The Great Democratic Deworming

AIPAC shoved thirty million dollars up Michigan’s arse and Michigan shat it straight back out.

Abdul El-Sayed is the nominee, the establishment is sitting on the dunny with the shakes, and the plumbing has never looked better.

Here’s the number that should make every consultant, every pollster and every smug Beltway parasite in Washington reach for the bucket.

Fifty-four million fucking dollars. That’s what got spent to stop one bloke. Roughly $60 million in outside money went into the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, about $54 million of it benefiting Haley Stevens and around $5 million benefiting Abdul El-Sayed, a ratio of nearly eleven to one. More than $30.6 million of that came from AIPAC, the most the group has ever dumped into a single race since it started its United Democracy Project super PAC in 2022.

Eleven to one. That is not a campaign, that is a fucking carpet bombing. And Michigan looked at the smouldering crater, wiped the ash off its face, and voted for the other bloke anyway.

Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee for United States Senate in Michigan.

Let that sit for a second. Then say it out loud in the voice of a man who has just watched a bloke in a $4,000 suit fall arse over tit into a skip bin.

What fifty-four million buys you these days

Sweet fuck all, as it turns out.

The money didn’t go on policy, because policy was the one thing these pricks could not risk mentioning. A professor of rhetoric who watched the ad blitz noted AIPAC spent across four themes: attacking El-Sayed over criticising women and the Obamas, over supposedly helping Trump win, and over sitting for an interview with Hasan Piker, with a general absence of any discussion of Israel in the AIPAC-funded TV ads.

Lets all hold hands and read that shit again. Thirty million bucks from a pro-Israel lobby, and not one ad game enough to say the words. That’s not frikken advocacy, that’s a bloke in a trench coat selling watches out the back of a dodgy van. If your position is so grouse, so obviously correct, so beloved by the punters, why in the name of Christ are you hiding it behind a Hasan Piker attack ad?

And it got dirtier. A dark money outfit called the Center for Democratic Priorities spent about $6.5 million on pro-Stevens ads, while another chunk came from PACs funded by other PACs and dark money groups that never fully disclosed their donors, described as a Russian doll of a PAC within a PAC within a PAC within a nonprofit. The biggest non-AIPAC spender, A Stronger Michigan, put over $13 million behind Stevens and is mainly funded by Center Forward, a nonprofit backed by major corporations. UDP’s backers include hedge fund manager Paul Singer and the Kraft Group, headed by the owner of the New England Patriots.

So the “grassroots choice of Michigan working families” was being bankrolled by a vulture capitalist and an NFL franchise owner through a nesting doll of shell companies designed specifically so you’d never find out. Mate. That’s not dark money. That’s money so dark it needs a torch and a spotter to find its own ringpiece.

“The Michigan Senate primary is a fight as to whether billionaires and their super PACs will continue to control American politics, or whether we can have a government that represents working families.” — Sen. Bernie Sanders

Bernie’s been saying that for forty flogging years while the establishment patted him on the head and called him unelectable. Forty years of being right and being ignored, and now the bloke’s getting a fucking victory lap in a state that voted for Trump.

The bloke they spent thirty million trying to bury

Here’s who they were so shit-scared of.

Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, born in Detroit in 1984. Raised by his father Mohamed, an Egyptian immigrant, and his stepmother Jackie, whose Michigan roots go back to the 1800s. Graduated the University of Michigan Phi Beta Kappa with highest distinction, took an MD from Columbia, and a doctorate in public health from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He was appointed to rebuild Detroit’s Health Department after it was privatised during the city’s bankruptcy, becoming the youngest health official in a major American city.

The bloke walked into a city that had sold off its own public health department for parts and rebuilt the bastard from scratch. He secured free glasses for kids, stripped lead out of schools, went after corporate polluters, expanded Narcan access, and spearheaded a program cancelling up to $700 million in medical debt for 300,000 Michiganders.

Seven hundred million dollars of medical debt. Wiped. For three hundred thousand people who will never meet him.

And AIPAC’s counter-argument was that he did a podcast with a streamer they don’t like.

He wiped out $700 million in medical debt for 300,000 people. They spent $30 million telling Michigan he was rude to the Obamas. One of these things is a record and the other is a fucking press release with a Ferrari budget.

