Stop the Sabotage, Democrats! You Need Talarico and El-Sayed to Win.

Over the next two months, James Talarico and Abdul El-Sayed will face tens millions of dollars in negative ads savaging them, Fox News and a broader right-wing media ecosystem portraying them in the worst way possible, Republican opponents questioning their manhood (Talarico) and patriotism (El-Sayed), and a president eager to attack them. They shouldn’t also have to deal with fellow Democrats taking potshots at them too. So I urge Jasmine Crockett, Josh Gottheimer, Dana Nessel, and other prominent Democrats to stop bashing their party’s Senate hopefuls and instead start slamming El-Sayed and Talarico’s opponents. I can’t believe I have to write this! I know there’s a perpetual war over the soul of the Democratic Party. But it can, and must, be paused until November 3. Let’s start with Texas and Crockett. Talarico defeated Crockett 52-46 percent in a tense March primary. The congresswoman has a legitimate beef that she and other Black female Democratic candidates are treated unfairly by a party that is obsessed with “electability” and often views the most viable candidates as those who are white and male like Talarico. A party both committed to racial and gender inclusion and heavily reliant on getting more than 90 percent of Black women’s votes to win elections should be trying to get more Black women into office, not essentially practicing pre-discrimination. “We will oppose you based on your race and/or gender in the primary because we fear voters in the general election will reject you based on your race and/or gender,” is the position of many Democratic voters and elites towards Black and female candidates. They need to abandon that. Talarico’s race and gender alone may have been what put him over the top in the primary, which I suspect grinds at Crockett. (It’s worth noting that some voters may have felt that even a white male candidate couldn’t win in Texas if they are as partisan as Crockett.) That said, Talarico would be a much better senator than Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican candidate. So Crockett should be trying hard to ensure that Talarico wins. She’s not. “I personally don’t feel like the excitement necessarily exists within the Black community. Right now, I don’t feel like they’re excited,” Crockett said on the “Front Page” podcast recently of Talarico’s candidacy. That might sound like Crockett just giving a political analysis. And it’s likely that Talarico (like most candidates) has work to do to improve his standing among Black voters. But Crockett has suggested several times over the last few months that Talarico is running a lackluster campaign, particularly with regard to appealing to Black voters. She could air those critiques in private. Or she could campaign aggressively for Talarico to Black voters, to address this shortage of excitement that she is asserting. She’s doing neither. She refused to speak at the Texas Democrats’ convention in June, even after Talarico reportedly personally called and asked the congresswoman to give the keynote address. She has suggested that she will campaign for other Democratic candidates in Texas but not Talarico. Crockett is acting like a sore loser. That’s not unusual in politics. But Crockett shouldn’t be taking this approach now. This November is perhaps the best chance in decades that Democrats have had to win a Senate seat in Texas. Winning that seat could help flip the Senate and put a key check on an authoritarian president. Talarico needs all of the support he can muster, particularly from Black voters who might be influenced by Crockett. (Polls suggest Black voters overwhelmingly chose Crockett over Talarico during the primary.)So if the congresswoman can’t bring herself to enthusiastically campaign for Talarico, she could at least stop implying that Talarico can’t connect with Black people, the kinds of remarks that get lots of media coverage and will make it harder for him to … connect with Black people. Talarico is actually trying quite hard to connect with Black Texans, fully aware many of them were disappointed that Crocket lost in the primary. In Michigan, Representative Haley Stevens, who lost to El-Sayed, fully embraced him right after the primary. But Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and Representative Hillary Scholten have refused to endorse him. Outside of the state, a number of Democrats continue to attack El-Sayed, most notably Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey in an appearance on Fox News and an op-ed in The Free Press. And numerous other Democrats and MSNBC hosts continue to link El-Sayed to podcaster Hasan Piker. The main fissure here is over Israel policy. Piker and El Sayed have cast Israel’s military actions in Gaza over the last several years as a genocide, called for the U.S. to stop providing military aid to Israel, and questioned if Israel should remain as a state where Jewish people control the government. Nessel, Scholten, Gottheimer, and many other Democrats are less critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza and want Israel to remain a Jewish state. Some pro-Israel Democrats say that many of Piker’s remarks and a few of El-Sayed’s have veered into either antisemitism or at least intolerance of Jewish Americans.The other tension is over which factions in the party have power. El-Sayed’s victory over Stevens was a big win for the party’s progressives over the Democrats’ center-left bloc. And if El-Sayed wins the general election, progressives will seize on that win to argue that Democrats can ignore the center-left’s usual electability arguments against the left and nominate someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2028. So some in the center-left are sore about their primary defeats. Democrats shouldn’t always automatically fall in line with the party’s nominee. I would be wary of backing a Democratic candidate who opposed abortion rights or raising the minimum wage. I understood Democrats who felt that they could not support Kamala Harris in 2024 because she embraced the Biden’s administration’s policies in Gaza. If Gottheimer or Nessel feel strongly that the U.S. should keep offering military aid to Israel or that Israel must remain a Jewish state and that they can’t support anyone who doesn’t hold those views, I would respect that stance. Those are serious and legitimate policy differences. But other rationales for not fully backing El-Sayed are unacceptable. Considering how important this Senate race is, no Democratic official should oppose El-Sayed based on lingering resentment from this year’s primary or because of this race’s implications for 2028. The obsession with Piker is also misguided. If Piker says something that El-Sayed disagrees with, the candidate should state his disagreement (and he has). But the idea that Piker is some Hitler-like villain that El-Sayed must completely disavow as a person is crazy. Piker is not running for office in Michigan; his statements and policy views aren’t at issue in this race. This is an attempt by center-left Democrats to punish Piker for boosting El-Sayed and other progressive candidates during primaries and to silence a prominent left-wing voice in the party. I would be opposed to such a shaming campaign anyway, but particularly now. Why are Democrats spending time talking about a lefty podcaster who isn’t influencing their candidate much when they could talk about an autocrat president who is very much influencing the Republican candidate (Mike Rodgers)? Finally, the vague, floating, and hard-to-dispel antisemitism accusation being lodged at El-Sayed (and Zohran Mamdani last year) should be dropped. If there are specific comments or policies that pro-Israel and/or Jewish Democrats want El-Sayed to address, that’s legitimate. El-Sayed rightly apologized this weekend for a remark that he made in March, in which he said “hurt people hurt people” when discussing an attack on a synagogue in the Detroit suburbs. But much of this criticism is falsely implying that a strong critic of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians has malice toward American Jews. What connects the Michigan and Texas cases is the kind of racial and identity politics that Democrats desperately need to move on from. There are legitimate questions about the role of Black women in Democratic politics and what the party’s stances on Israel-Palestine issues should be. But the way to debate those questions isn’t to lodge vague accusations that Talarico can’t connect with Black people or that El-Sayed hates Jewish ones and use those as wedge issues to tank the party’s Senate candidates. I welcome an extended conversation about the role of Black women in the party and its Middle East policies in November—and I would assume Talarico and El-Sayed would as well. Let me close with my own accusation. It’s fairly obvious that suggesting that a white candidate doesn’t connect with Black voters or that a Muslim candidate is antisemitic might hurt those candidates in a general election. I worry that Crockett doesn’t actually want Talarico to win; same for Gottheimer, Scholten, and Nessel in El-Sayed’s case. They would prefer a pro-Trump senator to one from a rival faction of their own party. That’s a strong accusation, but it’s pretty in line with their recent behavior. These politicians have two months to prove me wrong. I hope they do.