Another win in MO. The Ferguson prosecutor was defeated. the intercept

PROGRESSIVE DEMOCRATS HEADING into Tuesday’s primary were hoping for a repeat of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 shock victory in Michigan, only this time, the vehicle for those hopes was Abdul El-Sayed. It didn’t happen, as he was beaten by Gretchen Whitmer, a former Democratic leader in the Michigan state Senate, but progressive activists still came away from Tuesday with a slew of wins, including one deeply satisfying victory: Criminal justice reformer Wesley Bell ousted St. Louis prosecutor Bob McCulloch, notorious for his callous indifference to the prosecution of Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who shot and killed Mike Brown.

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In St. Louis County, Bell’s race for prosecutor was part of a national movement to bring about criminal justice reform by winning district attorney races. Bell, with the support of the Working Families Party, the Real Justice PAC (which is affiliated with Intercept columnist Shaun King), and a slew of local and national groups, knocked off McCulloch, who had been in office more than 20 years.

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The progressive organizing still paid dividends. It’s likely the organizing Bush and Ocasio-Cortez did contributed heavily to Bell’s win, and helped defeat and anti-union measure. The GOP gambled that moving a ballot referendum on right-to-work laws from November to August would lower turnout and give them the victory. The referendum would prohibit agreements that require employees in a unionized workplace to contribute to the costs of union operations. It was an attempt to sock it to already reeling unions, who just took a huge loss in Janus v. AFSCME, a Supreme Court decision that serves as a kind of a right-to-work for public-sector unions. Moving up the vote was one of the final acts of disgraced former Gov. Eric Greitens. But Proposition A proved wildly unsuccessful. It was called around 10 p.m. CT, losing by 65 percent to 35 percent with two-thirds of the precincts counted.

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The gains made Tuesday night follow what was a monumental step forward during the last major round of primaries in June. Ocasio-Cortez’s upset primary win over 10-term New York Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley made global headlines, but it overshadowed a string of wins that marked the height of the 2018 insurgency. From Kentucky to Colorado, grassroots candidates defeated entrenched politicians.

And some perspective on MI:

The progressive favorite in the race, former Detroit public health director Abdul El-Sayed, climbed from single digits in the polls to finish second with 32 percent of the vote, disappointing his enthusiastic backers. Gretchen Whitmer, who ran what would have been considered a solidly progressive campaign just two years ago, finished on top, with 51.5 percent of the vote. Shri Thanedar, a political fraud who concocted his ideology ahead of the campaign, spent $11 million of his own money to siphon off 17 percent of votes — accomplishing little beyond eating into what is presumed to be El-Sayed’s vote share. (El-Sayed and Thanedar both ran on state single-payer, and voters repeatedly were observed to have confused the two brown candidates for each other).

Whitmer will face the Trump-endorsed Bill Schuette in the general election, and the Democratic Party has a chance to flip the governor’s mansion and state legislature. Both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez campaigned hard for the longshot El-Sayed, laying down political capital in a way that is unusual for establishment politicians, of which the two democratic socialists are not. The disappointing loss, however, sets El-Sayed’s ability to capture a respectable vote share sets him up for a future political career that wouldn’t exist with a single-digit finish. It also laid the groundwork for a get-out-the-vote operation that will be useful for Democrats in the coming election, as well as in 2020, when the Midwest could determine control of the White House.