Francesca Hong is the frontrunner to win the Democratic nomination for governor of Wisconsin next week. If she goes on to win the general election, she’ll become the first democratic socialist governor in American history. 

But, when Bernie Sanders, the most famous democratic socialist in the country, was asked Wednesday if he’d endorse her, he said: “I don’t think so.” He said he’d met her a few years ago, and that she “seems very very nice” — but said he wasn’t familiar with her race.

Indeed, while leftists and socialists who’ve long been eager to overthrow the Democratic establishment are excited about Hong’s campaign, some are increasingly sounding a bit wary of her chances — and wondering whether she’s the best representative the movement has to offer given the electoral stakes in this swing state. 

For instance, when Hong was asked this week about an old deleted tweet in which she called to cancel Thanksgiving due to its celebration of colonialism, she didn’t exactly disavow it. Instead, she told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that “views can evolve” while also stressing the holiday was “incredibly painful for many people in our communities.”

Moderate Democrats cringed, of course. But what was more notable was how many fellow leftists joined in — even to some of her biggest fans, the answer seemed like political malpractice. It also brought to the surface simmering tensions within the left over how to navigate social issues more broadly, a divide that’s becoming more relevant now that their candidates are on the cusp of wielding actual power. 

Left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, fresh off campaigning with Hong, posted on X: “love fran, this was an opportunity to turn this back on how thanksgiving is about to be unaffordable due to trumps wars.” (Two days later, Hong tried a do-over on the answer, claiming Thanksgiving was actually her favorite holiday.)

Another source of concern, for some, is Hong’s tendency of giving elliptical answers when asked about her old support for abolishing police and prisons — saying she won’t do it as governor, but remaining reluctant to disavow the idea as a long-term goal. 

Sanders has been a longtime critic of “defund the police” rhetoric. And in the same interview where Sanders said he likely wouldn’t endorse Hong, he said, in response to a separate question: “No serious person that I know who is running for office believes in quote-unquote defunding the police.”

Hong’s rhetoric is reminiscent of how many people in progressive spaces talked about culture, identity, policing, and prisons back during the “Great Awokening” era, peaking in the “racial reckoning” of 2020. But some on the left increasingly believe that those positions alienate voters — particularly the working-class voters they’re trying to mobilize. 

This new left conventional wisdom, said to be embodied in Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign, is that socialist candidates for office should quietly downplay or even explicitly renounce those old causes — as Mamdani did for police defunding — in favor of a laser focus on issues like affordability, stopping data centers, and opposition to Israel, where public opinion is on their side. 

It’s a sort of left-wing version of “popularism” — the center-left credo that Democrats should campaign on popular ideas that poll well, and abandon unpopular progressive stances. In other words: Don’t scare the normies.

But not everyone on the left is so eager to jettison these stances for purportedly optimal campaign messaging: After all, a major organizing principle for many on the left is their willingness to stand up for what they believe in even when it isn’t popular. 

For instance, Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Mamdani ally who successfully challenged a House Democratic incumbent this year, stood by her old calls to abolish policing and borders — though, unlike Hong, she’s running in extremely blue terrain. 

“Five years ago, the left was collectively making the case for abolition &/or defund, & gaining public opinion wins,” leftist podcaster Briahna Joy Gray wrote. “Today, they’re making the case for why elected progressives are justified in abandoning this agenda.”

All this is symptomatic of a deeper divide on the left, not just about today’s political strategy, but about race, class, and gender more broadly, and how 2020-era cultural issues fit into their movement today. 

Many class-focused leftists view the period they now jokingly call “woke 1.0” or “woke 1” as a cringey mistake, and seek to blame Democratic elites for it. But others on the left still think and talk about race, identity, and social justice causes just like they did in 2020 — indeed, to them, these issues might be why they joined the left in the first place.

Some on the left now want to move on from “woke 1.0”

In 2021, Chi Ossé, campaigning for New York City Council, tweeted: “A cis white man should not be the next speaker of the Council.”

