I’ve seen a few pieces lately lamenting how terrible the Michigan primary has been. Here’s an example from Paul Campos at LGM.

I’ll leave the on-the-ground reporting to Kay, but as TBone posted in the comments last night, it appears that part of the reason that El-Sayed might win tomorrow is that Schumer and Gillibrand pressured McMorrow to drop out. Maybe if they would have kept out of it, Stevens or McMorrow would have prevailed. Best laid plans and all that…

My simple observation is that this will get uglier before it gets better. There’s a fight to be had here. We’ve got a group of the party that thinks if we just hold on and beat Republicans in 2026, and Trump in 2028, we can go back to making donors happy and doing some small incremental improvements. There’s another, smaller, group that thinks that we need major reforms. The former group, the institutionalists, have decided that they don’t want to have a fight out in the open. Instead, they’re wanting to have their donors air-bomb their opponents with negative ads. It’s ugly, and it turns people off, and many of us just want it to be over.

Unless and until the institutionalists decide to fight for what they want — the 2015 status quo — and do it out in the open, we’re going to continue to have these ugly fights. Most people do not want what the instutionalists want. They don’t want to keep giving Israel money, they don’t want only tiny incremental improvements in social programs, they don’t want a bloated defense budget that sucks up all the money we could use to better the lives of average Americans, they don’t want a bunch of billionaires living tax-free lives while the rest of us have a lower standard of living, and they don’t want a set of Republican judges telling us “no” whenever something slightly progressive escapes Congress and is signed into law by a Democratic President. The institutionalists want a slightly-better-than-status-quo future that most of the Democratic base doesn’t. Therefore, the Democratic base has decided to throw them out in the rare cases where a better alternative is offered. This process is ugly. We should get used to it, because it’s going to take a long time for things to change.