Abdul El-Sayed and the DSA Won Michigan's Democratic Senate Primary in the College Towns. He Lost Detroit and the Working Class
Plus: ICE just booked 51,000 people in a single month, and a Kansas judge torched a stack of pro-life laws the same day he joined the court that hears the appeal.
It’s Wednesday,
What a primary night! Today I give a full breakdown of the Michigan primary. What does this mean for the midterms? TBD
Let’s get into the news!
In today’s Read:
The left had a loud Tuesday and the coverage picked the wrong headline. A socialist won in Michigan, the DSA’s own endorsed candidate got buried in St. Louis, and one number ties it together. Nobody in the center will print it.
ICE booked 51,000 people in July, the biggest month in DHS history. Same number, two stories, one missing detail both sides are hiding.
A Kansas judge wiped out a stack of pro-life laws and called it “not even a close call.” He did it the day he joined the court that hears the appeal.
Quick Rundown: an armed man is arrested casing Trump's LA golf course before his visit, Rand Paul ships Fauci to the DOJ, the WNBA benches the wrong woman, Trump pulls 1,076 hospices off Medicare, and his AG clears committee.
Abdul El-Sayed and the DSA Won Michigan's Democratic Senate Primary in the College Towns. He Lost Detroit and the Working Class
The Story.
Tuesday was primary night in Michigan and Missouri, five days after the DSA wrapped a Chicago convention where the youth wing floated leaving the Democratic Party outright, and the room talked 2028. Primary night broke three ways.
In Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, the progressive won: Abdul El-Sayed is projected over Rep. Haley Stevens, 48.5 to 47.5 with more than 95% counted, a statewide margin of about 14,900 votes. The result is still uncertified.
Same night in St. Louis, the DSA’s nationally endorsed candidate, former Rep. Cori Bush, lost her rematch to Rep. Wesley Bell by about 59 to 37, in a race where Bell and his allies, led by the AIPAC-aligned United Democracy Project, outspent her by about 27 to 1 on the air, according to the ad-tracker AdImpact.
And in Michigan’s 13th, the Detroit seat, DSA-endorsed Donavan McKinney, a lifelong Detroiter, unseated two-term Rep. Shri Thanedar, 51.9 to 48.1, an upset AP didn’t call until late Wednesday morning.
How did the vote break down? The county map tells the whole story. El-Sayed ran it up where the electorate is whiter and more credentialed: he took Washtenaw, home to Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan, by about 25 points, and Kent, home to Grand Rapids, by about 26. Then look where he lost. Stevens carried Wayne County, meaning Detroit, by 6. Flint’s Genesee County broke for her by 13, and she took blue-collar Macomb by 7. Pre-election polling had Black voters breaking for her better than two to one, and the returns held. El-Sayed’s only county wins were the campus towns. He lost Detroit, Flint, and the blue-collar suburbs outright.
Let’s talk about El-Sayed for a moment. He is DSA-supported, but he is not a card-carrying member, and he is not on the DSA’s own national endorsement list, which for Tuesday’s headline races ran to Bush, McKinney, and Rashida Tlaib. He told CNN, “I am not somebody who is a socialist. I believe in capitalism, I just believe that capitalism has to be regulated.” Save that statement in your back pocket. We’ll come back to it.
The Left’s read. A progressive surge in a battleground and a fight for the soul of the party, wrapped in a record-turnout headline. The Washington Post, CNN, and NBC frame El-Sayed’s win as energy and a Midwest breakthrough for the left. The DSA’s own outlet, Democratic Left, leads on Bush’s loss as a money story, “near-unprecedented spending.” The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom that covers gender and politics, reads Bush’s defeat as a setback for Black women’s representation. Nobody in the center lane names the class split sitting inside El-Sayed’s own win.
The Right’s read. “Socialism wins Michigan.” Fox and the Free Beacon hammer El-Sayed as a longtime friend of the Democratic Socialists who headlined their fundraisers and then, with a Senate seat in reach, decided he isn’t a socialist after all. The frame is a party lurching left and handing Republicans a gift in November. The dunk writes itself, and it steps right over the demographic story underneath.