When a critic of his on X unearthed that old post earlier this year, Ossé — now a council member — gave a pithy response: “Woke 1 was crazyyyy”.

The citation of “woke 1.0” or “woke 1” is a now-common shorthand among parts of the online left to describe — and distance themselves from — what they now view as the more dated or inconvenient aspects of the impassioned social justice activism they participated in during the late 2010s and early 2020s.

Typically, this doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting causes like racial justice altogether. Rather, it is often intended to acknowledge that the tactics used a few years back didn’t work, and that a new approach is necessary to try and achieve those goals. (Indeed, “woke 1.0” implies that “woke 2.0” is either coming or already here.)

Among those who use the term, there isn’t a consensus about what’s an outdated relic worth abandoning, and what’s a worthy cause worth preserving. However, there’s probably the most consensus that the sweeping, totalizing identity-related rhetoric and assertions that were common at the time haven’t aged well. Not only did they repel winnable voters, but they fueled constant arguments inside progressive organizations, to the point that some activists likened the discord to undercover federal plots to disrupt left-wing groups in the 1960s. 

Take it from Chevalier. The victorious congressional primary challenger has stood by her old tweets about police and borders being fundamentally wrong. But when the New York Editorial Board asked her about “woke 1,” she said it was “indeed crazy” — because there was too much “divisive rhetoric” that hurt the left’s effort to build solidarity.

“At the core of what it means to organize is to bring people together behind a vision,” Chevalier said. “And you can’t do that when you are spending time trying to show who’s more progressive or who’s more woke. That actually causes more division, and it makes folks feel that there is no space for them in our movements.”

To others, the true core of “woke 1.0” is unpopular, fringe-sounding cultural causes — like, say, calling Thanksgiving problematic. In response to the Thanksgiving clip, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein posted: “Hong has a lot of strengths but this woke 1 stuff is a major weakness.”

“Socialists must practice effective communication,” Nathan J. Robinson, editor-in-chief of the socialist publication Current Affairs, wrote. “Reply to a Thanksgiving question: The only thing threatening to cancel Thanksgiving is the rising cost of groceries.”

The deeper disagreement inside the left on economics and identity issues

Underneath some leftists’ attempt to turn the page from “woke 1.0,” there’s a deeper and more longstanding divide on the left between those who want to prioritize economic issues — and those who care deeply about identity-related causes too.

To broadly generalize, we can think of the left as having three main strains, focused on economic justice (class politics), social justice (causes related to identity and culture), and foreign policy (war, empire, and — especially nowadays — Israel). But not everyone prioritizes them in the same way, or joined the movement because of the same issue.

Amid the rise of social media-powered identity related activism, some on the economics-focused left have expressed concern that progressives’ language, approach, and tactics were hampering what should be the left’s top priority: mobilizing the working class. The Marxist scholar Adolph Reed, for instance, has criticized “left identitarians” as “fundamentally antagonistic to working-class politics.”

Some on the class-focused left go further, characterizing “wokeness” as essentially an op by their political enemies. 

According to this potted history, it was Hillary Clinton who first opened the Pandora’s box of weaponized identity politics, and she did this to defeat a Bernie Sanders campaign that was overwhelmingly focused on economic justice. Clinton characterized Sanders as insufficiently attentive to gender and racial issues, famously questioning whether breaking up the big banks would solve racism and sexism. His record of more moderate positions on hot-button issues like guns and immigration, which had helped maintain support with culturally conservative independents back in Vermont, also came under attack. 

But by 2018, the rising left — embodied by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, all first elected that year — had fulsomely embraced identity-related causes alongside economic ones, believing them to be compatible and interconnected.

All this built up to the 2020 racial reckoning, in which the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin spurred massive nationwide protests and impassioned demands from the left for societal change. And some activists insisted this change had to include not just defunding but outright abolishing the police.

