LANSING, MI -- Progressives are mounting a national campaign for the heart and soul of the Democratic party.

But then a majority of their candidates failed to get past Michigan's primary elections last week -- including national darling Abdul El-Sayed a Detroit Progressive who ran for Michigan governor.

The Michigan Democratic Party's Progressive Caucus endorsed a slate of 26 candidates who appeared on primary ballots. Just seven won their primary races, and of those, two were on the ballot unopposed.

Asked about the results, Ayman Khafagi, vice chair of the Progressive Caucus, didn't mince words.

"We lost big time," he said. "Most of our endorsed candidates... close to all of them lost their primary contests."

He and other progressive leaders are hopeful that the Michigan Democratic Party's left edge moved the party in their direction and took a step forward in terms of electing candidates. But for now, they're left grappling with a lot of losses.

Top of ticket tumbles

El-Sayed is young, a first-time political candidate and a new dad with big dreams for his daughter. He's trained as a doctor and worked in public health, bringing a medical perspective to his push for state-level, single-payer health care.

He earned the Progressive Caucus endorsement and was also something of a national celebrity, pulling in headlines from national and international publications even as he polled third in a three-person race against former Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer and Ann Arbor businessman Shri Thanedar.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, who won Michigan's 2016 Democratic presidential primary, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who upset a longtime congressman in a Democratic primary in New York, stumped for him in the weeks leading up to the election. They drew thousands, building momentum around a candidate which polls had pegged as a longshot.

In the end, it wasn't enough. He came in a distant second to Whitmer, earning 30 percent to her 52 percent. Thanedar, earned just under 18 percent of the vote.

El-Sayed was able to reach a lot of groups of Michiganders, using personal experience to advocate for policy change.

In talking about the importance of early childhood education, El-Sayed cited the fact that his daughter is the best learner she will ever be right now, early in her life. As a first-time candidate, he railed against politics as usual and the influence of corporations in politics and in campaigns.

These positions leave a mark on this year's race and the Michigan Democratic Party, he said.

"We pulled the entire conversation in our direction. We made single payer health care an issue. We made corporate money in politics an issue," El-Sayed said in an interview Friday.

Early signs pointed to progressive power

In April, the Michigan Democratic Party's endorsement convention was bubbling over with far-left energy. The Progressive Caucus butt heads with the powerful Labor Caucus by endorsing Dana Nessel for Attorney General, pitting her against former U.S. Attorney Pat Miles.

Nessel won the endorsement and is expected to get the party's formal nomination at its August convention.

The challenge for progressives is translating that convention success into election success, said Matt Grossmann, director of Michigan's State University's Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, who is currently on sabbatical.

They could do that by expanding the progressive base to include more minority voters or turning out more younger voters to fundamentally change what the electorate looks like for primary elections, he said.

"I just think if they are going to make further inroads beyond just winning at a convention where you get your true believers, in the broader primary electorate, they have to kind of make inroads in one of those two ways," Grossmann said.

El-Sayed pointed to Thanedar's candidacy as being a factor in his inability to take on Whitmer. Thanedar spent close to $11 million of his own money and portrayed himself as a progressive, which El-Sayed said ended up splitting the progressive vote.

"You get Shri out of that race and it's a much tighter affair," he said.

Both campaigns attempted to discredit the other throughout the campaign.

Bright spots

In some races, progressive candidates did prevail. The biggest Progressive Caucus-endorsed candidate to win was Rashida Tlaib, a former state representative who won the Democratic primary in the 13th Congressional District. With no Republican opponent on the ballot, she is the presumed congresswoman for the district come January.

Nessel is presumed to be who the party nominates for Attorney General at its convention later this month.

And there were state House races that saw victories, too.

One candidate who won was Laurie Pohutsky, who is running for the state's Livonia-area 19th House District. Her main strategy was hard work: she's been knocking doors since 2017 and making sure she's a presence in the community.

"We didn't take anything for granted," she said.

New to politics, she spent less than $4,600 on her campaign. Budget-wise, she got creative. She couldn't have done it without volunteers who knew her whole campaign was a long-shot, she said. Her team worked to cut the fat off a traditional campaign, she said, but for a lot of progressive candidates funding is a factor.

"In general progressives seem to have fewer resources when it comes to money and funding and things like that, so it's just a harder fight overall," she said.

Even with few resources, she pulled out a win with 54.7 percent of the vote to her opponent, Dan Centers' 45.3 percent. She'll go up against Republican Brian Meakin, who ran in the primary unopposed, in the Nov. 6 general election.

Even knowing she's one of a handful of progressives who won their primary campaigns, she thinks the movement is growing.

"I think ... we're gaining ground overall with the progressive movement. But I do think that the ground we gained shouldn't belie the fact that it's still a hard fight," Pohutsky said.

Khafagi noted a few trends among the candidates the Progressive Caucus had endorsed. One was female candidates performed better overall. The other was voters tended to pick candidates with political experience. That worked against Progressive Caucus-endorsed candidates, many of whom were new to politics.

"Basically, voters were not planning to take any risks whatsoever," Khafagi said.

Working to elect Democrats

Despite his personal loss, El-Sayed is supporting other Democrats running for office, including Whitmer. So, too, is Thanedar.

"There's a lot to coalesce around, right now," El-Sayed said.

Khafagi also said the Progressive Caucus was supporting Democratic candidates generally going into the election.

"We as progressives have a better fight to fight when democrats are in office, even if we disagree with them, Khafagi said.

He used single-payer healthcare, which the caucus supports, as an example. If Republicans are in office, progressives may have to fight just to keep the Affordable Care Act or the Medicaid expansion, he said, where if a Democrat who already supports the ACA and expansion is in office progressives can push the single-payer approach.

He sees the progressives as having influenced Michigan's primary elections, even if it didn't translate into big wins.

"We definitely have a growing number within the Democratic Party. Whether the party can take us seriously or not, that's up to them," Khafagi said.

"However, Whitmer's platform is way further to the left of Granholm's platform. Many of the candidates who ran for state house, even if we didn't endorse them, they adopted a big part of our platform. We had candidates running against each other showing they are not taking as much corporate money as the other candidate. So, this is a win for us, and this is influence."

El-Sayed said for progressives in Michigan, it's back to work following the losses. They need to build out more infrastructure, he said, especially around fundraising.

"The next step right now is to re-tool and to re-build and to empower," he said.

And despite his loss and the loss of many progressive candidates, he sees a bright future for progressives and the ideas they advance, like single-payer health care, 100 percent renewable energy, clean water for everyone and getting corporate money out of politics.

A former Lacrosse player at the University of Michigan, he drew on sports to describe what progressives accomplished this cycle.

"There's no doubt in my mind that we advanced the ball down the field," El-Sayed said.