What both sides are skipping. The class inversion, which is what I am most interested in. CNN reported before the vote that Black voters were “clearly against the more progressive option.” The results proved it. The coverage claimed “progressive surge” anyway. And on the other end, the right’s tidy “socialism got rejected in St. Louis” take skips how Bush actually lost, which was under an avalanche of outside money at 27 to 1, not a neighborhood-by-neighborhood referendum on Marx. Also, they probably remember how crazy Bush was as a Representative. Anyway, both sides get half of it and drop the half that matters: the movement that claims to represent the working class won the credentialed class, and the one candidate it formally put its name on got buried by a Super PAC.
Two lazy takes are already wrestling over Tuesday night, and both of them are wrong.
The first is the one you’ll hear on the right: socialism ran into a wall in St. Louis. Cori Bush lost, therefore America looked at the DSA and said no thanks. Except that’s not what happened. Bush got outspent something like twenty-seven to one, with the AIPAC-aligned money doing most of the shoving. That’s not St. Louis weighing socialism and passing. That’s a burial by checkbook. If you want to be credible when you criticize these people, and I do, you don’t get to pretend a candidate drowned in outside cash was a fair ideological test. It’s all about the money, honey. Say what actually beat her.
The second take is the one you’ll hear on the left, and it’s the one the whole press corps reached for by Wednesday morning: progressive surge. Energy. The kids are rising. Look at the turnout.
Now look at who actually cast the votes.
El-Sayed won on the affluent college towns. Ann Arbor. East Lansing. White voters, credentialed voters, the people with a graduate degree and a lawn sign. And he lost Wayne County, which is to say he lost Black, working-class Detroit, to the establishment moderate, after Black voters told pollsters for weeks they were breaking against him roughly two to one. Sit with the shape of that. The candidate carrying the banner for the working class couldn’t win the working class. He won the faculty lounge and lost the factory floor.
That is the story. And it is the one number nobody in the center will print, because it breaks the fairy tale.
And before a sharp reader beats me to it: yes, a DSA-endorsed candidate did win in Detroit that night. Donavan McKinney knocked off incumbent Shri Thanedar in the 13th District, which sits inside the same Wayne County El-Sayed lost. But that was McKinney and a weak incumbent, not Detroit embracing the program. Thanedar was a self-funding multimillionaire his own party had turned on, with the Congressional Black Caucus and labor lined up behind the hometown challenger. And the tell is one line down the ballot: the same county that sent McKinney to the House broke for Stevens over El-Sayed for Senate. The label won a House seat. It didn’t carry the county.
Now, about that “I believe in capitalism” line. Don’t buy it. El-Sayed can say he isn’t a socialist all he wants, but I’m not grading on what a man calls himself six weeks before a Senate race in a purple state. The proof is in the campaign. And the campaign was DSA in everything but the membership card. The Democratic Socialists shipped organizers and volunteers into Michigan to turn out his college vote. Bernie, the Squad, and Hasan Piker barnstormed for him. He ran on Medicare for All. When the entire apparatus of the democratic-socialist movement is knocking on your doors, and your platform is theirs, “technically I’m not a member” is not a defense. I mean, am I the only one who sees the duck?
And before he ran, he did the thing these candidates all do now. He cleaned the feed. About six months out, El-Sayed quietly deleted thousands of old tweets, the defund-the-police ones included, where he’d called police “standing armies we deploy against our own people.” CNN’s KFile fished them out of the trash anyway. I wrote a whole piece on this move, because he is nowhere near the only one running it. Scrubbing the receipts is easy. Scrubbing the worldview is the hard part, and his keeps leaking out every time he opens his mouth.
This costuming is the DSA strategy. It doesn’t need you to sign the form. It needs a winner it can stand behind and a major party to run him through. They call themselves democratic socialists because putting “democratic” in front of the word sands the edge off, and they attach their cart to whoever will pull the vision the farthest, bank the win, and claim the momentum on Wednesday. They are not a wing of the Democratic Party. In fact, they hate the Democratic Party and seek to tear it down. They are using it as a ballot-access vehicle, the way a parasite uses a host, and El-Sayed is exactly the kind of ride they’re built to hitch.
