AMY GOODMAN: And let’s go to William Lawrence of the Sunrise Movement — 

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — who we just mentioned, who won his primary, a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, defeated two opponents to win the Democratic House primary in Michigan’s 7th District, focusing partly on what you just mentioned: AI data centers. This is one of his ads.

WILLIAM LAWRENCE: I’m Will Lawrence. And tech billionaires want to turn this whole field into a massive data center that’ll jack up our energy bills and ruin our home values.

RANDY: They put that in, it’s going to plummet the values. It’s an existential threat.

WILLIAM LAWRENCE: I’m running for U.S. Congress because I’ve been afraid to stand up to corporate power. I’m backed by Bernie Sanders, and I don’t take a dime from corporate PACs.

ANJALI KAMAT: And in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, Donavan McKinney, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has a narrow lead over Congressman Shri Thanedar. This is a part of one of McKinney’s ads.

DONAVAN McKINNEY: Shri Thanedar and the same billionaires supporting Donald Trump are spending millions lying to you. They know that in Congress, Shri fights for them. I will fight for us — lower costs, higher wages, Medicare for All.

ANJALI KAMAT: Abbas Alawieh also won the Democratic primary for a seat in the Michigan state Senate. He was a co-founder of the Uncommitted Movement, which pushed for President Biden, and then Kamala Harris, to end U.S. support for Israel’s war on Gaza. This is Abbas speaking outside the DNC, the Democratic National Convention, in 2024, where the Uncommitted Movement pushed to include a Palestinian voice at the convention.

ABBAS ALAWIEH: Here is the scandal, my friends. Here is the scandal. The scandal is that there are forces within Democratic Party leadership who do not want us to talk about Palestinian human rights. But that’s not sustainable. This is a watershed moment.

ANJALI KAMAT: John Nichols, can you talk about some of these other key races in Michigan and other states where progressives were challenging more establishment candidates, and just what you think is most important as a takeaway from yesterday’s primaries?

JOHN NICHOLS: I sure can. I’m delighted to do it, because the fact of the matter is that our national media too often focuses on the top-line races and misses the real dynamic, which you start to recognize is when you go down-ballot and you look at contests for U.S. House seats and for legislative seats.

And if you look in Michigan, what you’re seeing is, with Will Lawrence, an example of a real breakthrough win for a young candidate who ran a campaign on dynamic, fresh issues, including data centers. With Donavan McKinney, that’s still a close race. There are votes still to be counted there. But this is an incredible thing, because this is a candidate who didn’t have anywhere near the kind of money that his opponent did, and yet, with a real grassroots campaign on the ground there in Detroit and that region, ran very, very well.

And if we move beyond Michigan and you look around the country, what you’re going to see is that Tuesday night was a very good night for insurgent candidacies and for outsiders. In the Missouri governor’s race, what you saw was kind of a remarkable result. Cindy Holscher, who’s a state senator out there and came from the outside — she wasn’t backed by the sitting governor, she wasn’t backed by a lot of Democratic Party leaders, and yet she won her primary for governor. And she did it by talking, again, about data centers and making that a very central part of her campaign. We’re starting to see a thread here.

Also, I’ll point out a couple of referendums that are big deals. In Kansas, they — Holscher in Kansas running for governor. And then, in Kansas, they had a referendum on the ballot, and that ballot referendum would have changed how the Supreme Court is chosen in Kansas. It would have made the Supreme Court dramatically more politicized. That would have made it harder to defend rule of law, to defend big moves to try and fund education, a host of other initiatives in that state. So, that was a big democracy win, a big win for having the rule of law.

Over in Missouri, the next state, there was a referendum on reducing the ability of citizens to do citizen referendums that push back against what’s happening in their state House — right? — with the governor and the Legislature, which is very, very Republican, very red. There in Missouri, they defended those citizen referendums. Those referendums have been used to protect labor rights, to raise wages.

And so, I guess what I would walk away from all this and say is, it looks to me like in a lot of cases — not every case, but in a lot of cases — voters are starting to wake up and recognize that there are all sorts of assaults on their ability to push back against corporate power, to push back against elite power, and they’re finding ways to do it. And again, I’ll close only with that message of that thread on the data centers. You see it run through so many of these races. It’s certainly not the only issue, but it is an issue that a lot of candidates have recognized is a powerful way to say that they will stand up to corporations.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, John, we just have 20 seconds, but, as you mention Missouri, Congressmember Wesley Bell defeated former Congressmember Cori Bush for the second straight election. Pro-Israel outside groups spent heavily against Bush in both of those races, the previous one and now.

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah, Cori Bush did try to make a comeback. I will tell you, it is very hard to make a comeback when you’ve been defeated for a seat. But she ran a very, very strong campaign there. And again, what you’re seeing is huge amounts of outside spending, huge amounts of effort to kind of divert the discussion from some of the core issues and give an advantage to a candidate who’s being backed by that outside money, not on the issue that that outside money is desirous to influence the race on, but rather on just a whole bunch of kind of pro and anti messaging.

And this gets us to a deeper reality. And that is, money in politics remains an absolutely fundamental issue. We talk about everything else, but at the end of the day, the way that money operates in our politics can be all too definitional in all too many places.

AMY GOODMAN: John Nichols, executive editor —

JOHN NICHOLS: But I will say, it didn’t happen — 

AMY GOODMAN: — of The Nation, I want to thank you for being with us. And I also want to thank Andy Levin, former congressmember from Michigan.

Coming up, we go to the ICE jail in Newark, Delaney Hall, where three prisoners have died over the past nine months. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: Huda Asfour in our Democracy Now! studio singing “Khatar,” “Danger.”