The Final Electric Days of Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate Campaign
Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, never had a bodyguard before this campaign. Now he has three. “When the President is constantly coming after you, there’s real consequences,” he told me. We were sitting in the back of his campaign bus, heading toward Caro, a rural town in the thumb of Michigan’s mitten. El-Sayed, slumped on a black leather bench, was keeping his gaze forward to avoid motion sickness. On his right wrist, El-Sayed wears a jumble of Taylor Swift-style beaded bracelets, and I asked him about one, which read, “FUCKING WOLVERINE.” He explained that, at a recent campaign stop in Michigan, Vice-President J. D. Vance had called him “a little weasel,” and added that he should “shut his mouth and show more gratitude to the country that gave him everything.” El-Sayed had twisted the barb and hurled it back. “Nobody understands how deep and profound the gift of this country is like a kid who was born here but for the accident of history that allowed that to happen,” he’d said. “J. D. Vance called me a little weasel today. I’m, like, ‘No, no, no. What you’re talking about is a fucking wolverine.’ ” A supporter made him the bracelet, and handed it to him at a recent campaign stop.
Hate has played an arresting role in the late stages of Michigan’s Senate race, in which El-Sayed is facing the former U.S. congressman and Donald Trump ally Mike Rogers. At a rally in Port Huron early this week, Trump announced, “I’m here to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a U.S. senator.” In August, Vance said, “There’s something about Abdul El-Sayed that is very, very evil and on the rise in the United States of America today”; he claimed that El-Sayed sees himself “as fighting for one group at the expense of others.” El-Sayed replied, in part, by calling Vance a “sock puppet.” On the campaign bus, he told me, “Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, because they’re fools, built me one of the biggest and best platforms of any incoming United States senator.”
Many recent polls show El-Sayed leading Rogers by only a few points, within their margins of error. “You need every vote here,” El-Sayed’s wife, Sarah Jukaku, told me. “It’s not like California, which is a huge state but you can take things for granted a bit.” A little-known part of his strategy is to run up a lead on the Upper Peninsula, which is home to only three hundred thousand people, or three per cent of Michigan’s population. El-Sayed performed particularly well there in the primary—in which he lost Detroit and Flint to the establishment candidate Haley Stevens—and the latest figures from the Detroit News show that he continues to be a favorite there, putting him nearly six points ahead of Rogers in the U.P. and northern Michigan.
“If you want rural, working-class communities to be in play, you’ve got to come to the Upper Peninsula,” Chloe Kannan, a local organizer and a member of the Sault tribe, said. We met on a blustery afternoon at a protest that she was leading in the city of Sault Ste. Marie, outside a red brick local hospital that had been bought several years ago by a larger health-care provider. In the distance, a white double-humped steel bridge spanned the St. Marys River. Ontario was on the other side.
At the protest, two dozen locals, some in “Yoopers for Abdul” T-shirts, gathered around the open bed of a pickup truck. Kannan and others took turns standing in the bed, and recounting the firing of doctors and staff, until a white Grand Wagoneer pulled up and El-Sayed got out. He was dressed in his campaign uniform of a Carhartt jacket over a tight black T-shirt and dark-wash jeans, and accompanied by his three bodyguards. Climbing up into the truck bed alongside Kannan, he told the group, “The fight for this particular hospital is the fight for rural health care across the country.” El-Sayed, a doctor and the former director of Wayne County’s department of health and human services, is running on a double-barrelled slogan of “Money out of politics” and “Medicare for all,” and vying for voters disillusioned by the mainstream of both parties. There are “people locked out of the system and people doing the locking out,” he told me. “I’m for the people locked out.”
Since 2025, El-Sayed has made four trips to the Soo, as locals call Sault Ste. Marie, a rural outpost that for thousands of years has been a gathering place and trading hub for Indigenous communities. He’s entered Ojibwe sweat lodges twice, once at a local health center and a second time at a private home. I learned about his experience only through members of the Native community, who were moved by his commitment to working on behalf of the greater good. “He’s up against some very dark energy,” Lori Gambardella, a traditional-medicine supervisor, who’d conducted the sweat lodges that El-Sayed attended, told me. At the hospital rally, she hugged him before he spoke. Two Ojibwe elders, both women, said that they were so taken with El-Sayed that they’d given him a hand-crafted drum.“A hand-drum is the heartbeat of our people,” one of the women, Janet Liedel, told me. She worked as a cashier at a local supermarket and was registered as an independent; she was voting for the person, not the party.
El-Sayed was among the Michiganders exceedingly confident of his forthcoming victory. “I want to focus on governing,” he told me. He was already thinking about how to strike working relationships with Ted Cruz, among other opponents, to move his bid for universal health care forward. He was also looking forward to welcoming the two tribal women on their road trip to Washington, D.C., when they came to visit him and to see their drum.