Yet the racial reckoning ended in disappointment, an “anti-woke” backlash soon followed, and rising crime seemed to discredit the idea of doing away with police. And though the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America still calls for taking “steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system,” there’s an increasingly open debate on the left about whether it should.

“The idea that police/prison abolitionism flow from ‘core socialist principles’ is pretty odd,” Ben Burgis, a columnist for Jacobin magazine, posted recently.

“We need to create a permission structure on the left that allows socialists to have normal socialist beliefs about police & prisons (fairer, fewer, and more humane) instead of “abolish” which is flatly anarchist, and incompatible with any form of state socialism,” the socialist Cassie Pritchard wrote.

Sociologist Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing, fired back: “In what fantasy land are police not the natural enemies of workers and their movements? There is no ‘reforming away’ that core truth.”

How these tensions play out in Francesca Hong’s campaign

With Hong holding a large lead in recent polls, some Democrats — fearing what lies ahead for her in the general election — have essentially been trying to coach her into giving what they view as better answers on these “woke 1.0” questions.

When Jon Favreau interviewed Hong on Pod Save America this week, he asked about her old tweets — saying he was only focusing on this because Republicans would be sure to spend millions attacking her, and “I just want to make sure you have the best possible answers to what’s coming.”

Asked about how her views on policing have evolved, Hong said: “My views have only become stronger in that I’m serious about public safety and I will not abolish the police.”

Favreau then asked if she still believed police exist to uphold white supremacy (as she tweeted in 2021), and Hong said, “No.”

But when Favreau asked specifically why she changed her mind on that, her answer was difficult to parse.

“When you talk to people who are most justice-impacted — a mother who lost a child to police violence, people who have contended with injustices in historically marginalized communities — justice also looks like making sure that we are implementing solutions and helping to change the material conditions of people’s lives,” she said.

Then, when asked how her long-term vision of a world without prisons would work, Hong said: “What I know is attainable and the policies that actually meet the urgency of the moment and understanding the realities of it, means that we have to ensure that we’re funding our local governments, that we’re bringing justice to victims.”

She added, more succinctly: “What may have been aspirational is not primary.”

In 2014, Narendra Modi pioneered the use of social media and digital campaigning in India to become prime minister. Known as one of the first global politicians to harness the power of the internet, he has the most social media followers of any world leader currently in office. 

Today, over a decade since Modi’s digital-first political campaign, an internet-fueled youth movement called the Cockroach Janta Party (or the Cockroach People’s Party) is using the same social media platforms to organize protests, successfully forcing the resignation of one of Prime Minister Modi’s top advisers. The Indian government has responded with a crackdown, arresting protesters and increasingly censoring X, Meta, and other social meda sites. The legacy of the Cockroach Janta Party will be complex: On one hand, it brought to the forefront important conversations around Gen Z unemployment and meritocracy; on the other, it may have pushed the Indian government to create stricter new censorship laws to silence future dissent.

The internet that helped propel Modi to power is becoming a tool that a new generation uses against him. How much further will Modi’s government go to censor its people and restrict free speech? 

Read more about censorship in India and the Cockroach Janta Party:

• Censorship tracker on MediaNama, a live list of censorship following the Jantar Mantar protests in New Delhi
• “Social Media Modi-Fication: Narendra Modi’s use of Social Media in Indian Elections 2014”
• “India CJP protests: Young women face harassment and abuse”
• “Activists decry AI surveillance at CJP protests”
• “India’s young are more educated than ever. Why are so many jobless?”

If you enjoy our reporting and want to hear more from Vox journalists, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/vox. Each month, our members get access to exclusive videos, livestreams, and chats with our newsroom.

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In the teensy Midwestern town of Braham, homemade pie capital of Minnesota, something unusual in the municipality’s computer systems knocked the city’s entire water supply offline last week.

Within a few hours, dozens of other Minnesota cities discovered that their water and wastewater utilities, too, had been compromised, most likely as part of a massive Iranian cyberattack, the kind that US officials have been warning about since the war began. 

