PBS NEWSHOUR: NPR’s Tamara Keith and Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter join Amna Nawaz to discuss the latest political news, including the Michigan Senate primary and the message Democrats are taking into the midterms.

AMNA NAWAZ, PBS NEWSHOUR: The defining issues in that Senate primary, you have got the moderate Congresswoman Haley Stevens and the progressive Abdul El-Sayed running to take on the presumptive Republican nominee, Mike Rogers. Amy, for Democratic primary voters here, seems to be at issue of which direction they want to see the party go or which candidate they think can actually win in November. Is that fair? AMY WALTER, COOK POLITICAL REPORT: Right. I do think that’s fair. And I think Haley Stevens was a great example of the kind of candidate that could win in the first Trump midterm election. She was part of the establishment at a time when people in thought the establishment and institutions were going to be the answer to Trumpism. She came from working in the Obama White House. She was somebody who was going to stand up, all those things that Democrats believed Trump was knocking over. In the eight years since then, what many Democratic voters have seen is that standing up for the — what they thought were universal values of democracy, of institutions and of norms is no longer as powerful, and that those institutions and norms didn’t protect the country from a second Trump election. And so where you see Democrats now is very similar to where Republicans were at this point in, say, 2014 or even in 2010, when they believed that the Republican leadership was not properly reacting to the election of President Obama, and they needed a new direction to go. So she will run and she’s continuing to run on, I’m the electable candidate. But I think, for many voters in Michigan, what they’re saying is we don’t need to play it safe anymore because playing it safe is really what got us Donald Trump back.

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