T
here are many ways to tell the story of how Dr. Abdul El-Sayed defeated Representative Haley Stevens in the Michigan Democratic primary for Senate. We could start with AIPAC, Stevens’ viral stick-it-to-’em video, or an electorate frustrated out of their minds about the Democratic Party’s endless obsession with the mushy middle.
But let’s go somewhere else.
It’s a week before Election Day. The summer wind moves silently through the Michigan corn outside of Saline, about 20 miles southwest of Ann Arbor. A farmhouse is selling eggs on the honor system. Another one flies banners for America’s 250th. I am in the Platonic ideal of bucolic America, the one seen in a thousand Republican ads and squawked about by right-wing pundits dreamily — and not so dreamily — wishing we could return to this version of the U.S.A.
I eventually turn onto dusty Braun Road and hit a dead end after a mile. The cornfields are gone. Construction noise echoes through the fields. Behind a fence, 575 acres of blight — roughly the size of Princeton University — is rising out of the earth. Contractors in hard hats look at plans. Multiple cement trucks pass each other, their spinning drums painted red, white, and blue.