The media is all too happy to help. They know how to find El-Sayed’s biography. “Chef.” “Generational.” “Public-health background.” What it never quite finds is the crosstab that says his base is the college quad and his weakness is the minorities and working class he’s supposed to represent. Same trick the whole industry runs on the DSA writ large, filing a movement that praises Lenin and Mao under the cozy label “progressive Democrats” and never once digging into the roots or the endgame. The class inversion is right there on the county map and the exit data, in plain sight, and the coverage walked past it to write “surge.” These are their friends after all; I cannot be surprised.
Will El-Sayed’s costume hold in the general? The statewide race, where the whole electorate shows up, how will “abolish,” “Medicare for All,” and “I’m technically not a socialist” hold up for those who don’t have a graduate degree and don’t think the police exist to uphold white supremacy? That is the real test.
Some Republicans including the president are already spiking the football. Some of them are thrilled El-Sayed won, because the matchup math they’re citing says their likely nominee, Mike Rogers, runs better against a socialist than against a moderate like Stevens. Not to be a party pooper, but hold your horses. I wouldn’t bet the seat on it. This is a swing state. Democratic voters tend to swallow hard and line up behind the nominee, and the frustration out there with this administration and this Republican Congress is real and building. We’ve spent almost twenty years watching the electorate lurch, cycle after cycle, throwing one party out and hauling the other one in.
Fact is, Trump and the Republicans are the incumbents now. They aren’t the outsiders anymore. The DSA is. Which means the DSA gets the easy message, the same lane Trump ran in, and the Tea Party ran in before him: the system is rigged, and the elites sold you out. The only thing that’s changed is what they’re selling as the fix, and this time it’s socialism. A frustrated electorate is an unpredictable one, and most of the people who’ll pull that lever in November have no clue what’s sitting under the “generational energy.” They don’t know the DSA is rebranded communism. Which is why I have kept my DSA articles free, because the word needs to get out.
So the “he’s too radical to win” theory is the hope, not a guarantee, and it leaves one thing standing between an unpopular agenda and real power. It isn’t the quality of the coverage. It’s turnout. The left’s base is high-propensity. They show up for a Tuesday primary in August. The right’s base grumbles about socialism from the couch and then acts shocked when these people keep winning. The DSA just showed you it can win, especially with others sitting out. Republicans, that’s your cue to get off the couch, because “too radical to win” is exactly what everybody said the last few times the “radical” won.
ICE Arrested a Record 51,000 People in July. Both Sides Are Hiding the Same Number.
The Story.
ICE arrested roughly 51,000 people in July, the largest single month in DHS history, according to internal agency data first reported by CBS News and confirmed across outlets. That’s about 1,645 arrests a day, and it comes one month after June set the prior record at roughly 43,000. Back-to-back record months. The method shifted, too. Fewer of the big, televised raids on Democratic-run cities, and more arrests at airports, at ICE check-in offices, and on traffic stops, with a wave of newly hired agents spreading the effort across the country.
The Left’s read. A crackdown “widening” and “quietly ramping up,” with the weight on the airport dragnets and who’s being swept in. ABC’s headline has arrests hitting a record high “as enforcement quietly ramps up.” The load-bearing word is “quietly,” as in sneaky, as in something being pulled off behind your back.
The Right’s read. A promise kept and the machine finally humming. Fox says ICE “shatters” its arrest record. RedState calls it the biggest month in the agency’s history. The framing is a scoreboard, not an alarm, and the move away from spectacle raids reads as ICE getting more efficient, not more furtive.
What both sides are skipping. Of those 51,000, how many have criminal records, how many are visa overstays, and how many crossed illegally and are now sitting on a pending asylum claim or a scheduled check-in? Those are wildly different cases wearing one total. The right waves the number around like a trophy and never breaks it down. The left cries “quiet” about a figure DHS is putting out in a press release, which is a strange kind of quiet. And both skip the operational shift: moving from street raids to airports and check-in offices means ICE is grabbing the people who are easiest to find, the ones already in the system for breaking our immigration laws.
Fifty-one thousand in one month. The right calls it a record. The left calls it “quiet.” Same number framed differently.
Um, enforcement is enforcement, the border is a real thing, and anyone who spent the last cycle ignoring the illegal immigration crisis lost the argument with voters for a reason. If you’re in the country illegally and you get arrested for it, that’s the law, not complicated.
