Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan's Democratic Senate nomination Tuesday by about a point, and he faces Republican Mike Rogers on November 3. Thursday morning CNN data reporter Harry Enten took the question from anchor Kate Bolduan. El-Sayed campaigned as the candidate of the working class, so how did the working class vote?

Enten answered with a number. Zero of fifteen.

El-Sayed did not carry a single one of the fifteen Michigan counties with the lowest share of college degrees, and he won thirteen of the fifteen with the highest. "More from elite circles than from the working class circles," Enten said.

The socialist wing of the Democratic Party is a movement of the credentialed. The workers it claims to speak for are walking out the door.

Detroit voted for the congresswoman.

Rep. Haley Stevens, who represents the Detroit suburbs, won more than 60 percent of the vote in Detroit itself, the state's largest Black-majority city. She also carried Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, the three that cast most of Michigan's Democratic votes.

Bridge Michigan, a nonprofit Michigan news outlet, reported that El-Sayed was the first Democrat to win statewide in Michigan without carrying any of those three counties since Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential primary.

Al Jazeera headlined the night "Abdul El-Sayed wins Michigan Democratic primary for Senate in blow to AIPAC," treating it as a defeat for AIPAC, the largest pro-Israel lobby in the country. The same article recorded that Stevens "outperformed expectations across the state and had a strong showing in Detroit, Michigan's largest city."

Both sentences are true. Only one of them tells you who El-Sayed's voters were.

College towns delivered the nomination.

El-Sayed ran up his margins where the diplomas are. He carried Kent and Washtenaw counties with more than 60 percent each, and in parts of Ann Arbor he topped 70.

Kent County is about 40 percent college-educated. National Review found he won it by 26 points.

Michigan Advance found the same split statewide. In counties where fewer than 30 percent of adults hold bachelor's degrees, Stevens took about 52 percent. Above that line, El-Sayed took about 60.

The pattern is university towns, not wealthy suburbs. He lost affluent Oakland County and won Ann Arbor.

County returns describe places, not people, and a county with few graduates still contains graduates. Turnout also rose sharply in Dearborn, the Detroit suburb with the largest Arab American population in the country, and those voters were a real part of his margin.

But Dearborn does not explain Kent County by 26 points, and it does not explain losing all fifteen of the least-educated counties in the state.

Building trades backed Stevens.

The unions split, and they split by trade. Stevens' campaign lists endorsements from the pipefitters, the ironworkers, the bricklayers, the plumbers, the boilermakers, the carpenters, the laborers, the operating engineers, the firefighters, the Steelworkers and the Michigan Teamsters. Most of those are building trades and industrial unions.

Those are leadership decisions, not member votes. Nobody polled how the members themselves cast ballots.

Kevin D. Moore, president of Michigan Teamsters Local 299 in Detroit, said Stevens "has proven time and again that she stands with labor."

The United Auto Workers went the other way. UAW President Shawn Fain claimed the win the night of the primary. "The billionaire class thought they could buy another election. They underestimated the power of workers talking to workers. Shop floor conversations beat Wall Street's checkbook."

His union says it turned out 112,887 UAW voters during early voting alone, a number many times larger than El-Sayed's margin of victory. If that figure holds, the auto workers won him this race.

They were also the only major union in Michigan that tried. The Michigan AFL-CIO, the state's largest labor federation, stayed out. So did the Michigan Education Association, the teachers' union.

Pollster Richard Czuba asked the question in June, when the auto workers endorsed. "Is this a harbinger of a lot of unions endorsing El-Sayed, or is this one union that is much more liberal, much more far left, choosing the furthest far-left candidate?"

No other big union followed.

Nate Silver described this coalition in July.

Two weeks before Michigan voted, Nate Silver published a piece called "The DSA sweet spot: highly educated, downwardly mobile." He was writing about the Democratic Socialists of America, the group organizing this wing of the party. El-Sayed says he is "not technically or practically DSA," though Detroit's chapter once billed him as "a longtime friend."

