Bill Scher is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ.”

If you thought that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset primary win over Rep. Joe Crowley meant the Democratic Party was poised to go socialist, think again.

Tuesday night’s largely Midwest primaries produced a near-shutout for the anti-establishment left. Ocasio-Cortez partnered with Bernie Sanders to make a series of splashy endorsements that, in the end, failed to clinch victories. And two leftist upstarts hoping to emulate Ocasio-Cortez, and defeat longtime Democratic incumbents, fell far short.


The most glaring defeat came in Michigan’s gubernatorial primary. This is the state where Sanders defied the polls and edged out Hillary Clinton, raising hopes that he had a magic touch in the Rust Belt. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez tried to catapult the young and brash newcomer Abdul El-Sayed, who trailed in polls, endorsements and money to former state Senate Democratic leader Gretchen Whitmer. They could only nudge him up to second place, with 30 percent of the vote.

In fact, Clinton’s endorsement appeared to carry the most weight in Michigan. Her late robocall in support of Haley Stevens helped take Stevens from second place in polls to an election night victory in the suburban 11th District, a top Democratic target, while Fayrouz Saad, backed by Ocasio-Cortez, placed fourth. In two other House primaries in Michigan, candidates backed by the party’s official campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, coasted against supporters of Sanders’ signature Medicare for All proposal.

El-Sayed’s defeat may have been the most noticeable loss for Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders, but the defeat of Brent Welder in Kansas is far more politically significant. Welder, a former Sanders 2016 campaign staffer, hoped to carry the Democratic banner in Kansas’ 3rd Congressional District. The largely urban district is a top party priority, one of a handful of Republican-held seats that Clinton won in 2016.

The Berniecrat left desperately wants to convince naysaying political veterans (and annoying political pundits) that a democratic socialist platform holds the ticket to victory in heartland districts like this one—so much so that Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez gave a full-throated endorsement to Welder over another compelling and fairly liberal candidate in Sharice Davids.

She’s a lesbian Native American, professional mixed-martial-arts fighter and former Obama White House fellow. But Davids exhibited a bit too much of an incrementalist streak for some progressives, arguing that single-payer health insurance is not realistic in the short term and supporting free community college instead of promising to make all college debt-free. Negating the stereotype that the far left puts “identity politics” above all, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez backed the white guy.

Welder led in the early vote, raising hopes among progressive populists that they would get one major victory out of Tuesday night’s primaries, only to see Davids come out on top Wednesday morning by about 2,000 votes. That leaves Nebraska’s Kara Eastman as the only single-payer supporter nominated for a competitive House race in America’s “breadbasket.” (In Kansas’ 4th Congressional District, James Thompson, who supports single-payer and was endorsed by Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, won his primary, setting up a rematch with incumbent Rep. Ron Estes. But most professional handicappers don’t consider the seat to be attainable for Democrats.)

Targeted Democratic incumbents easily survived challengers who hoped to be the next Ocasio-Cortez and who were endorsed by the anti-establishment Justice Dems. In Washington state’s ‘top-two’ primary, Democratic challenger Sarah Smith managed to squeeze into the second-place slot and will face 11-term Democratic Rep. Adam Smith in November. But having earned only slightly more than half the votes of the incumbent, the Justice Democrats-backed insurgent remains a considerable longshot. And in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District, Rep. William Lacy Clay defeated Cori Bush by 20 points. While the remaining Democratic incumbents still facing primaries this year shouldn’t get caught napping like Crowley, nor do they have to fear that the Democratic Party is gripped with a fever to throw all the bums out.

The one endorsement that paid off for Ocasio-Cortez was of Rashida Tlaib, who won a close race to succeed John Conyers in Michigan’s 13th District and, having no Republican opponent, is poised to be the first Muslim woman elected to Congress. But that victory illuminates the limits of Ocasio-Cortez’s influence. Michigan’s 13th is like New York’s 14th: deep, deep blue. Ocasio-Cortez’s district is the 30th-most Democratic in the country. Tlaib’s is the 21st. When Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth snarked that Ocasio-Cortez represented the future of the Democratic Party “in the Bronx,” she was mistaken. It’s the future of the Bronx—and Detroit.

OK, that’s a cheap shot. Cori Bush performed better against Clay than did Russ Carnahan, a sitting congressman (who was redistricted out of his seat), in 2012. As FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich wrote on Twitter, “This tells you all you need to know about how the Democratic Party has moved.” Bush, El-Sayed, Smith and Welder all scored about one-third of the Democratic vote in their contests, which is not nothing.

The Democratic Party is more liberal than it was 15 years ago, and there’s no question that shift is partly due to an increasingly vocal, confident, confrontational democratic socialist faction. But it is still only a faction. Most Democratic nominees in competitive House races—not to mention incumbent Senate Democrats fighting for their political lives in red states—are not embracing single-payer or calling for the abolishment of ICE. They are mostly calling for improvements of the Affordable Care Act and a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented.

“There is no district too red for us to flip,” Ocasio-Cortez declared in a recent speech. Given how close Danny O’Connor came to winning the special election in Ohio’s 12th District, she’s probably right. But her platform doesn’t seem like the path to Democratic victories in red districts, based on Tuesday’s results. In the places where democratic socialists are making their biggest inroads, the hue is blue.