El-Sayed’s reputation is that of a know-it-all who is happy to scorch anyone who opposes him. “Abdul isn’t short on confidence, and I know that can make people nervous if it comes across as arrogance,” the Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow, who suspended a campaign for the Democratic nomination for the Senate, told me. “But if Abdul can convince people he’s listening to them and fighting for them, and not just asking them to fight for him, he can win this thing.” Jukaku, his wife, described him as a counterpuncher. “If you are respectful, he will be so respectful. If you are kind and warm, he will be so kind and warm. He will mirror it with more,” she told me. And, “if you’re going to be arrogant to him, he’s gonna be more.” El-Sayed gave me a similar account of his persona: “Bad-faith questions get bad-faith answers,” he said, after a dustup in Bay City with Fox News.
After his swing through the Upper Peninsula, El-Sayed had headed south, to the thumb of Michigan’s mitten. In Caro, after four long days on the bus, and with multiple stops per day, he bounded onstage, delivering his stump speech like a standup routine. “Donald Trump and J. D. Vance can’t seem to keep my name out of their mouth,” he’d said. “However they want to say it, we’re going to make sure they say it with the word ‘Senator’ in front in November.” El-Sayed invoked Bill Clinton, who’d urged him to run for public office after hearing him speak at his college graduation, at the University of Michigan, in 2007. He mentioned Barack Obama, too. The two had a lot in common, El-Sayed said. Not height. “He’s tall and skinny, and I’m”—he paused—“five-eight.” The crowd broke into warm, if expectant, laughter.
When the Q. & A. began, a twentysomething white man wearing a gray T-shirt with a rainbow sticker on it raised his hand. When called on, the man, who said his name was Tommy, asked El-Sayed, “Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?” Claims that El-Sayed supports the Muslim Brotherhood have dogged his campaign, based on social-media posts that his half sister made in 2012, and a letter that he’d signed that year in support of Mohamed Morsi, then the President of Egypt and a former leader of the group. El-Sayed seemed prepared to escalate—“What are you implying?” he asked—but, as Tommy kept drilling the “simple” question, El-Sayed switched tacks. “Sure, yeah, but why are you asking the question?” he said to Tommy.
“I haven’t heard you disavow them yet,” Tommy said. “I haven’t heard you disavow them yet,” El-Sayed shot back, and the room burst into laughter. A five-minute civics lesson followed, in which El-Sayed schooled Tommy on the U.S. Constitution and the allegations of dual loyalty levelled against J.F.K., as the first Catholic President. “You assume, Tommy, because I’m Muslim that I would have some allegiance to something that’s not the U.S. Constitution,” El-Sayed said. He asked if Tommy, who’d called himself a Christian, honored the U.S. Constitution’s separation of church and state. Tommy demurred. (The clip soon went viral, and has been viewed fifty million times.)
When their exchange ended, I spotted Tommy making a beeline for the exit and followed him. In the parking lot, I asked if he was satisfied with El-Sayed’s answer. “Abdul said he did disavow the Muslim Brotherhood,” Tommy said. “I’ve seen him skirt around the question a lot, so to get a straight answer was satisfactory.” Did it change his opinion about El-Sayed? “Not so much,” he replied. A few minutes after Tommy left, two black sedans pulled out of the lot, with homemade signs on top that read, in red and blue marker, “MICHIGAN IS TOO AMERICAN FOR ABDUL.” When I texted Tommy later to ask if he was inside one of the sedans, he didn’t reply.
Tommy, it turned out, is Tommy Teepell, a political operative, and a former aide to Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator and avowed Christian nationalist. He is also the son of Timmy Teepell, a G.O.P. strategist, whose firm, Breakthrough L.L.C., received two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from America Next, a nonprofit waging a “war of ideas” on behalf of conservative America. According to F.E.C. filings, the payment was intended to fund opposition to El-Sayed through “influencer marketing.” America Next also appears to be backing stunts like Tommy’s: at the University of Michigan, a leaked chat among college Republicans revealed that a senior who claimed to be working for America Next offered students two hundred dollars to heckle El-Sayed at events.“We are going to coordinate questions to ask him and spread out to increase the chances we’re called on. We’re gonna boo him. We’re gonna show everyone that ABDUL IS NOT WELCOME IN THE SENATE,” the senior’s message read. (America Next did not respond to a request for comment.)
Jeff Timmer, a prominent Republican strategist in Michigan, told me, “The sad truth is that peddling fearmongering, hate, racism, and bigotry still works. It’s what Trumpism is built on, and it has replaced all pretense of traditional G.O.P. ideology.” Rogers, the Republican Senate candidate, has embraced the strategy, claiming, without offering any evidence, that El-Sayed has accepted campaign contributions from supporters of Hezbollah and Hamas. At the same time, race-baiting is, to some liberals, an indication that Republicans know they’re in trouble. “ ‘Let’s be racist’ strategy is not a strategy aimed at the middle or the left,” Hugh Madden, a strategist who has worked with labor unions and lives in the Upper Peninsula, said. “It suggests that Republicans have a base-turnout problem.”
