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Common Power Executive Director Charles Douglas hopped on this live fresh off knocking doors for Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Justin Pearson in Tennessee. Both won. El-Sayed won after roughly $70 million was spent against him, and Charles was blunt about what closed that gap. It was people. Volunteers, advocates, and neighbors in rooms and on porches, in rural counties and metro precincts, with the oldest voters and the youngest ones.
What made this conversation useful was that we did not stop at the celebration. I talked to Charles about the demographic breakdowns, the ones showing progressive candidates underperforming with Black voters and with lower-income voters while overperforming with highly educated white voters. He gave me his perspective.
We also got into the Amir Hassan story out of Michigan’s 8th, which is one of the most clarifying things to happen in a Republican primary this year. Charles heard about it in real time on the show.
From there we talked about trust. Charles told a story about a Black couple who pulled up to a polling place not knowing there was a Senate race at all, and what changed their afternoon was the fact that Charles looked like them. That anecdote powered the second half of the show, into his thesis about young Muslims and young Jews building the coalition that heals this party, and into Justin Pearson winning a district that Tennessee Republicans redrew to hurt him.
It was a high-energy hour with a lot of laughing in it. We got into high-level analysis, and somewhere in there we agreed that a well-executed Obama impression remains an underrated campaign asset.
I appreciate those of you who tuned in live and contributed so much to the conversation. This is truly the best community on Substack. If you’re just catching it now, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments and smash that like button.
You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below. And, as always, thank you for supporting independent media.
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Beating Money With People
Charles framed Abdul El-Sayed’s win as proof of concept for the model his organization has been betting on, and I framed it as a survival skill for a general election that is about to get a lot more expensive.
A spending gap offset by volunteers. Charles kept returning to the number, roughly $70 million spent against one of the biggest Senate candidates on the left. His answer for what beat it was people power, and his conclusion was that any Democrat hoping to win in November needs a candidate who can marshal regular people in neighborhoods rather than just buy airtime.
The coalition was wider than the caricature. Charles pointed out that El-Sayed did not just run up numbers in the usual progressive strongholds. He won some rural counties, pulled from the middle class, and performed with both the oldest and the youngest voters, while Stevens took the metros.
This is the skill set the money era demands. I made the case that beating that kind of spending is the exact credential a general election candidate needs right now, given the recent Supreme Court ruling loosening how corporate PAC money can coordinate with campaigns and Elon Musk announcing another $100 million. A candidate who can garner grassroots support is the one thing that money has not figured out how to buy.
The Unity Came Fast, And It Should Come Faster Everywhere Else
The part that surprised both of us was the speed of the reconciliation. Charles admitted he had been worried about Michigan for weeks, because the race had slid from a policy fight into character attacks. Then the losing side folded it up and got behind the winner within hours.
Haley Stevens did not make anyone wait. Her statement said she was proud to offer her support, and she hugged El-Sayed on stage at their unity breakfast the next morning. Charles said the images gave him hope precisely because he had watched the primary devolve into personal attacks, which he warned last week is the kind of fight that leaves lasting damage on our side.
Schumer’s PAC had the ad locked and loaded. Senate Majority PAC dropped a Don’t Stop Believing ad for El-Sayed right after helping spend tens of millions against him. Charles read the timing as evidence they were always prepared to put it back together, and we both agreed it is one of the best Democratic ads either of us has seen this cycle.
I want this to be the standard, not the exception. I said what Haley Stevens did is what Jasmine Crockett needs to do. I am still waiting on a more full-throated embrace of James Talarico from her. The Michigan race was far more vitriolic than the Texas primary, where James Talarico ran on sunshine and rainbows and never said anything negative about his opponent, which makes the delay harder to justify.
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A Different Way To Look At The Demographic Splits In Dem Primaries
This was the analytical core of the show. I brought the data, and Charles gave an answer that reframed the whole question.
I asked the question people did not want me asking. Progressive candidates keep underperforming with Black voters in primaries, and in Michigan, lower-income and working-class voters broke toward Stevens while highly educated white voters broke toward El-Sayed. My honest confusion was about the second part. If the entire message is built around the working class, something is getting lost between the message and the people it is written for.
The Black electorate that shows up is not the whole Black community. Charles made the point that primary data captures older voters disproportionately, and that younger Black voters do not vote like older ones. He added that when someone tells him at the door that their vote does not count, it is almost always a young Black man, and that suppression shapes the sample before anyone runs a crosstab.
The Voting Rights Act theory. Charles presented a theory: Voters old enough to remember having no rights in 1964 and rights in 1965 believe government can deliver transformative change overnight, so the silent generation often reads more like Gen Z than like boomers. The youngest boomers came of age entirely after that shift, learned politics as incremental tinkering, and became the don’t rock the boat voters.
He heard the same thing in rural Tennessee. Gen X and boomer voters told Charles at the door that they loved Justin Pearson but thought he was too loud, and that being that loud was going to get everybody in trouble. Charles said the identical instinct shows up in Detroit.
Where you get your news predicts how you vote in a primary. Charles argued that voters with less formal education still get most of their news from television and still trust those outlets, and that this group lines up closely with establishment primary voters. On the flip side, he thinks that independent media audiences are self-selecting into information seeking, which is why they lean toward bolder candidates.
Amir Hassan Found Out What Selling Out Buys You
I got to break this story to Charles live, which was worth the setup. It is the most revealing thing to happen in a Republican primary this cycle, and it took about ninety seconds to explain.