At least a dozen states have been affected by the attack, which briefly led to a flurry of small-town service disruptions, boil-water notices, and local flooding. Water wells, dams, sewers, and pipelines are some of America’s oldest and creakiest pieces of infrastructure, built long before the internet existed, and certainly long before AI made hacking much easier. While you may assume most hackers are in it for the money or for data, some have targeted critical infrastructure like water systems or energy grids in ploys for control or disruption — or worse still, as acts of war. 

And, as last week’s attacks show, the nation’s water system is woefully unprepared. But how worried should you be that the very infrastructure that keeps our water taps running is, apparently, hackable? 

Quite worried, indeed. 

When we say the water supply got hacked, what we really mean is that someone, somewhere has broken into the computer that controls a local water treatment plant or reservoir, and is now pulling the levers, like the one that decides how much of a corrosive chemical can safely go into cleaning the water that comes out of your tap. 

These levers were once manual buttons and knobs operated in-person by real live humans, meaning that — barring a natural disaster, bomb, or break-in — protecting them was about as simple as building a fence and hiring guards. Increasingly, however, these levers have gone digital, meaning that they are now remotely operable from anywhere in the world. 

Those upgrades have been convenient, allowing technicians to monitor and troubleshoot problems in real time. But, in the process, they have exposed at times centuries-old infrastructure to distinctly modern vulnerabilities. Most local water systems are operated by local authorities, don’t have a dedicated IT team, and lack the money or resources to thoroughly protect themselves without some extra help. Hackers know this, which is why they’ve increasingly targeted local agencies in such attacks. 

“With great connectivity comes great responsibility,” said Joshua Corman, founder of I Am The Cavalry, a nonprofit focused on helping critical infrastructure withstand hackers. And yet, even when it comes to critical services like water, “our dependence on connected technology is growing faster than our ability to secure it.” 

About 97 percent of water systems are small, run by local agencies that often barely lock the proverbial front door. America’s water system is like an expensive heirloom bicycle that’s been left on a busy street, protected by only the flimsiest of padlocks. And that very vulnerability has made tiny towns like Braham prime targets for faraway adversaries. Accessing the computers that operate most water systems — known as programmable logic controllers or PLCs — is often as simple as entering a username and password on a public-facing webpage. Sometimes, there is no real password at all, because PLCs were initially intended to be accessed only within locked, secure facilities, not on the open internet. If the US wants to avoid a far more severe version of what happened last week, then it will need to start taking the security of tiny water systems like Braham’s seriously.

“Any sociopath from anywhere in the world can see these things on the internet,” said Corman. And in the case of last week’s attacks, “these were devices with no password, no firewall or VPN shielding them — they just had to log in” as whoever the intended operator was, and just like that, they were inside a local water plant. 

How did this happen at all? 

When municipalities began hooking up their old water and wastewater systems to the internet — a trend that accelerated during the pandemic as water operators, like everyone else, adapted to remote work — cybersecurity was rarely front of mind, neither for individual utilities nor for regulators as a whole. 

“We have more cybersecurity regulations for your credit card than we have for the nation’s water supply,” said Corman. Only recently have some municipalities begun to take steps to decrease the exposure of their water plants to hacks. In March, New York state, for example, launched a set of grants and basic cybersecurity regulations mandating security training for all water operators. 

Basic cybersecurity hygiene isn’t always enough. More than half of all credit card holders have been hacked, even with the help of mandatory firewalls and data encryption. You can imagine how vulnerable our water must be without the assistance of such guardrails. In a worst-case scenario, a malicious actor could quite literally open the floodgates, as Russian hackers did to a Norwegian dam last year. They could poison the tap water, as a still unidentified hacker almost did in Florida in 2021, dialing up the levels of sodium hydroxide used at a water treatment plant by over 100 times its normal levels. In a severe scenario, they could indefinitely cut off access to all water entirely.

