Abdul El-Sayed Is Running Through, Not Around, the Right’s Racism

WARREN, MICHIGAN – On an early-October afternoon, Macomb County’s Carpenters Union Local 1234 hall is standing room only for Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s “It Shouldn’t Be This Hard” tour.

Warren City Treasurer Lorie Barnwell is up first, and she explains that the powerful have been running the same playbook for millennia: create a mountain of problems and then find a scapegoat to blame. This is a playbook they’ve run in places like Macomb, a majority-white, working-class suburb of Detroit that inspired the phrase “Reagan Democrat.” President Trump has convincingly won Macomb in each of the last three elections.

“Abdul’s gonna stand up for the scapegoats!” Barnwell roars. “The poor, the immigrant, the sick, people of a different color, religion, women” and “the LGBT community.”

In a midterm where Republicans are lacking a record to run on, their last resort, as one Trump operative told Axios this summer, has been to make it “a hate election.” And boy, have they. Attacks against El-Sayed in particular have evolved from 1980s-style panics about socialism into gutter Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism. Former Klan leader David Duke is right; his ideas have found a home in the modern Republican Party.

Take for example Vice President JD Vance, who in rallies has cast El-Sayed as a shadowy figure who “wants to litigate ancient grievances.” In the small southeast Michigan town of Monroe, Vance said that “what excites him is this prospect of wielding the power of a country he hates,” and that he perhaps sees the country as “too white or too proud or too American.” Separately, an ad being run widely in the state claims that El-Sayed would usher in Sharia law, another golden oldie for Republican fearmongers.

People need their villains, and El-Sayed offers them one. But Michigan’s U.S. Senate candidate has not sat back amid the howling bigotry of Vance, Donald Trump, his corporate stuffed-shirt opponent Mike Rogers, and the entire Republican establishment, fueled by over $130 million in dark-money spending. Instead, he has confronted the right’s extravagant racism by addressing it directly, hammering his opponents for choosing hate over the giant cost-of-living crisis staring every voter in the face.

As the election rhetoric nears its peak, the question is whether El-Sayed’s egalitarian, anti-war message can overcome the avalanche of racist hatred.

“They Want You to Fear My Name”

The same day that Vance launched his attack in Monroe, El-Sayed was speaking at a packed auditorium in Marquette, the largest city in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. And he shot back by turning the tables on the vice president’s attempts to write people like him out of the American story.

“They want you to fear my name. They want you to fear my faith,” El-Sayed told the audience. But he said that the real fears of working families, like “how hard it is to survive the next month” or “wondering whether or not you’re going to have to skimp on meals tomorrow” were going unaddressed by Republican leaders.

El-Sayed’s vision of America is a place where cherished values are expressed through guarantees to economic and social freedom. “Don’t lecture me about America,” he said in Marquette. “In America, we’re big enough to guarantee health care to our people rather than taking it away … to invest in unions rather than busting them.”

This vision continued to be developed in Warren. “There are assaults being launched against labor every single day by the very corporations who buy off too much of our politics,” El-Sayed tells the audience. A strong labor movement once forced wages to rise in lockstep with worker productivity. After 40 years of the right-wing assaults El-Sayed describes, the two have totally detached. Since 1975, $80 trillion has flowed upward to the obscenely wealthy from the bottom 90 percent of Americans.

“I’ll always walk with my union sisters and brothers” on the picket line, El-Sayed says, “but I also want to make it so that we don’t have to walk as much because they understand that their senator’s got their back.” That means fighting for the PRO Act and helping to “normalize and enable union organizing in every sector of American life.”

“We’ve got to say it ten toes down from our whole chest: union yesterday, union today, union tomorrow,” he finishes, echoing a period of labor militancy politicians rarely invoke.

The scene in Macomb has been mirrored almost daily across the state. El-Sayed has played to full houses in Wexford and Ionia Counties, places Trump won by more than 30 points; hundreds over capacity in Traverse City; and 1,200 in a Port Huron auditorium, where Trump dominated by 35 points in 2024.

Since retaking office, Trump has betrayed his promise to end working families’ “long economic nightmare.” Real wages have declined as his Iran and tariff wars spike gas and food prices. Earlier in the year, the administration cut $500 million in food assistance, leading to a surge in hunger and forcing strained food pantries to make “heartbreaking” choices. In Michigan alone, over 200,000 have lost their health care because of Trump’s senseless Medicaid work requirements and the elimination of Affordable Care Act subsidies.

El-Sayed’s signature strength has been to describe both the nature and solution to this pain.

