El-Sayed Works to Stitch Together a Diverse Majority

About a month after Michigan’s August 4 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, where Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, depending on how you look at it, won in an upset or survived a squeaker, he sat down with a roundtable of Black mayors and elected officials across the state. The primary results clearly showed that El-Sayed had to take immediate steps to win over Black voters who had backed his chief rival Rep. Haley Stevens in the primary, and this meeting was part of the strategy.

At multiple points during the meeting, the mayors and representatives said they didn’t see El-Sayed enough during the primary. A few of them went further and argued that the Democrat hadn’t campaigned in their areas at all.

El-Sayed listened before politely, but firmly, pushing back.

“I’ll just tell you, through the course of the primary, I’ve actually been to every one of your cities,” El-Sayed said, looking around the table. He conceded that he may not have campaigned directly with each of them—some had backed Stevens—but he had sought the votes of all their constituents.

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El-Sayed continued that, as health commissioner of Wayne County, which is 37 percent Black, he had been a very “hands-on public servant” and planned to stay that way as a senator. He promised to be more visible in the leaders’ communities and to prevent the feeling that he was taking them for granted. “I want to understand what the problems are, and I want to figure out how I can partner together to solve them,” he said.

The 41-year-old progressive has fielded a fair share of criticism from important voting blocs in Michigan since winning the Democratic nomination. He has had to push Democrats to coalesce around his campaign and heal the scars from a contentious primary, during which he weathered over $60 million in attack ads. Foremost among these scars was the fact that African Americans came out for Stevens in a lopsided way that he could not ignore.

“He did not do well in the primary with Black voters outside of the 30 counties that he won,” Bernie Porn, the EPIC-MRA pollster who is seen as the best in the state, told me. “He would not have won the primary were it not for the overwhelming support he got among younger voters.”

Some Jewish voters in the state continue to warn that their support, too, may be up for grabs unless El-Sayed changes his answers on Israeli sovereignty and Palestine. And then there is Michigan’s Arab community, a small but critical voting bloc that strategists presume will decisively vote for El-Sayed despite shifting some support to Republicans and Donald Trump in recent years.

Bilal Beydoun, a Dearborn-based Democratic strategist and writer, said that in the Arab community, El-Sayed was bolstered by a few Arab American candidates who ran grassroots campaigns. But those candidates have won their primaries in safe Democratic seats, so that might detract from the ultimate turnout in November.

“For the Arab Americans who do turn out of course I expect them to fully back El-Sayed, and not just because he’s Arab American. I think that’s a lazy overall point that people are going to make,” Beydoun said. “His anti-war message is quite unprecedented and revolutionary. He would be the first Muslim senator, he would also be the first anti-war senator from Michigan in my lifetime.”

Even as the front-runner, El-Sayed’s calculus for winning the Senate seat is complicated. He overcame two better-known rivals in the primary with an outsider campaign. But in the general election, El-Sayed must maintain support from the Arab community and bolster support among African Americans—especially those who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for him in the primary.

Party regulars coming home after an extended and bitter primary isn’t unheard of. But electoral scar tissue can be persistent. The rub for El-Sayed is that there is a history in Michigan of the African American and Black communities being at odds with each other. El-Sayed is asking them to rally around the same candidate in an election where his opponents have actively worked to keep those constituencies divided.

“There are different interests,” said former Michigan House Speaker Joe Tate, a Democrat who attended the roundtable with El-Sayed. “And sometimes that can show itself as points of friction.”

Simmering Tensions

There are almost 400,000 Arab Americans in Michigan, according to the Arab American Institute. That’s nearly 4 percent of the state’s population. About 14 percent of Michigan’s population is African American, about 1.41 million voters, according to census figures.

Broken down by party affiliation, the vast majority of African American voters in Michigan are Democrats—about 83 percent, according to a Pew Research Center survey of voters. Black voters in Michigan have consistently leaned heavily Democratic in recent elections, even when Republicans and Donald Trump made gains among that constituency. Meanwhile, Arab American voters are more evenly split, with 38 percent identifying as Democrats or Democratic-leaning and the same percentage identifying as Republican or Republican-leaning, according to a national Arab American Institute poll.

In 2024, Trump’s re-election campaign worked to rally Arab voters, with former director of national intelligence Ric Grenell taking point on outreach. This was ultimately successful, as Trump won Dearborn, a famously majority-Arab city, by six points over Kamala Harris. That support helped the Republican president win the state for the second time in three tries.