The good news is, none of this happened last week. Nobody died, nobody lost water for more than a few hours, no fire hydrants ran dry, and no hospitals were forced to cut off their dialysis machines (which can use more than a hundred gallons of water per treatment session). There’s no need to panic, and your drinking water is almost certainly still safe to drink, assuming it was safe before. Even the city of Braham, within a few hours, was able to bring its water tower back online, pumping groundwater back to its 1,800 residents. 

How do we avoid cyber-armageddon?

If you’ve watched the Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali-starring thriller Leave the World Behind, in which a cyberattack apocalyptically spoils a family vacation, then you might have some idea of where this story could go. 

Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure can be extraordinarily dangerous, but thankfully, none have directly cost lives or severely disrupted services in this country so far. If the US wants to keep it that way, that will mean doing more to help small cities like Braham adapt and better monitor for potential threats. As it stands, of the roughly 151,000 water facilities in the US, only about 420 participate in voluntary information sharing on their own cybersecurity practices, says Corman, who has been leading his own project that recruits volunteers to give free cybersecurity support to water utilities in the nation’s roughly 6,000 hospital towns, where a disruption could be particularly deadly. 

Cybersecurity experts like Corman believe that hackers from other nations like China have already quietly established cyber intrusions in countless local US utilities, water systems, and power grids, lying in wait to attack or act as leverage if a conflict arises. 

Unfortunately, the Trump administration has hardly treated last week’s attacks as symptoms of a system in need of much broader strengthening, at least in its public statements. “I think Minnesota is behind it. You know who’s behind it? Minnesota,” the president baselessly claimed during a Cabinet meeting last Friday. “I think the governor is behind it. I don’t think there was an Iranian cyber attack.” 

Just a few months ago, he proposed $707 million in cuts to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the agency responsible for protecting the nation’s infrastructure from cyberattacks. He did so, at least in part, out of anger over the agency’s role in confirming the validity of the 2020 election results. If Iran is, indeed, responsible, for the recent water system intrusions, all of this means that Trump has effectively made us more vulnerable to the consequences of a conflict he initiated.

At the end of the day,“nation-state hackers do not respect the jurisdictional lines separating federal, state, and local responsibility,” Jen Easterly, who led CISA under the Biden administration, wrote in the New York Times this week. “They search for the most vulnerable way to disrupt American life, and too often they find it in small communities that lack the resources to defend themselves.” Easterly’s role has remained vacant for the past 18 months.

Kurt Gaudette, a senior vice president at the cybersecurity firm Dragos, told me that water systems have got to get into the habit of monitoring their networks for suspicious activity. Most power utilities have begun doing so in recent years, with some bipartisan backing from Congress. 

In some cases, however, the most cost-effective and safest way to avoid a repeat of last week’s mess might be to unplug the most vital controls — like the one that decides the chemical levels in a water treatment plant — from the web entirely. 

As Corman puts it, “if you can’t protect it, disconnect it.”

The acrimonious Democratic primary contest in Michigan is over: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed will move on to face the Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers this November for a must-win seat in controlling the US Senate.

Al-Sayed’s victory, as the first Muslim major-party Senate nominee, is historic for Muslim Americans. But the race also pitted various constituencies of the Democratic base against each other, and set the Democratic establishment and heavy AIPAC spending against El-Sayed, a progressive political newcomer.

To get a better sense of the significance of this moment, and to get an on-the-ground perspective of the repairing of bonds that Democrats must now do to prepare for the general election, I turned to another trailblazer: Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan.

In 2023, Dearborn became the first majority-Arab American city, and a large percentage of its residents are Muslim. Hammoud was the first of both communities to be elected mayor. He has long been on the front lines of how these communities engage with, or feel left out of, the Democratic Party. He was a prominent voice of the Uncommitted movement back in 2024 which urged people to vote “uncommitted” in Democratic primaries in 2024 in protest of President Joe Biden’s handling of the Gaza war. That issue pushed many residents out of the party. Later that year, Dearborn, along with Michigan, shifted right, with Donald Trump winning a plurality of the city’s vote and contributing to former Vice President Kamala Harris’s eventual loss.

