Politixia
How much is an endorsement from President Donald J. Trump worth these days, for your average Republican candidate for Congress? Would the value of that endorsement be better expressed as “zero,” or possibly “less than zero”? I can only imagine that’s what Michigan congressional candidate Amir Hassan would tell you, given that he scored Trump’s complete backing, and financial support from the national Republican party, only to find himself being utterly trounced at the polls in yesterday’s Michigan primary election … by another Republican candidate who suspended his campaign almost a month ago. It sounds like pretty much everyone involved here may have forgotten to factor in the baseline of racism inherent to the MAGA voter: How else to explain the result where the Trump-endorsed Hassan ends up with 33% of the vote, and his competitor Thomas J. Smith, who gave up entirely on the race and actually endorsed another candidate, ends up with 50%? It’s either “Republicans are racist,” or “Republicans actively hate Trump endorsements,” take your pick.
No one seems to be more surprised by the outcome here than the aforementioned Thomas J. Smith, who suspended his campaign to represent Michigan’s 8th district in mid-July, only to find that as of this morning he was up by 17 points over Trump’s hand-picked candidate. Smith presumably would have dropped out of the race entirely, save for the fact that his name had already been printed on the ballots. As mentioned above, Smith even endorsed and campaigned for another candidate, anti-abortion activist Al Lemmo, who hilariously garnered only 16% of the vote. There are literally images and videos of Smith, now the winning candidate, decked out in gear for Lemmo, singing his praises, saying he gives him his “complete and total endorsement.” The outcome is apparently so unexpected that The New York Times didn’t even have a headshot image of Smith for its polling results tracker.
This is not Al Lemmo. This is primary winner Thomas J. Smith campaigning for Al Lemmo.
How funny, then, that the MAGA voters of Michigan not only ignored Trump’s instructions of who they were supposed to cast their ballots for, but also ignored the instructions and endorsement of the guy they ended up voting for as well! Smith, meanwhile, realized that he should probably put out some kind of statement accepting his new role as the nominee on Wednesday despite the fact that he stopped trying to win this race a month ago, saying to The Detroit News that he was “humbled and honored that Republicans have chosen me to take the fight to Kristen McDonald Rivet. I look forward to working with Speaker Johnson and the entire Republican team to expand our House majority and advance President Trump’s America First agenda to lower costs for working families and make America affordable again.”
Can this result really boil down to something as elementally simple and blatantly racist as the (presumably poorly informed) MAGA voters of Michigan’s 8th district rolling into their polling places on Tuesday morning and seeing the names “Amir Hassan” and “Thomas J. Smith” next to each other, and marking the one that sounded more like a white guy, and less like a vaguely threatening Muslim man? What a sad and grossly disturbing result that would be, to think that months of campaigning, money spent on a national level, the endorsement of Donald Trump, and the actual issues at hand would prove to be totally inconsequential when compared to garden variety racism. I’m grasping for any other, rational explanation for why this would happen, and failing to come up with one.
the Republican primary voters saw the name “Amir Hassan” and every single Hitler Particle in their body started vibrating at once
— violentlycar (@violentlycar.bsky.social) 12:03 AM · Aug 5, 2026
It’s almost (almost) enough to make you feel bad for the 40-year-old Hassan, a Flint native and Navy vet who worked as a federal law enforcement officer for 11 years, in the DOD and DHS. Honestly, it’s difficult to see in retrospect why he would have been the Trump pick to endorse at all, given that the Tri Cities area’s MAGA voter contingent is apparently virulently racist. One presumes he must have espoused some of the correct anti-democracy views for the Trump administration to sign off on his candidacy, although this didn’t stop other candidates in the race from leaning on racial attacks against him. Al Lemmo in particular accused Hassan of being a “trojan horse” candidate and secret Democrat, despite the fact that he was the Trump-endorsed candidate. One wonders if this cost Hassan, but it certainly didn’t direct votes to Lemmo–rather, everyone flocked to Smith, the man who stopped campaigning a month ago.
Regardless, the Republican party is attempting to pick up a seat in Michigan’s 8th that is held by first-term Democratic Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet of Bay City, who ran unopposed for her reelection on Tuesday. Newsweek described the seat as one of the GOP’s “top pickup opportunities,” but it doesn’t seem particularly vulnerable to me: Although Trump won the district by a few points in the 2024 general election, McDonald Rivet was also elected on the same night, defeating Republican challenger Paul Junge 51-44, a rather comfortable margin considering that Kamala Harris was losing the same district. This would suggest that McDonald Rivet is considerably more popular than national Democrats in her own district. Now she gets to face a guy in Thomas J. Smith who spent the last month thinking that his congressional campaign was over, until MAGA Michigan flipped the script and rejected Trump’s chosen candidate.
Keep the endorsements coming, Donnie! They’re clearly working wonders.
Seems like an upset might be brewing in the GOP primary in #MI08 to take on Dem Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet. Trump endorsed Amir Hassan, but he currently trails an absolute nobody who suspended his campaign a month ago by a wide margin.
— The Downballot (@the-downballot.com) 11:54 PM · Aug 4, 2026
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