During the August primary, El-Sayed won almost 80 percent of the vote in Dearborn. But he struggled among Black voters, getting crushed by Stevens in the majority-Black parts of the state. The dichotomy in how the two constituencies voted for El-Sayed reflects broader differences.

Arab voters strongly oppose U.S. support for Israel’s actions in Gaza. Throughout El-Sayed’s Senate campaign, he’s been one of the more outspoken Democratic Senate candidates in support of Palestinian rights and in opposition to robust economic aid to Israel over the war in Gaza. He’s refrained from giving a one-word answer about whether Israel has a right to exist. He supported the Uncommitted movement during the 2024 Democratic primary, when President Joe Biden was running for re-election, before endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president when she became the nominee.

Some Black voters, by contrast, have viewed El-Sayed skeptically for initially refraining from backing the Biden-Harris ticket and, effectively, withholding support from the first Black vice president in American history. And here, El-Sayed is running up against some deep fault lines.

“I think Abdul is facing a couple of challenges that might not be his fault. One of them is that there has been a historic conflict between Black folks and Middle Eastern folks in Michigan,” said Macomb County Commissioner Michael Howard, who is Black. “Some of the relationships have been absolutely great, and some of it has been absolutely contentious, and there has been some conflict there.”

Howard added that Harris’s loss in Michigan left Black voters feeling like, “Our candidate was put up, and you folks turned your backs on us. So that’s two strikes” for Abdul.

The tensions between the two communities go beyond politics. In September, a car crash involving an 18-year-old Arab woman and a 49-year-old Black woman resulted in an angry crowd of Arab American men surrounding the Black woman and yelling racial slurs at her. Activists and community leaders have pointed to that example.

“Unfortunately, there has been a lot of friction … I think more so in a lot of the Arab-owned businesses and in the way Black residents feel they have been treated,” Joel Rutherford, a longtime community activist and local government official, told me. Rutherford cited the car crash incident and said, “Once people hear about it, let’s face it, those kinds of things spread like wildfire. And unfortunately, because it seems like that’s happened [multiple times] over the years, that’s just exacerbated the problem. It’s something that, to me, the communities haven’t taken the time to really get to know each other. They’ve kind of decided that one group is on one side, one group is on the other.”

Political Outreach

El-Sayed and his team took his narrower-than-expected primary win to heart. Since becoming the nominee, he has participated in roundtable discussions with Black leaders. He’s campaigned with former Vice President Kamala Harris (even as other candidates have recoiled at the prospect), as well as Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE), one of the few African American legislators in the Senate. El-Sayed has appeared on numerous Black-focused podcasts, like The Breakfast Club and Higher Learning. Former President Barack Obama is scheduled to stump for El-Sayed and other Michigan Democrats later this month.

Obama formally endorsed El-Sayed on Monday in a campaign ad. But there have been bumps. A CNN report found that in 2012, El-Sayed wrote a critical essay about Obama’s presidency. El-Sayed recently walked back that criticism, likening Obama to a father figure that he can admire without unilaterally supporting all his actions.

Obama has likewise defended his plans to campaign for El-Sayed. “I’m going to go to Michigan to campaign for Abdul El-Sayed. And people are like, ‘Well, he’s really left-wing,’” Obama said at a recent fireside chat in Virginia. “But I don’t know, he’s for a higher minimum wage and health care for all, and it doesn’t seem crazy to me. You know, FDR was for that too.”

El-Sayed has enjoyed consistent but less visible support from Arab donors and outside groups dating back to when he unsuccessfully ran for governor. During the Senate primary, an under-the-radar super PAC called American Priorities, formed to counter spending from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), spent $600,000. El-Sayed was endorsed by Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a progressive favorite and one of the few sitting Arab Americans in Congress. The Arab American Political Action Committee and The Arab American News both endorsed him, as did Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn. On primary day, El-Sayed won 70 percent of the vote in Dearborn Heights, which has a large Arab American population.

In the general election, El-Sayed has enjoyed support from prominent Muslim leaders, too. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently appeared at a tightly controlled fundraiser for the Democratic nominee in New York. Others, like Rep. Ilhan Omar, have been early supporters. The conventional wisdom has long been that El-Sayed would enjoy strong support among Arab American voters.

