers of Democratic voters − the Americans most angered by Mr. Trump’s policies − are having second thoughts about embracing candidates who espouse an ideology susceptible to being characterized as dangerous and alien. In fact, that’s exactly the theme the Republicans are preparing for the general-election campaign, which has its symbolic opening on Labour Day.At the same time, there are indications that there is still enormous appeal in a progressive message delivered without the look and sound (and vulnerability) of socialism − another theme growing out of Tuesday’s primaries. That was the formula that prevailed in two contests in another Midwestern state. Minnesota Lieutenant-Governor Peggy Flanagan used that blueprint to win the Democratic Senate nomination, and former state senator Matt Little employed it to win an important congressional primary in a district that ranges southwest of Minneapolis.That was the recipe progressives served up for three-quarters of a century in Minnesota, catapulting figures such as Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy and Walter Mondale to prominence. All became national figures and presidential candidates with messages that had strains of populism but steered clear of the kind of socialism that emerged during the Great Depression in neighbouring North Dakota, the only state with a state bank and a state grain elevator. Indeed, Mr. Humphrey − a Minneapolis mayor, senator, vice-president and unsuccessful 1968 Democratic presidential nominee − is remembered for having purged the state party of communists in the mid-1940s. The formal name of the party since that period, the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, tellingly retains its progressive orientation but stops short of veering into socialism.Opinion: How far left is the Democratic Party willing to go?Ms. Hong’s defeat is all the more startling given how that creed has been part of Wisconsin’s heritage for more than a century. “Following World War I, the Wisconsin Democratic Party collapsed as a viable political option and the Wisconsin Socialist Party found itself the second most powerful party behind the Republican Party,” Joshua Kluever, a historian at Marshall University in West Virginia, wrote in a 2023 article in The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. “Wisconsin Socialists took a pragmatic approach to legislative debates and allied with progressive Republicans to defeat conservative opposition.”The state’s largest city, Milwaukee, had three socialist mayors between 1910 and 1960. The state legislature passed 295 measures written by socialists between 1919 and 1931. A Wisconsin presidential candidate, Robert La Follette, ran in 1924 as the candidate of the Progressive Party, won five million votes and captured the state’s 13 electoral votes – an astonishing feat during the era of Coolidge conservatism.A sobering reminder: Wisconsin is also the state that sent Joseph McCarthy to the Senate and gave him a platform as the most prominent preacher of the Red Scare that came to be known as McCarthyism. The Republicans’ plan, from Mr. Trump down to GOP political image makers, clearly is to paint the Democrats as congenial to, if not practitioners of, a doctrine that conservatives argue is, to revive a phrase from the mid-20th century, un-American. Open this photo in gallery:Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic Senate primary candidate, greets a supporter outside of what was to be an ICE detention center in Romulus, Mich.NICK HAGEN/The New York TimesThough Dr. El-Sayed has not described himself as a democratic socialist, that distinction almost certainly will be lost as Republicans − determined to preserve their slender majorities in both the House and the Senate − paint him as a “radical left lunatic,” to use one of Mr. Trump’s favourite slurs. Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has already appeared with a placard depicting the Michigan health-care official beside a copy of the Quran and the crossed-swords logo of the Muslim Brotherhood. The image bellows: “COMMUNIST EL-SAYED, LINKED TO THE BROTHERHOOD, WINS DEM SENATE PRIMARY IN MICHIGAN.”Republican consultant Alex Castellanos argued in an article and memo that Democrats have laid out “a welcome mat for communism to enter the Democratic Party’s home” and criticized establishment Democrats for refusing to disavow these new progressives.A Pew Research Center survey released this summer found that a third of Democrats “like” candidates who describe themselves as democratic socialists. The Democrats learned this month that that share of their party, much like Mr. Trump’s MAGA adherents, is enough to make some noise but maybe not a reliable long-term electoral base.