The tell: when Republicans start paying for your ads

This is the part that should end the electability argument forever, and it won’t, because the consultant class would rather eat their own kneecaps than admit they’ve been wrong since 2016.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee produced a digital ad emphasising El-Sayed’s progressive credentials and his Bernie Sanders endorsement, a move many viewed as an effort to boost him into the general election. Rogers and national Republicans had signalled they considered El-Sayed the easier opponent.

So the establishment Democrats spent $54 million saying he can’t win, while the Republicans spent their own money helping him win. Both of them were absolutely certain. Both of them were reading from the same 2004 playbook, laminated, coffee-stained, and about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.

Here’s a thought that will keep somebody awake tonight: what if they’re both wrong? What if a bloke who talks about medical debt and lead in the water and why your insulin costs more than your rent doesn’t scare a laid-off toolmaker in Macomb County half as much as another decade of being told to shut the fucken hell up and be grateful?

He also picked up the United Auto Workers endorsement, which in a car-making state is not nothing. Funny that. Turns out the actual working class the establishment claims to speak for had their own opinion.

The wave, and I do mean wave

Michigan isn’t a one-off. This is the part where the party’s power brokers stop chucking a wobbly about one race and start noticing the water rising round their ankles and the smell coming up through the floorboards.

Zohran Mamdani took the New York mayoralty. Katie Wilson took Seattle. Three Mamdani-backed candidates won New York congressional primaries, two of them against sitting incumbents, including Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old community organiser who knocked off Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair Adriano Espaillat. Melat Kiros unseated a longtime Colorado incumbent. And in Michigan on Tuesday night, progressive William Lawrence won the competitive 7th District primary outright, while challenger Donavan McKinney ran ahead of sitting congressman Shri Thanedar in Detroit’s 13th.

Lawrence’s victory statement wasn’t a policy paper. It was a boot.

“Tonight the people of Michigan’s 7th District sent a clear message: they are tired of Silicon Valley billionaires and DC insiders determining the future of our towns and our country.” — William Lawrence

Then there’s Maine, where the whole thing got tested to absolute destruction and passed anyway. The insurgent campaign that had the establishment reaching for the smelling salts detonated on the launch pad. And the movement behind it strolled out of the wreckage and picked up the nomination regardless. State Democrats chose Troy Jackson, a former Maine Senate leader whose politics and platform are near enough indistinguishable from the bloke he replaced, tax the rich and Medicare for All and the whole bloody menu, with a Bernie Sanders endorsement to match.

Sit with that for a tick. They aimed everything they had at one man and hit a fucking hologram. The candidate was replaceable. The platform wasn’t. That is the single most terrifying sentence in American politics if your entire career is built on renting yourself out to whoever’s holding the chequebook.

Now the part where I don’t take the piss

Because it isn’t a clean sweep, and anyone flogging you that line is selling something with a dodgy warranty.

Centrist Josh Turek decisively beat progressive favourite Zach Wahls in Iowa, and the centre had a genuine win with Xavier Becerra in the California governor’s primary. In San Francisco, Saikat Chakrabarti finished a distant third for Pelosi’s old seat with about 15 percent despite pouring millions of his own money in. One of the most left-leaning cities on the continent, and the playbook didn’t take. It doesn’t just teleport into every postcode. Anyone who tells you it does is doing the exact same magical thinking that got the establishment done like a dinner, just facing the other way.

And Maine is the one they’ll throw straight back at us, so let’s not be gutless about it. Graham Platner rode this exact energy to the nomination, then withdrew in July after a woman told Politico he forced her to have sex in 2021 after she told him to stop, an allegation he denies. He’d already spent months dodging questions about a chest tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol. Ro Khanna pulled his endorsement, calling the allegations serious and credible.

No funny angle there and I’m not hunting for one. The lesson isn’t that populism is dangerous. It’s that a movement whose whole pitch is that it’s cleaner than the machine has to vet its own harder than the machine ever bothered to. Every candidate, no mates’ rates, no she’ll be right. When you’re carrying that many people’s hopes up the hill you cannot afford one bloke nobody checked.

Brookings, hardly a nest of Marxists, reckons everyone is reading 2026 on the wrong axis entirely. It isn't centre versus left. It's insurgents versus incumbents, and the insurgents are winning on economics. Talarico beat Crockett in Texas from arguably her right. A former Medicaid recipient took out a candidate the national party had personally recruited and paid for. Those results don't sit anywhere on a left-right spectrum. They sit on a spectrum of "did the machine pick you."

Which, if you’re the establishment, is somehow worse. Ideology you can argue with. You can hire a bloke with a whiteboard and a focus group in Bethesda and triangulate your way out of ideology. But this isn’t ideology.

