Yesterday saw primary elections in several states in which, on the Democratic side ,progressives were pitted against establishment candidates.

The big win was by progressive Peggy Flanagan for the US senate race in Minnesota, who easily defeated Angie Craig by a margin of 59%-39%.

Peggy Flanagan, Minnesota’s lieutenant governor, won decisively on Tuesday after a campaign that attacked Angie Craig, a US representative, on her immigration record.

At the center of the attack was Craig’s vote for the Laken Riley Act, which requires immigration detention for undocumented immigrants accused of local crimes, and Craig has since expressed regret for voting for it.

The role of the Israel lobby played a significant role.

A pair of Democratic primaries in Minnesota on Tuesday were among a string of high-profile battles between progressive and moderate candidates, where Israel and the pro-Israel lobby serve as key wedge issues. 

The state’s highest-profile race was the US Senate primary between Rep. Angie Craig, who has been endorsed by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, and Lieutenant Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who said she would reject AIPAC’s money and accuses Israel of committing genocide.
…

Flanagan has referred to Craig as “AIPAC’s candidate” in the Senate race, which prompted Craig to distance herself from the group’s spending during a TV debate in June.

Much of the media attention has been on the defeat of Francesca Hong for the Wisconsin governor’s race. She is a democratic socialist and had a significant lead in pre-election polls but lost narrowly to the establishment-backed candidate David Crowley. The media are portraying this as a massive reversal of the Democratic establishment’s fortunes after a string of losses to progressives. But the issue is a bit more complicated, since some of the leading progressives held back from endorsing Hong seeing her as a flawed candidate, unlike in Michigan where they went all out for Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed also underperformed compared to the polls, but won anyway.

The movement’s leading national voices, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), also kept Hong at arm’s length and withheld their endorsements. Some who viewed Hong as a long shot in the general election and want the movement to avoid missteps like they saw with Graham Platner in Maine say the results proved those concerns were well founded.
…

“There’s a reason the institutional left mostly stayed away,” said a Democratic operative who works on progressive campaigns and was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “The people who made those calls are relieved.”

Elliot Morris, a statistician who studies polls, writes about why polling in primary races is so difficult, and that they can be off by huge amounts.

Francesca Hong, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Wisconsin in 2026, lost her primary race last night by less than half of one percentage point. In absolute terms, her performance should be impressive; a Democratic Socialist who years ago said Thanksgiving should be canceled and was outspent by a ratio of 15-to-1, according to media tracking firm Cross Screen Media, came within half a point of securing the nomination for governor of America’s 21st most populous state, and a key political battleground.

But graded against the polls, Hong disappointed. Our average of polls at FiftyPlusOne had Hong 20 points ahead of the competition Tuesday morning, with about 20% of the electorate left undecided.
…

Earlier this year I wrote up a historical study of the accuracy of primary polls that I conducted with my colleague Mary Radcliffe at FiftyPlusOne. We concluded then that primary election polls for Senate and Governor elections in 2014, 2016, and 2024 (years where we had the most complete data) had an expected error of about 13 points on average in the difference between the margin for the top two candidates:
…

Based on this data, I would recommend taking primary polls seriously but not literally. To put a finer point on that statement: The expectation is that primary polls will be off by about 13 points on average in the difference between the margin for the top two candidates.

However, Hong’s loss result drew a lot of attention and thus overshadowed some other notable progressive wins such as Matt Little easily winning the primary to replace Craig in her Minnesota congressional seat and Rebecca Cooke, backed by Sanders, easily winning the primary for Wisconsin’s 3rd District, getting over 60% of the vote.

So all in all, even taking into account Hong’s loss, it was a good day for progressives.