Democrats to choose between progressive and establishment candidate in Michigan as McMorrow drops out of race – US politics live

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. Progressive Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed has emerged as the party’s frontrunner in the Michigan primary campaign after Mallory McMorrow dropped out of the race. El-Sayed, a supporter of Medicare for all who would be the first Muslim US senator, has drawn high-profile backing from leaders of the American left, including Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who endorsed him last week. He will go head-to-head with the Democratic ‘establishment’ candidate Haley Stevens, a congresswoman, in the bid for the party’s nomination. McMorrow ’s retreat also marks the end of a center-left bid to hold the seat being vacated this year by the Democrat Gary Peters. The three-way primary contest was a close one earlier in the campaign, but polls indicated that McMorrow’s support had plunged in recent weeks, as El-Sayed raced past her and Stevens to emerge as the frontrunner for the party’s nomination. “I may be suspending this campaign, but I am not leaving the fight,” McMorrow said in a video statement announcing her decision to drop out. “When regular people get in the fight, things can change,” she added. Meanwhile, Stevens, a moderate Democrat, has the support of Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, and Super Pacs have spent more than $16m on her campaign, including pro-Israel groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) outraged by El-Sayed’s refusal to say that nation has a right to exist as a Jewish state. “Israel exists,” he told CNN last week. “The question is whether or not we want a politics where our money is sent over to Israel to do genocide and apartheid, instead of investing in our own kids.” Read the full story here: Michigan Democrat Mallory McMorrow ends bid for US Senate Read more In other developments: The bipartisan Ratepayer Protection Act , designed to shield individuals from soaring electricity prices amid the datacenter boom, would fail to meaningfully protect the public from the centers’ true costs, consumer advocates warn. The bill, backed by some in big tech such as Microsoft, moved through a House subcommittee in mid-June, and a vote in full committee scheduled for 1 July was delayed. Carlos Giménez, a Republican congressman from Florida, broke with the Trump administration on Sunday, calling on the White House to reconsider its push to eliminate temporary protected status (TPS) for Haitian migrants. Returning some 350,000 Haitians to their chaotic, dangerous homeland following the US supreme court’s ruling that the Trump administration can cut off temporary legal protections, would be a grave error, Giménez said. The Atlantic on Saturday republished a JD Vance essay that dismissed Donald Trump as “cultural heroin” exactly 10 years earlier, bringing back to the fore his evolving from a critic of the president to his vice-president. In an editor’s note, the magazine said it was republishing the essay on t