This is what I am curious about. How many have criminal records, how many are visa overstays, and how many crossed illegally and are now sitting on a pending asylum claim or a scheduled check-in? Nobody who entered illegally “followed the rules.” This information matters because it’s the data you’d use to write better immigration law. A visa overstay and an illegal border crossing aren’t the same problem, and they don’t take the same tools or the same money to fix. But that same breakdown also becomes a challenge for the politics.
Because whether we like it or not, the composition is politics too. A hardened criminal is an easy sell, and that number polls well, so if the administration had it, it would lead with it. But pair a visa overstay with an emotive story, someone who came to build a better life, or who’s been here for years and put down roots even after entering illegally, and most people can’t set the feelings aside. That one doesn’t poll as well. So the exact breakdown that would help you fix the system is the same breakdown that complicates the politics. Which is why it stays under lock.
DHS is loud about the total and silent about the composition. That silence is the tell. If the 51,000 were mostly hardened criminals, they’d have handed you the chart.
So watch two things. Watch whether DHS releases the real composition for July, meaning the criminal-record count and the overstay numbers, down to how long the average overstay actually ran, or keeps putting out the clean topline and letting you fill in the rest. And watch whether the outlets calling it “quiet” ever ask for that same breakdown, or whether “quiet” was only ever a mood.
Kansas Judge K. Christopher Jayaram Struck Down Abortion Restrictions, Then Joined the Court That Will Hear the Appeal.
The Story.
On Monday, Johnson County District Judge K. Christopher Jayaram entered a permanent injunction striking down a list of Kansas abortion restrictions: the 24-hour mandatory disclosures, a separate 30-minute waiting period, the requirement that providers tell patients the abortion pill’s effects can be “reversed,” and the rule that providers ask a woman her “most important reason” for the abortion. He ruled the laws violate bodily autonomy and said the call was not “even a close call.” The wrinkle everyone keeps rereading: the same day he handed down that ruling, Jayaram was sworn in as the newest justice on the Kansas Supreme Court, the court that would hear any appeal.
The Left’s read. A clean constitutional win. Kansas Reflector and KCUR lead with “not even a close call” and the bodily-autonomy reasoning, treating the ruling as the obvious application of the 2019 Kansas Supreme Court decision that found a state right to abortion.
The Right’s read. An activist judge cashing out on his way up the ladder. LifeNews and Breitbart put the spotlight on the calendar: a trial judge torched two decades of statute on the very day he got promoted to the bench that reviews his own work.
What both sides are skipping. The left won’t touch the optics, and the optics are bad. A judge signing a sweeping permanent injunction on the literal day he ascends to the appellate court that hears the appeal is a recusal question with a bow on it. The right, for its part, mostly skips that Kansas voters rejected an anti-abortion amendment in 2022 and that the 2019 state precedent genuinely does put these laws on thin ice no matter who’s holding the pen. Neither side wants the other half of its own story.
Start with what actually got struck, because “abortion restrictions” is doing a lot of hiding. This was not a ban. Kansas doesn’t have one, and after 2022 it isn’t getting one. What the judge erased was the floor: a 24-hour heads-up so a woman gets the medical information before the appointment instead of on the table, a short pause before the procedure, a line telling her a medication abortion can sometimes be halted partway, and a single question asking her the main reason she’s there.
Look at that list and tell me which part is oppression. A waiting period isn’t a wall. It’s the same “sleep on it” the state already builds into buying a gun, and a good deal less than the paperwork on a mortgage or, honestly, a tattoo. Informed consent means informed. I thought the left were pro informed consent. Ironically, you get more mandatory disclosure closing on a used car than a Kansas woman will now get before a decision she can’t take back, and that’s the version being sold to you as freedom.
The reason question is the one that should stop you cold. Ask a woman why she’s ending a pregnancy, and you start to find out how many are being pushed into it by a boyfriend, a parent, a trafficker, a paycheck that doesn’t stretch. That’s the data that tells you whether “her choice” was ever a choice. Strike the question, and you have decided you would rather not know. If you cared about the woman and not just the procedure, that answer is the first thing you’d ask for.