Take his inescapable slogan: “Money out of politics. Money in your pocket. Medicare for All.” Life could be far less punishing and toilsome, he argues, if billionaires didn’t control Mike Rogers, the Trump administration, and our politics in general; if health care were a guaranteed public good; and if we avoided brutal and costly wars that drive up prices and destroy life instead of improving it.

And it plainly helps that El-Sayed comes off as willing and eager to fight for this future in the halls of power. Polling consistently shows that Democratic voters are desperate for leaders who will rattle the system on behalf of regular people, shattering James Carville’s advice to “roll over and play dead.”

At the Macomb town hall, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) downplays the ongoing fight between progressives and centrists in the Democratic Party. The real divide is “between fight and flight,” she argues. “I am on Team Fight and I need someone with me who is on Team Fight.” Slotkin is a centrist who beat Rogers in the tough Democratic year of 2024 by a razor-thin margin.

Michigan’s soon-to-be senior senator is partially right. The obvious response is that the party’s base is hungry for a fight in favor of the overwhelmingly popular progressive agenda of Medicare for All, cutting ties with Israel’s genocidal and apartheid regime, and banishing corporations’ cartoonishly corrupt influence over our politics. El-Sayed has braided the need to fight with the policies he believes Democrats need to fight for.

Since then, he’s raked in endorsements from the party’s biggest stars, campaigning with Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and AOC, and has mostly unified a diverse base, as the Prospect has covered.

“I think that message of the people vs. the powerful is what is helping him in these areas,” Treasurer Barnwell tells the Prospect.

It’s important feedback for progressive populists who have been told they are “not popular” outside of liberal big cities.

According to a recent New York Times/Siena University poll, “Support for Dr. El-Sayed appears to be fueled by the popularity of his economic message and his vocal support for single-payer health care.” He’s also “winning 8 percent of voters who supported Mr. Trump” in 2024. If El-Sayed can peel off a slice of these voters, progressives will have the clearest proof yet that they can win in battleground states.

A Weak Candidate, a Weak President

“The vibes on the ground are the worst I’ve seen in my life,” one young Michigan Republican operative complained. “No one wants to do shit.”

Everyone knows why. Mike Rogers is uniquely weak because he is glued to President Trump, who is currently in approval-rating hell and dragging candidates like Rogers down with him.

Rogers is weighed down by other baggage. He is a yacht-owning insider who left Congress to get rich in the corporate sector at a time of record-breaking inequality. He’s a national security establishment creature in a ferociously anti-establishment environment. In some circles, he is best known for his record as a self-acknowledged “champion” of Big Pharma who consistently opposed “measures to expand coverage and rein in prescription prices,” as the Detroit Metro Times reports. In others, he’s seen as a war hawk who advocated bombing Iran “before it was cool” and defended Trump’s tariff policy before reversing himself on both.

Polling shows that 64 percent of Michiganders, a state whose economic fate is more tied to Canada than any other, oppose Trump’s tariff war, while 67 percent disapprove of his handling of the Iran war.

El-Sayed has nailed Rogers to both issues every chance he gets. A recent ad opens with Rogers claiming that the last two years have been “amazing,” before cutting to $5 gas, grocery inflation, ICE assassinations, and the U.S. massacre of 120 Iranian children. Woven throughout are photos of Trump with tech CEOs, Jeffrey Epstein, Vladimir Putin, and Benjamin Netanyahu. The ad ends by encouraging you to vote for El-Sayed if the last two years haven’t been “amazing.”

When you look at the full picture, you can appreciate the pickle Mike Rogers finds himself in. Everything he’s represented since entering public life—the warmongering and obedience to corporate power—is now hideously unpopular, just like the president who talked him into running. Meanwhile, his opponent is promising to give his worst enemies free, high-quality health care.

The thrashing tantrums that El-Sayed is a “jihadist,” “Islamofascist and communist” trying to ruin Christmas may look like the signs of a deeply disturbed and deteriorating mind, and in Trump’s case they certainly are. But it is also utterly predictable. As Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud tells the Prospect, the Republicans are “ramping up the vitriol alongside both the rise of costs in every category” and “the more real it looks like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed will win.”

Rogers’s mission is to “distract the American public from the pain at the pump and the pain at the grocery store,” he says, and from “the fact that [Republicans] are failing to deliver on the affordability agenda” they promised voters.

It could still work. The greatest predictor of electoral success is still who raises the most money, and El-Sayed is at a significant cash disadvantage. To make sure his message reaches people, he and his grassroots army will have to run through, not around, a field littered with inexhaustible racists. Plus, negative ads run because they work, and hate can be a powerful motivator.

For Macomb County Treasurer Lorie Barnwell, it’s what we should expect from a fearful ruling class. Rogers is “on the other side of the people vs. powerful. So if you’re on the powerful side, you have to make people scared to vote for you.”