Obama to stump with El-Sayed Oct. 24 as in-person early voting opens
Abdul El-Sayed, the 41-year-old Democratic nominee for Michigan’s US Senate seat, brings a résumé that includes a Rhodes scholarship, a Columbia University professorship in epidemiology and a tenure as executive director of the Detroit health department. He represents a new generation of Democratic politicians, down to a uniform of fitted black T-shirts, slim jeans and sneakers, and he campaigns on a tightly disciplined message — “Money Out of Politics, Money in Your Pocket, Medicare for All” — that is competitive in the polls.
But his support is softer than overall Democratic sentiment would dictate, especially among Black voters. A Washington Post-Schar School poll released last month found that 83% of likely Black voters in Michigan said they wanted Democrats to control the Senate, while only 67% backed El-Sayed. His campaign attributes part of that gap to a heavily financed onslaught of negative ads run against him during the primaries.
El-Sayed is responding with a strategy of political universalism: concentrating on a common set of issues he believes will be broadly resonant rather than on the specific, differentiated interests of the disparate groups under the Democratic tent. “Democratic politics too often tries to pander to folks on their differences rather than to bring us together across our similarities,” El-Sayed said. “I want to campaign on those things that all of us need and deserve in our lives.”
The Guardian describes the approach as “a lofty ideal in principle – especially for older Black voters who might be more accustomed to direct appeals,” but reports that in practice it means group-specific concerns go unacknowledged. The “Priorities” section on his campaign website doesn’t mention the names of minority groups or the words “racial” and “racism.”
Women and LGBTQ+ Michiganders are only explicitly mentioned in a section about healthcare freedoms, where El-Sayed pledges to “fight to codify the rights once protected by Roe v Wade into federal law” and to “oppose any effort to criminalize certain medications and the use of lawfare or funding cuts to stop healthcare providers from providing full-spectrum healthcare that meet all the needs of their diverse communities.” The site focuses on immigration and his pledge to abolish ICE, without mentioning the words “Hispanics” or “Latinos,” even though the Detroit Metro Times reported in April that most people arrested by federal immigration agents in Michigan, as of that time, were from Latin America.
Under a subsection called “Civil Rights & Liberties,” El-Sayed promises to “protect the rights of all Americans, regardless of where they live, where their parents came from, how – or if – they pray, their sexual orientation, gender identity, how old they are or how much money they make.” He invokes the Flint water crisis without mentioning Black people or racism, instead pledging to “fight for a federal water guarantee that every family has access to at least 50 gallons of clean water per person per day.” The closest the site comes to naming Black people directly is the acronym HBCUs, for historically Black colleges and universities, among a list of education services and institutions he would seek to fund.
The lack of acknowledgment may be showing up in a lack of enthusiasm. On Oct. 3, El-Sayed held a public rally in Flint, a city of roughly 80,000 people, the majority of whom are Black. A line snaked around St Michael Catholic church as people inched toward one of about 400 seats inside, but when the event began, only about one in 10 of those seats appeared, by The Guardian’s count, to be filled by Black people. The stump speech, a little more than 20 minutes long, stuck to the central platform message and did not explicitly acknowledge the constituent groups of the Democratic coalition.
During the question period, Michele Kelly, a 67-year-old grandmother, lifelong Flint resident and El-Sayed supporter, said many people in the low-income housing where she lives lack information and enthusiasm, and she asked what he and his team could do to “get that demographic riled up and encouraged to come out.” Kelly said afterward that she had been referring specifically to Black people, and that “if I hadn’t raised my hand, there wouldn’t have been no conversation about Blackness.” In his answer, El-Sayed never directly addressed Black people, instead referring to “those folk” and “people like that” and citing money in politics and a “profound lack of trust.”
El-Sayed won the primary in mid-September without winning the Black vote. Afterward, his campaign issued a press release “outlining the legislation he will introduce or support in the US Senate to directly address the priorities of Black communities across Michigan,” including small business, home ownership, health and voting initiatives. The release is listed on the site’s “News” vertical beneath scores of other press releases issued since. The campaign said via email that “Abdul has made more than two dozen visits to Black churches and participated in upwards of 100 events and meetings with Black elected officials, community leaders and organizations across the state.”