Two years later, things are very different, he told me. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You endorsed and campaigned for Abdul El-Sayed. How are you feeling today, and how is your community feeling?

Many of us are feeling exhausted because we haven’t slept. But what I can tell you, honestly, is that many people are feeling hopeful. In addition to, obviously, the outcome of the elections yesterday up and down the ballot, what was hopeful this morning is just seeing the whole party come together.

So kudos to Congresswoman [Haley] Stevens, to state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, to Curtis Hertel, the chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, for announcing right away that we know what we’re facing down in November, we have a lot more that we agree about than we disagree about; it’s time to come together and continue marching forward and to build this momentum and this movement.

But I think overall, people are just feeling inspired. I’m out and about today, and a lot of people are just approaching, talking about how hopeful they are.

How much of that hopefulness is about the possibility of El-Sayed making history as a Muslim American in the Senate?

Listen, most certainly I’m not going to take away the significance of a potential first. And as a fellow Abdul — I mean, Abdul is just short for all of our full names — it’s beautiful to see a son of Michigan who’s authentically himself, welcomed and uplifted by the people of Michigan. What is more American than that? That you’re willing to support a candidate regardless of the direction in which they pray, because of the direction in which they lead? And that is the American story.

I’m wondering, are you worried at all about the spotlight that this has all brought, or fearful about more ugliness? Already the GOP is trafficking in Islamophobia: Mike Rogers tweeted out that he’s going to save Michigan from El-Sayed, just as when he went after terrorists.

The ugliness and the Islamophobia and the bigotry is not going to be anything new. Keep in mind, what did they do to our first Black president, whose middle name happened to be Hussein? How much Islamophobia was thrown out there at the idea that he may have been Muslim? 

And when we’ve had women run for office, whether it was Secretary Clinton or Vice President Harris, you saw the sexism come out. Time and time again, regardless of who you have at bat, this type of hateful rhetoric always seems to emerge. And unfortunately, the algorithms seem to promote it. 

That’s honestly what’s most problematic: a lot of the rhetoric you do hear online, it’s fake accounts, it’s bots, and it’s because these social media owners and operators, these conglomerates and these monoliths, are so afraid of the president that they’re unwilling to have a check on hate speech. Rather than focus on the hate, again, people feel hopeful because you have candidates who are authentically themselves, who are not only welcomed and accepted, but uplifted and supported. And it’s because they spoke to a set of values that people of all faiths, of all backgrounds, of all ethnicities, of multi-generational, multi-ethnic coalitions that were constructed, all share. And they’re a set of values that we want to apply globally and they’re not exclusionary.

A lot of money was spent on painting an educated, kind man as misogynistic, who is married to a far smarter physician, who is the father of two young daughters. And I’m a girl dad myself, married to a far smarter physician. But stereotypes, they get acted on for the purposes of immediate political satisfaction…there will be some carryover as a result, with Republicans now utilizing those stereotypes, trying to cast fear because of Abdul’s name, Abdulrahman. They tweeted out his full name. He’s Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, I’m Abdullah Hussein Hammoud, so unfortunately that will happen. But again, I choose to believe that people are bigger than the naysayers and people are bigger than all the negativity.

Was there anything about El-Sayed’s contest that reminded you of your own run for mayor?

Obviously my race was far smaller. And I’m in the city of Dearborn, where people expect somebody with a name like mine to come to office, although we were the first at the time. I’ll tell you, even then in that race, in a city like Dearborn, there was a lot of rhetoric that said Hammoud could be the mayor for some, but not the mayor for all.

And you hear that underlying nature with the Mike Rogers attack ads, with the Republican Senate campaign coming out and saying, look at his full name. 

