The Democratic Party establishment’s attempt to cancel Abdul El-Sayed appears to have fallen flat.
More than 1,360 people packed Detroit’s Mumford High School on Sunday to hear the Michigan U.S. Senate candidate speak alongside U.S. House candidate Donavan McKinney.
The event was helmed by Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders, who endorsed both candidates, and billed as the latest stop on his popular “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, which drew thousands of supporters in Warren last year.
Polling shows El-Sayed, a former Detroit and Wayne County health official (and former Metro Times contributor), in a three-way tie with U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow ahead of the Aug. 4 Democratic Senate primary. The winner will likely face off against Republican Mike Rogers in the Nov. 3 election.
Meanwhile, McKinney, who currently serves as a state representative, is moving to unseat U.S. Rep. Shri Thanedar in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District.
Among El-Sayed’s fans on Sunday were Lorina and Christopher, supporters since El-Sayed’s unsuccessful 2018 run for Michigan governor, who bolted from their seats to snap a selfie with him before the rally got underway.
“I am really excited to vote for a candidate who I actually agree with their viewpoints and their politics, and it’s refreshing,” Lorina told Metro Times. “It’s sadly kind of rare now.”
Lorina cited El-Sayed’s willingness to speak out against what she called “the genocide” in Gaza, and his refusal to accept money from the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, while Christopher said he supports El-Sayed’s push for universal healthcare.
The two had waited in line for hours; Christopher said he tried but couldn’t squeeze into El-Sayed’s recent rally with Hasan Piker at Michigan State University.
“He’s got more of a national spotlight on him now,” he said.
El-Sayed has been attacked in recent weeks over his campaign appearances with Piker, a popular Twitch streamer and leftist political commentator from Los Angeles. Stevens called the decision “unacceptable,” citing what she described as Piker’s “hurtful and antisemitic comments,” while McMorrow compared Piker to alt-right commentator Nick Fuentes. (A vocal critic of Israel, Piker has repeatedly denounced antisemitism.) The gambit appears to have backfired, with El-Sayed and Piker drawing a month’s worth of mainstream media coverage that only amplified their message — following a recent Gallup poll that found American sentiment turning against Israel as its wars expand in the Middle East.
“When there’s a candidate whose viewpoints I agree with and who I think would serve the majority of the people in a way that makes sense and is accessible, I don’t mind spending time waiting,” Lorina added.
The Detroit rally kicked off with words from Makia Wilson-Lumpkins, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers labor union, and Dan Glass, president of the President of Teamsters Local 332 in Flint. The latter represents nurses involved in a labor dispute at Henry Ford Genesys Hospital who have been on strike since September, making it one of the longest nurse walkouts in recent U.S. history.
When he took the stage, McKinney said that the progressive policies he and El-Sayed are fighting for, like labor rights and universal healthcare, are popular.
“A progressive agenda is a common-sense agenda,” he said.
El-Sayed — who McKinney said could be “the number one doctor we have in the U.S.A.” if elected to Senate — also voiced support for the nurses.
“There is no group of people that shows up like nurses,” El-Sayed said.
“They’re the folks who show up for you on your worst day, and show up for you on your best day. And for the past more than a year now, they’ve been showing up for a fair contract in Flint.”
El-Sayed said his experiences in his final year of medical school at the University of Michigan informed his left-wing point of view. “Too often the answer to what was wrong had less to do with all that physiology we studied and so much more to do with pathologies in our politics — the air we breathe, the water we drink, whether or not you can walk in your community without being a victim of violence, whether or not you can get a doctor in the first place,” he said. “And I realized that I wanted to solve those problems.”
He said he was dismayed by the Trump administration’s freezing of federal funds for health initiatives. Last year, as director of Health, Human, and Veterans Services in Wayne County, he said he was mulling the impact the cuts would have on his department when he saw a notification on his phone announcing that U.S. Senator Gary Peters would not seek reelection.
Shortly after, he said he received a text message from U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Detroit encouraging him to run: “Habibi, this one looks like yours.”
While he emphasized the need for Congress to oppose the president’s agenda, he noted that the problem runs deeper.
“Donald Trump is not himself a disease in our politics, he’s just the worst symptom of the disease,” he said, which is “billionaires, big corporations, and especially interests like AIPAC, who buy and sell politicians to do their bidding instead of ours.”
He called the war in Iran unpopular and wasteful — “We could abolish the medical debt in this country ten times over for what we spent on a war we should have never fought,” he said, to cheers — and accused the Israeli prime minister of dragging the U.S. into its conflicts in the Middle East.
“Benjamin Netanyahu has been searching for 40 years to find a president dumb enough to go to war with Iran,” he said. “And he finally found one in the form of Donald J. Trump.”
El-Sayed also made clear that he opposes antisemitism.
“I want to be clear about something, crystal clear,” he said. “AIPAC and Israel are not the same as Judaism and the Jewish people. I love Judaism and I love the Jewish people … it is important for us to recognize that we love Judaism and the Jewish people because we love people, and we love Palestinians and their rights because we love people.”
El-Sayed elicited one of the loudest cheers of the evening when he called out Trump’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement of brutal tactics against undocumented immigrants.
“ICE is about normalizing putting government thugs on our streets against the Constitution itself,” he said. “And maybe it’s because I ran government agencies, but I can tell you that once a culture of impunity sets in, there is no reform … You cannot reform this … The only logical path is to abolish ICE.”
El-Sayed introduced Sanders as the leader of the progressive movement.
“I’ve been saying the same thing for the better part of a decade … he’s been saying the same thing for the better part of a century,” El-Sayed said.
Sanders, the longest-serving independent in Congress, praised El-Sayed and McKinney as fighters against the status quo.
“In a moment of national crisis, we need leaders in Washington with the guts to take on the political establishment of both political parties,” he said, both of which have become taken over by the interests of the super-wealthy.
“Today in American history, we have more income and wealth inequality than we have ever had in the history of our country,” he said. “I’m sure the kids right here in this high school are probably learning about the Gilded Age. Remember the Gilded Age? The Rockefellers and the Carnegies and all those guys? Tremendous wealth, tremendous power. Nothing, nothing compared to where we are today.”
He pointed to recent wins on the left as a cause for hope, including Zohran Mamdani’s underdog mayoral victory in New York City, Analilia Mejia’s U.S. House win in New Jersey, and Graham Platner’s promising campaign in Maine, but noted that those efforts all required grassroots support.
“Zohran Mamdan started his campaign for mayor of New York City at 1% in the polls,” Sanders said. “He was opposed by the entire Democratic establishment. He was opposed by the President of the United States. He was opposed by every oligarch in New York City. But you know what Mamdani did? He put together a grassroots movement in New York City of 100,000 volunteers who were prepared to knock on doors. It doesn’t matter how much money the other folks have when you have 100,000 people knocking on doors, whether it’s New York or in Michigan for Abdul.”
He added, “What do demagogues like Trump do? What’s their modus operandi? … What they do, is they understand that if they can divide people up, they always win … and what our job is, is to do exactly the opposite. Our job is to bring people together around an agenda that works for all, not just a few.”
