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[Alben Barkley]

Probably. But only probably. The logic of “He could only lose if some people who voted for Gretchen voted against him” doesn’t hold up because Gretchen could only win by as much as she did by winning people who voted for Donald Trump, and Donald Trump could only win at all by winning some people who voted for Barack Obama. Never assume that all the candidates in a party are interchangeable with each other and would necessarily have gotten all or even almost all of the same voters as the other candidates.

Snyder was unpopular and it was a blue wave year, so any Democrat would have been favored, which is why I say he still probably wins, but it might have been narrower. Again, Gretchen won a number of Obama-Trump voters, which was enough to flip several Obama-Trump counties and basically completely reverse the state’s partisan swing from 2012 to 2016. It is far from a certainty that a Muslim associated with the leftmost wing of the party who was endorsed by such figures as Michael Moore, Shaun King, and AOC would have won as many of those voters/counties back from Trump. Yeah, there’s a significant Muslim population in Michigan and he might have slightly outperformed Whitmer in those areas, but if he couldn’t make gains elsewhere it might have been close or even a loss.