Rogers courts Black and Jewish voters ahead of Obama and Trump visits
Michigan Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers are in the closing weeks of one of the most competitive and costly U.S. Senate contests of the year, The Wall Street Journal reported. Rogers, a former GOP congressman who is 63, is trying to become Michigan’s first Republican elected to the Senate since 1994. He is making overt appeals to Black and Jewish voters, parts of the traditional Democratic base that El-Sayed has struggled to fully win over, while seeking to show both loyalty to President Trump and distance on issues such as trade and the Iran war.
Former President Barack Obama is scheduled to appear with El-Sayed on Saturday evening to strengthen the candidate’s standing with Black voters. President Trump is scheduled to be in Michigan on Sunday to promote Rogers and other Republicans. El-Sayed has spent at least part of his time in Republican-leaning areas with an “it shouldn’t be this hard” theme that blames Trump and the GOP for higher prices.
El-Sayed, 41, could become the nation’s first Muslim senator after winning the August Democratic primary by less than 1 percentage point, and he has never been elected to office. The Journal described him as “quick on his feet, disciplined and social-media savvy” and said, “His bravado is also palpable, especially for someone never before elected to office.” It called him “arguably the most consequential figure on the ballot to influence the future of the Democratic Party.”
To his detractors, the Journal said, El-Sayed represents “an insurgent brand of far-left politics that is outside the mainstream.” To his supporters, the Journal said, he is “proof that progressive ideals have wider appeal than centrists acknowledge” and will show on Election Day that they can win in a presidential battleground. In a state President Trump won by 1.4 percentage points in 2024, El-Sayed has predicted he will win by 7 points. He said he has received death threats this year, as he did in 2018, when he finished behind now-Gov. Gretchen Whitmer by 22 percentage points in the Democratic primary for governor.
El-Sayed’s argument for a more expansive government role is rooted partly in his public-health career. To explain his position, he occasionally turns to a woman he calls Martha. During a medical-school sub-internship in New York City more than a decade ago, El-Sayed said, he met a homeless alcoholic patient whose head was bleeding after she slipped on subway steps.
An emergency-room resident wanted to discharge Martha, but El-Sayed argued to a supervisor that she needed a CT scan. The scan was negative, but she spent two weeks in the hospital before refusing his efforts to place her in chemical-dependency treatment. El-Sayed later saw her passed out on a subway train. That night, he said, he decided to end clinical work and pursue a public-health career.
Among the lessons El-Sayed said he drew from the episode was a firmly held belief that government should be the dominant player in health care, that people without means are discriminated against and that the state needs to spend more on social services. He said he does not know whether Martha is still alive. He plays down personal responsibility and puts the onus on government to take a leading role in health care. The Journal said that position “divides many in the country who celebrate self-reliance.”
El-Sayed said society failed Martha because, among other things, her mother had only a minimum-wage job, Martha was abused as a teenager by one of her mother’s boyfriends and Martha did not have enough welfare for herself and her five children. “For those of us whose life circumstances have created options A, B, C, D, E, F and G, she might have options A and B,” he said. The account could not be independently verified.
Detroit hired El-Sayed as its public-health director in 2015, and he resigned in 2017 to make his failed campaign for governor. After the 2018 election, he mostly focused on writing his memoir and a book on Medicare for All, as well as launching a podcast where he said essential drugs should be treated like public utilities. In 2023, he became director of the department of health, human and veteran services for Wayne County, the state’s largest county.
One challenge in that role was Wayne County’s long-troubled Juvenile Detention Facility, which for years had been plagued by serious mistreatment of youth, sexual assaults, high staff turnover and injuries to security personnel and detainees. John Ezzo, then owner of a private security company contracted to help provide staffing, said El-Sayed did not attend any of the dozens of meetings involving his firm. Ezzo said the company was critical in boosting staff levels so services such as more frequent showers and recreation could improve. “He didn’t get involved with the solution,” Ezzo said. He is a Republican who said he sometimes votes for Democrats.
El-Sayed said he stressed that he did not want to manage a juvenile jail when he took the job and that it was later spun out of his department. Three weeks in, he declared a public-health emergency for the facility, which he said allowed him to raise wages by 35% and obtain additional resources. He dismissed Ezzo’s claim that he delegated some meetings to subordinates. Asked if the episode was fodder for those skeptical of more government, El-Sayed said he understood those concerns but also said he made things better. “Yes, it failed,” he said. “Here’s a failure that’s completely outside of my area of expertise. But you know what? Doesn’t look like anyone else is running in, so let me go.”
Severe problems persisted through 2023 and 2024, until the center closed and detainees were moved to a new complex, the Detroit News has reported.
Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed is the son of a successful automotive engineer with a doctorate who is now a university professor; his birth mother works as a psychiatric nurse practitioner. Both parents fled political oppression in Egypt. Their marriage was short-lived — El-Sayed calls himself their “one-hit wonder” — and his father later married a Michigan woman with deep American roots that include a claim to be a distant descendant of Abigail Adams, a former first lady. Along with his father, she brought him up.
Growing up in what The Journal described as a leafy, upscale suburb north of Detroit, El-Sayed had a mostly idyllic childhood. He said he experienced racism, especially after the attacks against the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. In his 2020 memoir, “Healing Politics,” he wrote that the racism he endured after 9/11 inspired him to become a more faithful and actively practicing Muslim. He said the five daily prayers and studied the history of a religion whose message he distilled, among other things, to “Recognize that if God is greater, then everyone in the eyes of God is equal.”
