I was talking with awareness of the context of the primaries. Stevens was the DNC favourite but she was still evidently an Israel bootlicker and didn't perform well at the debate. El-Sayed got pre-primary endorsements from UAW and has had strong individual and collective support from labour union members. Not to say Piker didn't help signal boost the campaign a lot, just to say Senator-elect El-Sayed would have never gotten through the primary without him is not necessarily true, there were many axes of support that converged and primary voters also compared the quality of candidates directly. And El Sayed used the fact that gobs of cash were being lobbed into the race to defeat him to his benefit.

I'm just tempering the argument that Piker is the primary or sole reason why we got the result we did, it's a whole bunch of factors, a bunch of rural faces got eaten between the ICE raids, more new wars and gas prices, Republicans primaried particularly shitty candidates because they were measured by their fealty to Trump. It's a bit of No Kings rallies driving people to vote as tangible action against this admin, and finally it's the Mamdani effect where sewer socialism, left-wing populism that purports to go beyond ideology to focus on making a tangible difference for everyone while enshrining rights for the underprivileged.