People are just fucking sick of you.

And the bloke who runs the House worked it out before half the Democratic Party did.

“The insurgent left is on the rise.” — House Speaker Mike Johnson

Dead set correct, Mike. First accurate thing out of that man’s gob since he learned to form words. Enjoy it. It’s the last time this year you and I are going to agree on a single bloody thing.

Now for the actual fight

Mike Rogers, former FBI special agent and House Intelligence Committee chairman, took the Republican nomination unopposed. He’s making his second straight run after losing to Elissa Slotkin in 2024 by roughly 19,000 votes, about a third of a percentage point, even as Trump carried Michigan. Trump’s early endorsement cleared the GOP field for him.

He is also, on the evidence, running a campaign made entirely of fog. Asked by Semafor days before the primary how he’d vote on Senate-approved measures condemning Trump’s tariffs, Rogers said he didn’t know. On the paused anti-weaponization fund: he wasn’t talking about any of that stuff, he didn’t care, then corrected himself to say he did care. On the Iran war, he said he’d heard hardly anything about it on the trail.

The trail, Mike. The one in Michigan. Where the petrol comes from. Where the war might be. Hardly anything.

That is not a candidate folks, that’s a bloke hiding under a beach towel hoping November doesn’t find him. El-Sayed’s own read: he predicted a seven point win and called Rogers a generationally bad candidate. Bold. But when your opponent’s signature policy position is “I don’t care, I mean, I care,” you can afford to be.

The money is coming regardless. The Senate Leadership Fund has committed $45 million to Michigan as part of a $342 million nationwide push across eight competitive Senate races. And watch closely for who doesn’t show up: one Michigan voter reckoned AIPAC’s support for Stevens will simply vanish in November, on the theory the group would rather see Rogers in the seat. If a lobby that spent thirty million bucks in a Democratic primary goes quiet the second an actual Republican is on the ballot, that tells you everything about what the thirty million was ever for.

The cleanse

Turnout on Tuesday blew past the previous August primary record of 1.18 million from 2020. Record money on one side. Record turnout on the other. Money lost.

“That tells you about the kind of movement that we were able to inspire.” — Abdul El-Sayed, election night

Mallory McMorrow, who’d dropped out and tried to run the compromise lane, was first in line to endorse him and call for unity once the race was called. Fast learner, that one.

So here’s where we are. The Democratic Party has spent a decade being told by well-paid men in Washington that the electorate is fragile, that voters spook easy, that you must never say anything true about billionaires because it polls badly in a focus group in Bethesda. That advice has now been fed $54 million and a swing state and it came out the far end looking exactly like what it always was.

The party just took the world’s most expensive laxative. Thirty million from AIPAC, thirteen from a corporate front, six and a half from a dark money mob nobody can name, and the whole lot went straight through and hit the porcelain at speed.

What’s left standing is a doctor from Detroit who cancelled other people’s medical debt for a living.

“Mike, and I know you’re listening, Mike, we are coming for you.” — Abdul El-Sayed, Detroit, election night

Flush it again. There’s more in there.

IFLA ~ Texas Mom & Gman

AUSSIE TO YANKIE MAGIC WORD DEFRAGGING TOOL

Standing feature for our American readers, who keep emailing to ask what the fuck half these words mean. Fair question. Australian and American are technically the same language in the way a funnel-web and a daddy long legs are technically both spiders. One of them will kill you stone cold dead in the laundry.

This week’s batch is unusually gastrointestinal, and I want to be upfront that this is not my fault. It is the story’s. You cannot write two thousand words about $54 million of undisclosed money going into a swing state and coming out the far end as a progressive Senate nominee without the vocabulary following the plumbing. I tried. The words had other ideas. Blame AIPAC’s accountants.

Bucket, reach for the: To be made physically ill by something. Critically, not a metaphor for mild disappointment. An actual bucket, actually reached for, actually deployed, with everyone in the room pretending not to hear. The correct physiological response to watching fifty-four million dollars get spent convincing a swing state that the dangerous man in the race is the doctor who cancelled seven hundred million dollars of other people’s medical debt. If you did not reach for the bucket at that, mate, get yourself checked. Something has gone wrong upstairs.

