Insurgent Candidate Victories Highlight Growing Movement Against Corporate & Elite Power: John Nichols

AMY GOODMAN: And let’s go to William Lawrence of the Sunrise Movement —

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — who we just mentioned, who won his primary, a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, defeated two opponents to win the Democratic House primary in Michigan’s 7th District, focusing partly on what you just mentioned: AI data centers. This is one of his ads.

WILLIAM LAWRENCE: I’m Will Lawrence. And tech billionaires want to turn this whole field into a massive data center that’ll jack up our energy bills and ruin our home values.

RANDY: They put that in, it’s going to plummet the values. It’s an existential threat.

WILLIAM LAWRENCE: I’m running for U.S. Congress because I’ve been afraid to stand up to corporate power. I’m backed by Bernie Sanders, and I don’t take a dime from corporate PACs.

ANJALI KAMAT: And in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, Donavan McKinney, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has a narrow lead over Congressman Shri Thanedar. This is a part of one of McKinney’s ads.

DONAVAN McKINNEY: Shri Thanedar and the same billionaires supporting Donald Trump are spending millions lying to you. They know that in Congress, Shri fights for them. I will fight for us — lower costs, higher wages, Medicare for All.

ANJALI KAMAT: Abbas Alawieh also won the Democratic primary for a seat in the Michigan state Senate. He was a co-founder of the Uncommitted Movement, which pushed for President Biden, and then Kamala Harris, to end U.S. support for Israel’s war on Gaza. This is Abbas speaking outside the DNC, the Democratic National Convention, in 2024, where the Uncommitted Movement pushed to include a Palestinian voice at the convention.

ABBAS ALAWIEH: Here is the scandal, my friends. Here is the scandal. The scandal is that there are forces within Democratic Party leadership who do not want us to talk about Palestinian human rights. But that’s not sustainable. This is a watershed moment.

ANJALI KAMAT: John Nichols, can you talk about some of these other key races in Michigan and other states where progressives were challenging more establishment candidates, and just what you think is most important as a takeaway from yesterday’s primaries?

JOHN NICHOLS: I sure can. I’m delighted to do it, because the fact of the matter is that our national media too often focuses on the top-line races and misses the real dynamic, which you start to recognize is when you go down-ballot and you look at contests for U.S. House seats and for legislative seats.

And if you look in Michigan, what you’re seeing is, with Will Lawrence, an example of a real breakthrough win for a young candidate who ran a campaign on dynamic, fresh issues, including data centers. With Donavan McKinney, that’s still a close race. There are votes still to be counted there. But this is an incredible thing, because this is a candidate who didn’t have anywhere near the kind of money that his opponent did, and yet, with a real grassroots campaign on the ground there in Detroit and that region, ran very, very well.