The figures come from the DSA's own 2021 membership survey. Eighty percent of members over 25 hold bachelor's degrees, and 45 percent live in households making under $60,000 a year. Among American college graduates generally, only 19 percent live in households that make that little.

They hold the credential that Democratic voters without degrees do not, and the paycheck it usually buys has not followed. They are not the people El-Sayed said he was speaking for.

New York ran the experiment first. CNN's exit polls found Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who won the city's mayoralty last year, carried voters with college and graduate degrees by almost 20 points, while former Gov. Andrew Cuomo led among New Yorkers without a degree, Deseret News reported. Mamdani's first big initiative is a plan for city-run groceries, and I wrote Monday about what it does to the bodega owners who employ the New Yorkers he says he fights for.

The drift is older than either man. Catalist, a Democratic data firm that studies how people actually voted, puts Democratic support among voters without college degrees at 51 percent in 2012 and 45 percent in 2024.

Hasan Piker closed the campaign for him.

El-Sayed does not believe any of this is extreme. He told Bridge Michigan that "in an era where Trump is weaponizing ICE against the Constitution itself, I think abolishing ICE is a moderate position."

He is not lying. In the counties he won, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the moderate position. He says so in his own ad: "I'm Abdul El-Sayed, the only Senate candidate for abolishing ICE, and I approve this message."

Hasan Piker is the streamer who closed the campaign for him. He broadcasts politics on Twitch, the live-streaming service, and has roughly 10 million followers across platforms.

In April, Jon Favreau read Piker one of Piker's own lines back to him on Pod Save America and offered him the chance to take it back. The line was that Hamas is "a thousand times better than a fascist settler colonial apartheid state."

Piker did not take it back. "I stand by that," he said, and then went further. "I'm a lesser evil voter and therefore I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time."

Favreau wrote speeches for Barack Obama. He gave Piker a chance to disavow a defense of Hamas on the biggest podcast in Democratic politics, and Piker restated it instead.

Piker calls Mao Zedong "one of the great leaders of this world." On July 18 he addressed the College Democrats of America summer convention in Washington wearing a Mao-style suit, according to Fox News, and told the students "no more to the Democrats who compromise, who conciliate, and who betray us."

The College Democrats' own Jewish Caucus said normalizing him was "a direct threat to Jewish safety and inclusion within the College Democrats community."

In 2019 Piker said America deserved the September 11 attacks. He said weeks later that he had not meant it. Asked about that remark on Fox and Friends in April, El-Sayed answered at length. "It's important to talk about context. I'm never going to agree that 9/11 was justified. It was wrong. It was a horrible day for all of us. I condemned Hamas and I condemned that attack on day one. The issue that you're trying to do is paint me with out-of-context quotes taken out of context specifically to ask me these questions."

Then he kept campaigning with him. On the Monday before the election Piker turned up at a Detroit pool party and at an El-Sayed campaign event, and when a reporter asked whether he would keep campaigning for El-Sayed after the primary, Piker answered, "Are you crazy? Of course."

After winning, El-Sayed told the Washington Examiner, "He's a streamer. I'm focused on trying to win a race for Senate in Michigan." That is a comment about Piker's job, not about anything Piker said.

Carville says one of them has to go.

James Carville ran Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign. Two days before Michigan voted he drew a line on Fox's Sunday Briefing. "Hasan Piker and James Carville are not going to be in the same political party. One of us is going to leave. It might even be me."

Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was blunter the night after the primary. "I just want to issue a dare, continue to campaign with Hasan Piker right now," Fetterman said, adding that El-Sayed "barely, barely won by 14,000 votes."

Days before the primary, NPR found Irvin Kappy outside a suburban library with his two grandchildren and asked whether he would support El-Sayed as the nominee. "Absolutely not," he said. "I'd vote for the Republican, which I've never done before."

The socialists did not win the working class. They are the reason it is leaving.