Now the part the media is dodging. The judge called all of it “not even a close call,” and the outlets ran that line like a weather report, on the same day he was sworn onto the Supreme Court that hears the appeal. A trial judge leveled twenty years of statute and then, hours later, put on the robe of the court that reviews rulings like the one he just wrote. Now the honest mechanics, because they matter: he does not get to grade his own homework. If the injunction is appealed up to the Kansas Supreme Court, he’d be required to step aside, since no judge sits in judgment of his own decision. So the problem isn’t that he’ll rule on his own case. It’s the timing. Whether he planned it or the calendar just fell that way, he handed down the biggest ruling of his trial career on his last day with trial-court power, then walked upstairs. And even recused from this one appeal, he now helps write Kansas abortion law from the top court, after announcing on day one that the whole question isn’t “even a close call.” Remember the issue centered on informed consent.
Kansans voted in 2022 to keep abortion legal. They did not vote to gut informed consent or to unask the question about who’s being coerced. “Legal” and “no guardrails at all” were never a question on the ballot, and a judge pretending they were, on his way up to the bench that blesses it, is not democracy working. It’s one man clearing the floor on the last day he had the power to do it.
Watch two things. Watch whether a single outlet running “not even a close call” as neutral fact ever asks the recusal question out loud. And watch what the Kansas Supreme Court does with the appeal now that one of its own justices has a byline on the thing being appealed. That’s the read.
An armed man was arrested casing Trump's Los Angeles golf course a day before the president was due there. Jeanine John Taele, 38, allegedly photographed and filmed security "planning activities" at Trump National in Rancho Palos Verdes, and a search of his home turned up a modified AR rifle, a .45 pistol, body armor, high-capacity magazines, and notebooks with "concerning statements." So far he's charged only with possessing an unregistered short-barreled rifle, a 10-year felony, while the Secret Service investigates whether he was a threat. Trump was aboard Air Force One, headed to an RNC dinner, when the arrest broke.
F.A. United States Attorney Bill Essayli@USAttyEssayliJeanine John Taele, 38, of Downey, who was arrested at Trump National Golf Course Los Angeles in Rancho Palos Verdes, is charged in a federal criminal complaint with possession of an unregistered short-barreled rifle, a felony carrying a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in
4:49 AM · Aug 5, 2026 · 120K Views138 Replies · 920 Reposts · 3.11K LikesFauci took the Fifth more than 100 times, so Rand Paul is sending it straight to the DOJ. Sen. Rand Paul released a contempt resolution against Anthony Fauci and set a committee vote for Thursday, after Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment over 100 times at his late-July COVID hearing. Paul argues Biden’s pardon erased the criminal jeopardy the Fifth is supposed to protect against, ordered him to answer, and got refused, so he’ll refer the contempt straight to Justice if it clears committee.
A WNBA player said men shouldn’t play women’s basketball, and the league benched the wrong woman. Fever guard Sophie Cunningham told ESPN it’s “common sense” to keep men out of women’s sports and that she’s trying to “protect young girls in a locker room.” The fallout: support rallies, then the WNBA suspending Seattle Storm co-owner Celeste Keaton five home games for cursing at two teenage fans who backed Cunningham. Concerned Women for America is now pressing the league to adopt a biological-women-only policy.
Trump pulled 1,076 California hospices off Medicare, and everyone’s fighting over the credit. The administration announced it removed 1,076 California hospice providers over fraud, a 47% cut from the Biden-era peak, barring them from billing Medicare. Newsom’s office has spent 2026 touting its own crackdown and 280-plus revoked licenses, including a March release literally headlined “News you won’t see on Fox News.”
The two Republicans blocking Trump’s attorney general folded, and Blanche is headed to the floor. The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced Todd Blanche 12-10 after John Cornyn and Thom Tillis dropped their holds, once Blanche formally rescinded the administration’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” and narrowed the scope of Trump’s IRS immunity deal. With Mitch McConnell still absent and Susan Collins already a no, Blanche can lose only one more Republican on the floor.
The Hormuz deal Trump dangled last week is now down to hours. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. and Iran could reach a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz “today or tomorrow,” with “freedom of movement” for shipping, as Oman brokers and hundreds of ships wait. Trump called the talks “very good” and warned Iran would “get hit very hard” if the strait stays shut. A week ago this was the “largest operation since World War II” he called off.
That’s The Read.
See you Friday.
If The Read is doing the cross-check work for you, send it to a friend who’s still chasing the framing instead of the facts.