What is wrong with that full name? It’s a beautifully American name. And so yes, there are similarities in that sense, similarities in other candidates who were the first who rose to power. 

What surprised you about this primary? 

On the ground, we felt like there was a lot of momentum. And obviously I’m talking about the city of Dearborn, and obviously El-Sayed took nearly 80 percent of the vote here.

I would say that this election was also a stark reminder that people are hungry for a politics that answers to working families, not to corporate PACs and special interests. And the influence of big money has too often drowned out the voices of everyday people. And so, it’s beautiful to see that there’s an opportunity to restore a government that works for those it was meant to serve. And I think that is an underlying story that is foundational to the campaigns we’re seeing not only in Michigan, not only in the US Senate race, but in campaigns all across this country. It’s the mini versus the money, as Abdul would say.

How have things changed since 2024? Trump made major inroads with Muslim and Arab American communities back then — how does it feel now?

What’s changed are candidates who are trying to build authentic connections with people on the ground on a set of values and ideals that we can all corral around, versus in 2024, just being told that, well, the other candidate is worse.

Everybody knows what Abdul’s platform is. And remember, people in Dearborn didn’t vote for Abdul because he’s Muslim. They voted for Abdul because he showed up, he knocked on the doors, he went to places of worship. He canvassed and rallied. He had an agenda that wanted to tackle the main issues that so many working families are facing, economic issues. 

And obviously in ’24, slightly different, but I would say that people did not feel heard in 2024. And yes, Trump came to the City of Dearborn. I rejected meeting with Trump. I spoke to the threat that Donald Trump presented, to unravel the very fabric of America, and we see that happening each and every single day. But unfortunately at that time, the [Democratic] party was not willing to move. And I think there were lessons happening in that election, and I think we’re kind of seeing that play out right now.

You were a pretty vocal leader of the Uncommitted movement back then. My colleague Astead Herndon recently made the case that El-Sayed’s campaign has its roots in this movement, and in some way his victory came about because of those 2024 efforts. I’m wondering if you agree, or how you think about that legacy.

For me, getting 100,000 votes for Uncommitted, I don’t categorize it personally as victories. For me, it was, can you demonstrate that children being blown up in their homes or in their schools, or in hospitals being bulldozed, that these are things that universally we as human beings should all be opposed to? And you saw a multi-generational, multi-ethnic, multi-faith coalition be constructed around that.

It wasn’t an Arab, a Muslim issue. And in this election, what I see is that that coalition grew.

We’re still seeing atrocities unfold, but what is beautiful is people are bold enough, daring enough to come forward now and say, “Hey, why send our tax dollars for death and destruction when we need to build and uplift and support working families here?” Blind to who is being killed or murdered. And I think that’s ultimately what we were trying to achieve. 

The Uncommitted movement was an anti-war coalition, a pro-justice movement. And I think that’s what you’re seeing manifest in these candidates on the ground. And so I don’t like to consider anything a mere victory. It’s one election. We’re in another election right now. And ultimately victory is when working families feel seen, feel heard, and when policies change to change their lives for the better.

That is victory and that has yet to happen.

You mention this multi-ethnic, multi-faith coalition. I’m wondering if there have been any constructive interfaith conversations you’ve heard, or had, in this primary.

We worked a lot with organizers on the ground when they asked us, how do you mobilize and canvass in cities like Dearborn? And we told them, it’s not the traditional sense where you send out a text message or do phone banking. You got to show up. You got to be seen in community with them. 

We believe in authentic relationships. And I think that the same is true about many communities where they don’t want you to show up just during election time. And so I think the coalition-building and the community-building has been happening for quite some time between myself and my residents, obviously.

We educated them; when we did do canvassing, I gave them the tips about the cultural norms, the greetings. Don’t jump right into politics. Ask somebody: What do they care about? Find the issue that matters to them and try to uplift that somehow and speak to that. Show up multiple times. “Oh, I appreciate you passing by a place of worship once.” It’s not enough. You should be there every single week, if you authentically mean and stand by the idea that you want this community to support you. What are you doing today? Today’s the day after the election — are you coming back?