Last weekend, Obama appeared with El-Sayed at Detroit’s Cass Technical High School. Onstage, the former President invoked the fact that he’d faced similarly hateful attacks. “They will use lies and maybe your name or your faith to somehow suggest you are dangerous and less than trustworthy and less patriotic and less American than they are,” he said. “This stuff didn’t work on me, not in Michigan. It’s not going to work on Abdul. Abdul is as Michigan as it gets.” Afterward, El-Sayed told me that he found it “pretty surreal to have the person who was the President of your twenties campaigning for you.” He was most moved, however, by the moments when Obama, a fellow “girl dad,” interacted with El-Sayed’s daughters, and “the grandfatherly way he did it.”
Obama’s presence in Detroit reflected a real area of concern for El-Sayed’s campaign. In the primary, he lost the city to Stevens, the moderate, by more than thirty points. There is, too, a recent history of pain and distrust between Detroit’s Black and Arab communities: in 2024, Arab voters, many of whom had joined the Uncommitted Movement to signal their disgust with Democrats over the war in Gaza, did not turn out in large numbers for Kamala Harris, and she lost the state. “It was a system-wide failure,” Abbas Alawieh, a co-founder of the Uncommitted Movement and a candidate for the state senate, told me over breakfast at a Lebanese restaurant in suburban Detroit. “You lost every single swing state.” But, he acknowledged, the political tensions between the two communities remained. “It’s a huge concern,” Alawieh said.
“People are torn,” Karen Weaver, the former mayor of Flint, told me. She herself supports El-Sayed. “I’m anti-establishment, and that’s what I like,” she said. But Weaver, who sits on the leadership committee of the state chapter of Win with Black Women, a network of Black women leaders, said that the message from some of her peers was, “When we needed you, you didn’t have our back.” She went on, “And Black women vote. We’re loyal, and we vote.” Weaver, among others, wasn’t sure how this resentment would play out at the ballot box.
One Sunday last month, El-Sayed, along with the Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, visited Metropolitan Baptist Tabernacle, in Flint, Michigan, where he clapped in the pews and told the story of his grandmother, who raised eight children in poverty in Egypt, losing two in childhood. It was the church’s “Survivor” Sunday: breast-cancer survivors wore pink; domestic-violence survivors purple. Before the service began, a congregant named Anita Harris ushered people to their seats. “They’re trying to get Black people not to vote for him because of Harris,” she told me. She also kept seeing ads that cast him as a terrorist. “I don’t think that Black people feel that stuff is true,” she said. Harris, a retiree, explained that she had worked for General Motors all her life: “When the United Auto Workers endorsed him, that’s good enough for me.”
El-Sayed’s connection with Michigan’s Jewish population has been similarly strained. El-Sayed has said that he does not view Israel as an American ally and that he rejects its existence as a Jewish state. Recently, a debate moderator asked El-Sayed whether Israel or Iran posed a greater threat to the U.S., he refused to answer, calling it “a ridiculous question.” Jordan Acker, a member of the University of Michigan Board of Regents and a former Obama Administration official, told me, “My issue with him isn’t about Israel policy. It’s the way he speaks about Jews.” He was unsettled by El-Sayed’s frequent implication that, because the U.S. government sends aid to Israel, it’s not providing Americans with adequate health care. And he took note when, after an attacker opened fire at West Bloomfield Township’s Temple Israel, in March, forcing the evacuation of more than a hundred preschoolers, El-Sayed said, “Hurt people hurt people.” (He has since apologized for the phrase, which was part of a longer condemnation of the attack.)
In a recently released campaign ad, El-Sayed tries to distinguish between his affection for the Jewish people and their faith and his disdain for the “foreign government” of Israel. To Acker, this solved nothing. “Abdul is deeply thoughtful, deeply charming, very smart, and a great speaker,” he said. “He stands for ninety-five per cent of my values, but the most basic value we have is inclusion.” To him, a question remained unanswered: Do people who believe in the state of Israel have a place in El-Sayed’s Democratic Party? Acker continued, “My top issue is the safety of my children, and nothing I’ve heard from the El-Sayed campaign suggests they take that seriously at all.” He was still undecided about his vote.
El-Sayed has tried to reassure Jewish voters, saying, in August, “My commitment to Jewish safety is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.” He added, “We can be talking about antisemitism and at the same time we can be talking about how we bring people together. And we can be talking about everybody’s pain. And I think that anybody who does not want to do that is not serious about actually addressing the hurt that we see across the board.”
On the campaign bus, I noticed one bracelet tucked beneath the others. It read “BEST DAD.” When I asked El-Sayed about it, his throat caught. His two daughters had made it for him. He began to cry. He missed them, and his wife, Sarah, and he also worried that his choice to run for office had put them in danger. He said the F.B.I. had recently alerted local law enforcement to a threat against him, and he hadn’t had a chance to tell his wife before she allowed the two girls to head, on their own, to a friend’s house down the street. He continued, “I’ll be honest, I’ve had a recurring dream that I’m going to get—I’m going to die young, my whole life.” The tactics being levelled against him weren’t new, he noted. “This has always been the play.” ♦