Earlier Saturday, before the church rally, El-Sayed attended a private meet-and-greet at the Flint home of Christopher Burtley, an attorney who chairs the state’s Black leadership advisory council. About 100 people showed up, eight in 10 of whom were Black, by the organizers’ estimates. Burtley said the overwhelming feeling he detects toward El-Sayed from the Black community in Flint is “unfamiliarity.” His cohost, Phyllis Sykes, founder and executive director of the International Center of Greater Flint, said “people were on the fence,” adding, “I don’t think he has really been plugged into the African American network or whatever here like I know he has with some of the international populations.” Both Burtley and Sykes support El-Sayed.
The biggest names in Black Democratic politics are now attempting to close the gap. Former vice-president Kamala Harris traveled to Michigan to campaign with El-Sayed last month, and former president Barack Obama is scheduled to stump with him on Oct. 24, the first day of in-person early voting in the state and 10 days before election day. The Guardian describes the Obama visit as an 11th-hour appeal, writing that it is unclear whether the enormous goodwill Obama has accrued is transferable. Obama has a strong track record in Michigan, having campaigned for Gretchen Whitmer, Debbie Stabenow and Elissa Slotkin in their winning gubernatorial and Senate bids. But The Guardian notes that both Harris and Obama are mainstream, establishment Democrats with whom the staunchly progressive El-Sayed has publicly taken umbrage, and that the memory of those cleavage points resists erasure.
The late-hour appeal arrives with history attached. El-Sayed has made clear he disagreed with Harris’s position on the war in Gaza; although he endorsed her presidential run, he later said that watching a “manufactured campaign of joy on behalf of Democrats” amid the war was “nauseating.” CNN’s KFile has resurfaced his long-running critiques of Obama, including a HuffPost essay after Obama’s 2012 re-election in which El-Sayed wrote, “So let’s be clear, for progressives who care about peace, prosperity, civil liberties, and the future of our country, Obama’s reelection last night was no victory.” He wrote of the outcome, “It was the rock we chose over the hard place.”
The Guardian writes that among El-Sayed, Harris and Obama, the hatchets appear to have been buried, but it remains to be seen whether the voters — particularly Black ones who adore Obama and were burned by Harris’s defeat — will choose him.
El-Sayed also faces the general Islamophobia that surrounds his candidacy. He is Muslim and, if successful, would become the first Muslim in the United States Senate. The Washington Post poll found that four in 10 likely Michigan voters would not consider voting for a Muslim candidate for president, and that El-Sayed’s support among that group is six percentage points lower than for Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic candidate for governor. At his rallies, El-Sayed positions his identity as subordinate to common economic interests: “My name and my faith isn’t the reason you pay too much for gas,” he said in Flint to applause.
Asked whether he worries about an anti-Muslim version of the Bradley effect — the theory, named for the 1982 California gubernatorial election in which Black candidate Tom Bradley led the polls and lost, that some poll respondents give false answers about their willingness to support a minority candidate — El-Sayed said, “I’m worried about everything.” He has reason to be cautious of polls: in the primary, much of the pre-election polling, as the New York Times put it, showed him with “a commanding lead over” his opponent, yet on election night he “eked out a narrow victory.” El-Sayed said, “I don’t trust polls; I trust what I’m seeing on the ground.”
His closing pitch is to push beyond individual group identities. He told the Flint crowd he was betting on Michiganders’ willingness “to take a bet on a politics that is good for all of us” — on voters who understand “that America has always been about people grasping together what they cannot have alone.” The Guardian writes that what appears to be an emerging blue wave, public strain over affordability and dislike of the Iran war could lift El-Sayed to victory without more direct appeals to constituent groups, but concludes that declining to make them “is a large gamble on principle” — while making them “would only take a small rhetorical tweak.”