Michigan Dem senator throws support behind candidate to replace him in contentious primary

Gary Peters spent months saying he'd stay neutral in his own replacement race. Then Abdul El-Sayed started polling like a real threat and suddenly Peters found his voice, backing Haley Stevens. Funny how "neutral" tends to expire the moment the party establishment gets nervous.

This is the same playbook Democrats ran in 2016 and have never really put down. When a candidate with actual grassroots energy shows up, the machine doesn't debate him, it just leans on the scale until he goes away. El-Sayed isn't some fringe figure. He ran a real campaign for governor in Michigan before, and he's clearly built a following that worries people like Peters more than any Republican does at this point in the cycle.

Stevens is a fine, conventional pick if you're the DNC and you want someone who won't rock the boat. But voters can smell it when the party decides the primary before the primary happens. Every time Democrats do this, they tell their own base that its preferences are negotiable and the incumbents' preferences are not. That's not a winning message in a state Trump carried, and it's not exactly a profile in courage from a retiring senator who apparently only discovered his convictions once the outcome mattered to leadership.

If Democrats want to lecture the country about protecting democracy, they might start by letting their own primaries actually be primaries.