El-Sayed enters race for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat

Former Wayne County Health Director Abdul El-Sayed became the second Democrat to enter the race for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat on Thursday.

El-Sayed, who ran for governor in 2018, joins state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D-Royal Oak) in seeking the seat after incumbent U.S. Sen. Gary Peters (D-Bloomfield Twp.) announced that he would not seek re-election.

Other potential candidates include U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Birmingham) and former Michigan House Speaker Joe Tate (D-Detroit). Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and U.S. Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-Grand Rapids) have also been mentioned as possible Democratic candidates.

El-Sayed said in an interview with the Michigan Advance that he chose to run because “it’s way too hard to get by in Michigan right now, and in the richest, most powerful country in the world, folks shouldn’t have to struggle so hard to afford basic things.”

He said he thinks about the effect rising costs are having on everyday people he met during his 2018 campaign.

“You can just see it grinding them down in ways that shouldn’t have to happen,” El-Sayed said. “I look at what Trump and Musk are doing, and frankly, they’re just making it so much worse. We’ve got to step up and we’ve got to fight back, and I think that happens best in the seat in the U.S. Senate.”

After suffering defeat to President Donald Trump in the last election, El-Sayed says Democrats must “speak plainly about issues of direct relevance to people’s lives in ways that are easy to understand and to embrace, and we have to run on public policy that has direct impact on people’s lives as immediately as possible.”

“I think sometimes when it comes to the way that we run, we try to tact or triangulate to the least common denominator of what we think everybody can be okay with, and I think that makes us seem inauthentic, and it leaves us sounding like we don’t really have anything to say at all,” El-Sayed said.

He said it’s not enough to simply fight against the Trump administration, arguing that Democrats must also articulate a positive, forward-looking message about what they plan to do.

He pointed to universal health coverage, environmental regulations, affordable housing and reigning in corporations and the ultrawealthy as priorities.

“I feel really well placed in a race like this, because I have the opportunity both to be that fighter who stands up to Donald Trump and Elon Musk and all their acolytes, but also to have the skills to be able to build after they’re gone,” El-Sayed said. “And I think there’s going to be a lot of wreckage that they leave in their wake.”

El-Sayed pointed to his time as the director of the Detroit Health Department from 2015 to 2017 as evidence that he is “able to build in the circumstances of wreckage that politicians leave behind.”

But while El-Sayed critiqued Democrats’ messaging, he is taking a different approach than his former boss, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, who is running for governor as an independent and has said that the Democratic and Republican parties have a “death grip” on Michigan politics.

“When parties aren’t delivering for folks, the question isn’t to run outside the party, it’s to have the courage to rethink what your party ought to be doing,” El-Sayed said. “I’ve had my fair share of disagreements with the Democratic Party on a number of issues, and what I’m trying to do about it is to demonstrate the capacity to win elections by campaigning on the issues that I believe in.”

While El-Sayed said there is a short-term urgency to fighting back against the Trump administration, he added that Democrats must also address what he described as a broken political system that allowed Trump to be elected in the first place.

“If you’re unable to address the circumstances that Donald Trump exploited to get elected in 2016 in the first place, then I worry that all you’re doing is kind of your own version of Make America Great Again; it’s just 2015 instead of somewhere in the 1930s, where Donald Trump seems to want to be dragging us,” El-Sayed said.

But many of those policy goals would be difficult to get through the Senate if the filibuster remains in place, El-Sayed said, arguing that it “has served to interfere with more progressive legislation and, frankly, interfere with our ability to deliver on what we say it is that we want to do which has redounded to the benefit of Republicans.”

“Remember, at the end of the day, their governing philosophy is that government is part of the problem, ours is that government is part of the solution,” El-Sayed said. “So anything that stops the government from working inevitably redounds to their benefit.”

El-Sayed said the filibuster is “anti-democratic on its own terms.”

“The idea that one U.S. senator can block legislation for the entire country, it does not comport with the ideals of democracy,” El-Sayed said. 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was widely criticized for breaking a Democratic filibuster to advance a Republican-backed stopgap funding bill earlier this year. El-Sayed declined to commit to supporting any specific candidate to be the Democratic leader if elected, saying he would have to see who seeks the role before making any decisions.

“Anybody who tells you that they’re going to support one person or another without knowing who the alternative is, is just either unsophisticated or unnuanced about the choice in front of you,” El-Sayed said.

McMorrow has indicated that she would not support Schumer to continue as Democratic leader.

Michigan’s soon-to-be senior U.S. senator, Elissa Slotkin, made similar waves in her 2018 campaign for the U.S. House, when she vowed to withhold support from Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker.

El-Sayed said he would find common ground with Slotkin on issues like workers’ rights and environmental protections while “leading on those issues that my background and my experience give me particular expertise on,” like health care.

“She and I are very different people, but what better representation in the state of Michigan than a Jewish woman and a Muslim man,” El-Sayed said.

El-Sayed said he made the decision to run for the U.S. Senate rather than making a second attempt at becoming governor in part after he watched federal funding that the Wayne County Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services get caught in a federal funding freeze.

“I’ve asked myself, where is the fight now? 43% of the state’s budget is federal funds, and I think it’s going to be really difficult for anybody leading our state if Trump and Musk continue to do what they are doing and decimate a lot of the funding that the state relies on,” El-Sayed said. “And so, to me, I think the locus of the fight has to be at the Senate.”

El-Sayed appeared last month at a rally with U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in Warren that drew more than 10,000 people, filling three overflow rooms with an additional crowd gathered outside.

He said the level of enthusiasm “demonstrates a real hunger for a politics that is direct, that is unapologetic and that is consistent with the needs and frustrations that people have in this moment.”

“That, for me, was a really, really important testing point for the argument that we are making here, which is that if we are serious about winning elections in the future, then Democrats have to be serious about being honest, direct and clear about what we fight for, not just what we fight against,” El-Sayed said.

That also extends to the primary, El-Sayed said, saying that one of the mistakes of his 2018 campaign – which ultimately ended with now-Gov. Gretchen Whitmer sweeping all 83 counties – was being too focused on the other candidates in the primary.

“Sometimes we missed the opportunity to just demonstrate – to show people, not tell them – why I’d be the best candidate for them and for the future,” El-Sayed said.

But while that campaign ended nearly seven years ago, he said he’s not concerned about recapturing momentum and standing out in a potentially crowded primary field.

“If there’s any upside, politically, to having a name like mine, it’s that it’s not one that people soon forget,” El-Sayed said.

“If we’re willing to have a very clear conversation that starts with listening and that articulates what we want to deliver, I’m pretty certain that Michiganders are going to remember my name.”