The setup sounds like a joke and is not. Amir Hassan, a Black ex-Muslim who went full MAGA, ran in Michigan’s 8th and was endorsed by Donald Trump and by Mike Johnson. He was embraced by the MAGA establishment at the highest level available to a first-time House candidate.
The base rejected him anyway. MAGA came after him with Islamophobic attacks, insisted he was still a Muslim, and spread lies about him despite Trump’s endorsement. A Trump endorsement did not override what the movement’s own voters decided about his name.
He lost to a man who had already quit. Tom Smith dropped out of the race, did not fundraise, and had essentially no online presence, and he beat Hassan by nearly 20 points. Hassan posted a visibly shaken video afterward, and my read is that he genuinely expected to walk into Congress on the strength of that endorsement.
The lesson for every sellout watching. You are not protected from the bigotry at the center of Trump’s movement by embracing their far-right ideology. They do not like you. I said on the show that Vivek Ramaswamy is going to run into some version of the same wall.
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Representation Cultivates Trust, And It Matters
Charles spent election day doing poll greeting and watching at a Michigan polling place, and what he learned there impacted how both of us think about persuasion.
The couple who did not know there was a Senate race. A Black couple pulled up, asked him what was going on, and did not recognize either El-Sayed or Haley Stevens. He gave them the pitch on money out of politics and Medicare for All, and the man looked at him and said, “You’re one of me, huh?” Charles, who is Black and Filipino, said yes, and they went in and voted.
He traced that moment back to policy, not vibes. Charles connected it to segregation, redlining, and Jim Crow keeping communities physically apart, and said those cultural effects still reverberate through generations. He also framed it as trust rather than tribalism, meaning trust that the person talking to you understands what your life actually looks like.
Everyone in political media assumes too much knowledge. I made the point that most people are living their lives, too stressed or too busy to track any of this, which is why the Iran war broke through when other stories did not. The gas tank was the headline. Every appearance I do, I try to present the story as if the audience is hearing it for the first time, the way Charles did on that corner. And the fact that people listen most to people who look like them shows why we need more representation everywhere. That is also why we need more Black voices in independent media, because the trust problem does not stop at the door.
My post about names went semi-viral for a reason. I wrote that between Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani, this is the biggest year for names that scare Fox News since Barack Hussein Obama pulled off the W. The replies filled up with Arab and Muslim people saying some version of “we out here,” because when you walk into spaces dominated by people nothing like you, the name arrives before you do. People can relate to other people who have experienced this. It’s why I feel connected to Abdul El-Sayed in spite of us living totally different lives. Representation matters.
The Coalition That Could Heal This
Charles has now been in the room for two of the most talked-about wins on the left, and he noticed the same crowd both times. His thesis about what that crowd becomes was the most forward-looking thing either of us said.
The rooms in Detroit and Astoria looked alike. He said El-Sayed’s watch party was full of young Muslim and Arab people, and that when he was in Astoria for Zohran Mamdani he saw those same faces plus a lot of young Jewish people.
Young Muslims and young Jews are the repair. Charles argued this is the thing that heals the Democratic Party, because these communities agree on far more than the people insisting they are permanent enemies want to admit. He pointed to what happens when Jon Ossoff becomes more prominent, and people hear him and Mamdani in conversation rather than in opposition.
The platform has to carry all of it. I laid out what ties the coalition together: an economic populist message, an anti-corruption message, and a clear pro-human-rights position, built into one cohesive narrative. A candidate who can hold those three at once is the candidate who can hold the coalition.
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Justin Pearson In Tennessee Shows How To Fight Gerrymandering
The Tennessee result got less national attention and deserves more, because it is a case study in what happens when a party draws a district to weaken someone and accidentally hands him a bigger platform.
They ran the election on a Thursday. Charles said Tennessee moved the vote off Tuesday because the state does not want Black people voting and does not want poor white people voting either. Making it hard is the design, not a side effect.
Memphis got cracked into three districts. Rather than packing Black voters into one seat, the map splits them, and Pearson’s district now runs along 13 counties from Memphis nearly to Nashville. Charles said it took his teams about four hours to drive across it to knock on doors.
The redder map may have helped him. He won with more than 60 percent against a candidate backed by Cohen, the white incumbent who held that seat for 30 years. Charles credits the margin to Pearson talking with voters who had never cast a ballot for a Democrat in a federal race, including rural white voters who are middle class rather than poor.
Pearson is not a moderate, and it did not matter. He has fought for the environment in Tennessee for years, opposes data centers, and supports Medicare for All. He is running as a further left candidate in territory the map was drawn to deny him.
Common Power falls in love in the primary and then gets to work. Charles said their thesis is that moving the country away from MAGA requires pulling the general further left, and that the new middle will end up looking like where we were a decade ago. After the primary, they knock for whoever is not insane, which currently includes independents like Dan Osborn and moderate Democrats like Roy Cooper.
Bottom Line
This was a winning week, and the reason it was a winning week is the same in every race we covered. The progressive movement beat roughly $70 million in Michigan. Justin Pearson won a district Tennessee Republicans redrew to weaken him by talking to people who had never voted for a Democrat.
The Democratic establishment in Michigan also deserves credit for closing ranks within hours, and I want that speed to become the standard for every candidate who loses a primary from here forward.
The primary season is almost over. After that, the Democratic Party must unite behind the most important goal: defeating the Republican congressional majority.
If you want to knock doors alongside Charles and Common Power heading into the midterms, go to commonpower.org.
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