It was a pretty bitter race at times, particularly on the Israel and Palestine question. Lots of attempts were made by Republicans and Democrats to drive a wedge between Muslim and Jewish voters both in Michigan and in other races around the country. What’s it going to take to rebuild trust, to repair relationships? 

Prior to the genocide in Gaza, there’s been strong relationships between the Jewish community, the Muslim community and the Arab communities. The City of Dearborn is a city that uplifted its Jewish uncle Bernie Sanders twice in the presidential election. I personally endorsed Andy Levin when he first ran for Congress against Congresswoman Haley Stevens. We’re in contact. 

I’ve worked with Jewish Voice for Peace (the pro-Palestinian national Jewish activist organization) for several years now. We just put up the Wall of Tears mural in the City of Dearborn, which highlights the nearly 20,000 children in Gaza that have been killed. They brought the idea forward to work with us. 

Sometimes the media likes to speak to a relationship that is fraught with many issues. The reality is we know that antisemitism and Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment are one and the same. When you see a rise in one, you see a rise in the other, and we have to counteract all this together. And we have to distinguish between criticism of a government and criticism of a people.

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The progressive populist Abdul El-Sayed won Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary in Michigan — though the vote was so close that most outlets didn’t call the race until this morning.

It’s not exactly the resounding triumph progressives expected. In the lead-up to Election Day, El-Sayed’s campaign boasted of a “massive” polling lead over centrist Rep. Haley Stevens that they said definitively proved the mainstream appeal of his style of politics.

In reality, the takeaways from one of the midterms’ bitterest and most consequential races are probably more mixed. El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former public health official who has championed policies like Medicare-for-all and an end to military aid for Israel, appeared to struggle in some of Michigan’s lower-income and less-educated districts. 

That said, his win is still a big deal, especially given the forces arrayed against him. Democratic heavyweights and big-money donors both threw their considerable weight behind Stevens. 

The left’s big swing-state test

The Democratic primary in Michigan centered on a lot of interesting issues: money in politics, a whole bunch of -isms, and the role of “the establishment,” to name just a few. But the upcoming general election will test one question above all: Can a left-wing populist win over swing-state voters the way right-wing populists have been doing for years now? 

We have some left-wing populists in office already, of course — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez D-NY), who both campaigned for El-Sayed this cycle. Progressives represent a number of cities and urban congressional districts. And over the past few months, the left wing of the Democratic Party has notched some notable primary wins.

But all of these candidates have run to represent solidly Democratic communities, where winning the primary effectively meant winning the seat. An out-and-proud, Sanders-style, left-wing populist arguably has yet to prove that this platform can win a statewide general election in a state that isn’t deep-blue already. 

That makes Michigan a high-stakes test. The state went for Trump in two of the past three presidential elections. Winning Michigan as a Democrat means cobbling together a coalition from a broad and varied range of constituencies, including Black Detroiters, swing suburbanites, college-town progressives, blue-collar union workers, and both Jewish and Muslim Americans. 

“Michigan is like a microcosm of America,” one Detroit reporter told my colleague Astead Herndon. If a left-wing populist can win there, in other words, the Democratic Party will really have to pay attention. 

One link for later

➨ Have that second cup of coffee; there’s a strong case to be made for its health benefits. In contrast to other, highly publicized food studies of this arena — many of which are sponsored by industry groups — a number of large, rigorous, peer-reviewed studies have found that coffee reduces your risk of developing dementia, cirrhosis, and liver cancer.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that for most people, physical fitness peaks around age 33? I wish I didn’t know that, but now that I do: Misery loves company! 
• Today’s trivia: What was the name of the Nickelodeon game show hosted by Marc Summers? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday, we asked you how many states have legalized marijuana. That would be 41, if you count medical use, and 24 if you do not.