But for all the tacit support El-Sayed has maintained among Arab voters in Michigan and nationally, and the work he’s put in to shift the backing Stevens enjoyed among Black voters to his side, El-Sayed has not built an unbreakable coalition. His leads in polling, while clear (21 of the last 22 polls since Labor Day show him in front), are not overwhelming.

The Homestretch

For months, the campaign of El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, has attempted to shave off slices of voters from various Democratic-leaning constituencies. The Rogers campaign has aggressively touted any support he’s built among Democrats to ease Democratic discomfort with crossover voting. (Some of this appears disingenuous; notable members of the “Democrats for Rogers” coalition have supported Republicans for years.)

Following this pattern, Rogers and his team have made plays to disillusion Arab voters with El-Sayed and attract African American voters. The Rogers campaign ran an ad featuring a young Persian American man arguing that El-Sayed is too closely linked to radical Islam and al-Qaeda. In the first of two debates Rogers is set to participate in, he repeatedly attacked the Democratic nominee on those same tenuous attack lines.

Another ad Rogers released on Monday featured three Black Michiganders talking directly to the camera about how they are voting for Rogers because El-Sayed is “too arrogant and way too extreme.” Rogers obviously doesn’t want to make the campaign about an unpopular president; he’s tried to mildly break from Trump over the trade war in Canada, for example. His pitch is that Black voters, Arab voters, Democrats, and Republicans all need to vote for him to block a dangerous, radical proxy for terrorism from entering the Senate. A different Democrats for Rogers ad features a number of Black voters saying they planned to vote for Rogers. There is also a line in the ad that says, “He cares more about the West Bank than West Detroit,” even though there is no West Detroit.

One of the latest—and likely among the final few—campaign ads for El-Sayed is called “War,” which trumpets the Democrat’s opposition to “Trump’s war abroad” and the exorbitant spending that comes with it. In multiple frames, the ad features El-Sayed smiling in a flannel shirt, with an acoustic guitar playing in the background. It’s a clear pushback against the abrasive, radical caricature of El-Sayed that Republicans want to portray.

El-Sayed’s campaign is taking a multipronged approach to the final stretch of the campaign. They are working to build support in the northern and more rural parts of the state while also trying to close the deal with voters who supported Haley Stevens—especially around Detroit—and make sure not to reverse any gains Michigan Democrats have made with Arab voters, who not so long ago backed Trump but are drifting left.

El-Sayed has held private fundraisers with prominent Muslim, Arab, and African American donors and leaders in the final stretch of the campaign. His campaign is slated to hold another one with former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer, one of the city’s more successful recent mayors, who is Black.

I recently asked a top Michigan strategist with extensive campaign experience in the state if it’s fair to expect robust Arab turnout for El-Sayed. In response, the strategist said, “Yeah, but it’s just a very small percentage of the vote.”

Still, it is an important bloc of support. Margins of victory in Senate races in Michigan have shrunk dramatically over the past two decades. Twenty years ago, Debbie Stabenow won her 2006 Senate race by almost 16 percentage points. The late Sen. Carl Levin won his 2008 Senate race in a wave election by almost 29 percentage points. Yet the most recent Senate race between now-Sen. Elissa Slotkin and Rogers was decided by fewer than 20,000 votes, or 0.3 percentage points.

In other words, in a state where over eight million Michiganders vote, a large chunk of the 300,000 to 400,000 voters who identify as Arab could make the difference.

El-Sayed has, in character, presented an optimistic front. He’s recently predicted in multiple interviews that he could win by as much as seven percentage points, even as polling averages show him leading Rogers by 2.7 points.

The indicators suggest that this is a wave election year for Democrats, so it’s conceivable that a candidate like El-Sayed—who is enjoying large crowds in redder parts of Michigan—could win by a healthy margin. But it’s even easier to imagine El-Sayed, having overcome a bruising primary and an only slightly less arduous general election, eking out a victory by a minuscule number of votes. In that scenario, support from as many Black and Arab voters as possible would be invaluable.

“I think there’s a general sense that this will be a close race,” Tate said, adding, “In my mind, whatever friction points [Democrats] do have, Trump is overshadowing the whole thing.”

El-Sayed’s campaign has worked to turn Donald Trump’s support for Rogers and some of the Rogers campaign attacks into an advantage. On Wednesday, the campaign tweeted out a clip of El-Sayed where he says, “We’re too busy fighting each other because of our differences to realize they are picking our pockets at every turn.”