At the University of Michigan, El-Sayed majored in biology and political science and played on the lacrosse team. He met his wife there, and she later became a psychiatrist. He proposed to her when she was a freshman and he was a junior, telling the campus newspaper at the time that he did so partly because of his faith. “Islamically, there are no premarital relations of any sort,” he said. “No touching, no nothing. Given that, the logical solution is to get married.”
Disclosure records show the couple share assets valued at about $700,000 to $2.1 million, including rental properties in Ann Arbor, Mich.; Bengaluru, India; and Dubai, United Arab Emirates. As a medical and doctoral student in 2008, while planning to become a neurosurgeon, El-Sayed was named a Rhodes scholar and earned a doctorate in public health in England. He later earned his medical degree from Columbia University in New York.
The August primary, which El-Sayed won by less than 1 percentage point, exposed divisions within the Democratic Party. The Journal called the result “divisive” and said it “encapsulated virtually every division unsettling the party: establishment vs. outsider; pro-Israel vs. anti-Israel; moderate vs. progressive.” It also reported that long-simmering distrust between the Black and Muslim communities in the Detroit area had translated into skepticism about El-Sayed among some Black voters. He has worked to create unity since the primary, but major fissures remain.
El-Sayed recently stood before the faithful in a packed Dearborn mosque that has anchored Muslim life in the Detroit suburb for close to a century. At the American Moslem Society, one of North America’s largest mosques, the Democratic nominee invoked faith and moral obligation, preached progressive policies and reiterated his criticism of U.S. support for Israel. “We deserve to know that our money isn’t being wasted to make war, to do genocide, to backstop apartheid,” he said.
The following weekend, almost 200 miles west, a middle-aged man stood near the stage at the start of another El-Sayed appearance and shouted a reference to the Quran and Bible. “His book says something different than my book,” the man said before police escorted him from a historic theater in Muskegon, Mich. The Journal reported that El-Sayed’s faith and the Middle East had taken center stage in the closing weeks of what it called a “middle-of-America campaign,” as Republicans stepped up criticism of his Muslim background, associations and progressive leanings on everything from Medicare for All to his prior calls to defund the police.
When a Republican asked El-Sayed the previous weekend to denounce the Muslim Brotherhood, he did so while saying the question reflected anti-Muslim bias and a double standard. After the exchange went viral, El-Sayed released a straight-to-camera advertisement addressing his religion. “I’m Abdul El-Sayed, man of faith,” he said. “That’s a good thing.”
In an interview about the role of his faith in the race, El-Sayed said, “I’m not proving anything except for just reminding us who we are.” He added, “America is big enough.”
Rogers and his allies have sought to link El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed has repeatedly denied that he or his family members have ties to the group, including in a Wall Street Journal interview. Rogers’s campaign has highlighted 14-year-old online posts written by El-Sayed’s half-sister that suggest their mother was involved with the Brotherhood decades ago. “Had an amazing talk with my mom about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early ’70s when she was in college,” Eman Abdelhadi wrote in June 2012.
Abdelhadi, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, did not respond to voicemails or emails. Neither did her mother, Fatten Elkomy, who divorced El-Sayed’s father when he was 3. El-Sayed has said he was raised by his stepmother and has never discussed the matter with his birth mother.
Temple Israel, which is heavily guarded and not far from where El-Sayed grew up, is one of Michigan’s largest synagogues. It was thrust into the news this year when a man rammed his truck into it before killing himself in a gunfight with security guards. The Journal described the attack as a “Hezbollah-inspired act of terrorism.”
While El-Sayed condemned the Temple Israel violence, he also referenced family members of the attacker killed in an Israeli airstrike the week before, saying, “Hurt people hurt people.” He later apologized for the statement, but the Journal reported that “scars remain among some Jewish people from the statement and other positions he has taken.”
El-Sayed has also refused to say whether Israel or Iran is a greater threat to America and has appeared with what the Journal called “left-wing streamer Hasan Piker,” who once said, “America deserved 9/11.” The Journal said those actions have also angered a faction of Jewish voters, who account for about 1.3% of Michigan’s population and could be critical in a close election.
Rabbi Aaron Starr, a frequent Democratic voter who leads a 1,000-family congregation in suburban Detroit, said El-Sayed’s rhetoric was dangerous. “I can’t vote for someone who cannot affirm my most basic needs,” he said. Starr is also part of a group of spiritual leaders and others called Nonnegotiable Michigan.
Jeremy Zeltzer, a Jewish Democrat who recently organized a house party for Jewish voters to ask El-Sayed questions, said he worries the campaign has created permanent division in the community. “I’ve been called every name in the book from my fellow Jewish Michiganders for supporting El-Sayed,” Zeltzer said.
MSI previously reported that El-Sayed had apologized to Michigan Jewish Democrats for comments he made after a Michigan synagogue attack, which he tied to Israel’s actions. The Journal now reports that major fissures remain in the party, that some Jewish people continue to object to the separate “Hurt people hurt people” statement and his other positions, and that a Jewish Democrat has organized a house party to question him.