Dead set: Absolutely, genuinely, no word of a lie. Delivered flat, unsmiling, at the volume of a man ordering a pie, because visible enthusiasm would undercut the whole thing. “Dead set” in front of a claim means the speaker will stand there and be held to it in front of witnesses. Its highest and rarest use is conceding that an opponent has accidentally blundered into the truth, as when the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives announced that the insurgent left is on the rise. It is. Dead set. He hated every syllable coming out of his own head and said it anyway, which for that bloke counts as a religious experience.

Done like a dinner: Comprehensively beaten, carved up, finished, and the tray left in the sink to soak. The image is a roast, and the cruelty is in the completeness of it: not merely defeated but portioned, plated, eaten, and discussed afterwards by people who were not even hungry. Reserved specifically for defeats where the loser held every structural advantage available to a human being and lost anyway. Outspend your opponent eleven to one, own the endorsements, own the party machinery, own the Senate Minority Leader’s personal phone number, and still watch the other bloke give the victory speech. That is not losing. That is being done like a dinner.

Grouse: Excellent, top quality, the genuine article. Delivered deadpan and at low volume, because we are not Americans and we find open enthusiasm faintly obscene. Doubles as a precision weapon when turned sarcastic. If your position is so grouse, so obviously correct, so beloved by working families in Macomb County, explain to the group why thirty million dollars of your advertising went to Olympic lengths never to mention the position out loud. Nothing to do with the bird. The bird has done nothing wrong and has better disclosure practices.

Ringpiece: The arsehole. Anatomical, blunt, and used for emphasis rather than as an insult, a distinction Americans consistently fail to grasp and then have to explain to HR. Money so dark it needs a torch and a spotter to locate its own ringpiece is money routed through a PAC inside a PAC inside a nonprofit inside a Delaware shell company named after a type of tree. The Federal Election Commission calls this structure “layered.” Everyone else calls it what it is, which is a bloke in a trench coat selling watches out the back of a van, except the van has a compliance department.

Rough, a bit: Unfair, harsh, rotten form. The entire Australian moral vocabulary compressed into three words and delivered at conversational volume with no detectable emotion whatsoever. A man can be led out of a courtroom in handcuffs and someone in the gallery will murmur “bit rough, that,” and every single person present will understand that a complete ethical position has just been stated, filed and closed. Also deployed, with real wounded feeling, at anyone who reads two thousand words of free reader-funded journalism, gets to the bottom, nods, and does not subscribe. Bit rough, that.

Screen door on a submarine: Completely useless, and here is the important part, useless by design rather than by accident. That is the whole savagery of the phrase. Someone chose this. Someone specified it. Someone sat in a meeting, looked at the drawings, and said yeah, that will be fine. The apex Australian insult for a thing that fails at the one single job it was built to do. Fits, with millimetre precision, electability advice from a consultant class that has now been wrong in the identical direction for a decade straight and has never once missed an invoice.

Shit-scared: Terrified. Not nervous. Not concerned. Not “monitoring the situation with interest.” Frightened at the exact level the compound is describing, anatomically, and with some accuracy. Nobody on this earth spends fifty-four million dollars against a first-time Senate candidate because they are calm and confident about their prospects. The ads said he was rude about the Obamas. The budget said something else entirely. Always read the budget.

Tick, for a: A moment, a beat, a short pause, and generally the absolute outer limit of Australian patience before someone wanders off to the fridge. From the tick of a clock. “Sit with that for a tick” is not a polite request, it is an instruction to stop reading, put the phone down and let the number land properly, and it is deployed at the precise moment the information turns out to be significantly worse than it looked the first time through. Which, in this piece, was most of it.

Dunny: The toilet. Classically the dunny out the back, a tin shed a polite sprint from the house, positioned by our forebears at the exact distance that punishes both hesitation and confidence. The word carries no shame in it whatsoever, which is the important part and the bit Americans struggle with. Australians will discuss the dunny at a dinner table, at a funeral, in Parliament. It is a functional room performing a necessary service, and so is a democracy, which is why the plumbing metaphor never stops being the correct one. Fifty-four million dollars went into Michigan and Michigan sent it straight through. See also: floater in the dunny, bog, outback dunny, porta-loo.

floater in the dunny A turd that flatly refuses to flush, bobbing serenely back to the surface no matter how many times you hit the button. As an insult, a person or a problem that simply will not go away despite an entire nation's best and most repeated efforts to be rid of it. You vote it out, you indict it, you bankrupt it 6 times over, and up it bobs again, grinning, demanding one more term. The single most accurate piece of plumbing-based political analysis in the English language.

TEAM AMERICA - FUCK YEAH!