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Could Abdul El-Sayed Upend Democratic Politics for Good?

If Michigan sends a Senator Abdul El-Sayed to Washington, traditional “electability” assumptions will have been shattered for good.

Around 1 pm on an overcast Fourth of July, I sat with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed on a park bench by the shores of Reeds Lake in East Grand Rapids, Michigan. The populist US Senate candidate had just finished walking his third parade of the day, tossing hundreds of pieces of candy and campaign pins, mostly to children, some of whom looked disappointed to get buttons instead of candy. El-Sayed was wearing a stars-and-stripes cowboy hat and bicep-hugging black T-shirt, in which he’d started off the day by dancing to Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” for a video that quickly went viral. He did not look classically senatorial, nor did he attempt to sound it.

“The world is not an episode of The West Wing,” El-Sayed insisted, after I mentioned that he seemed more confrontational than during his widely covered but unsuccessful 2018 run for the Michigan governorship. El-Sayed has called his Democratic opponent, Representative Haley Stevens, nothing more than “a suit with a large AIPAC bank account.” He has described the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers, as having “the charisma of a doorknob” and “the aesthetic of the guy at a country club who sneers at you from his Lincoln.” El-Sayed has promised that by the time he finished with Rogers, pieces of him would be “scattered all over the state of Michigan,” although he clarified that he meant “politically” rather than bodily.

El-Sayed told me that these harsh comments are not slips of the tongue. Polls show Democrats want politicians who fight for them, and are sick of those who follow James Carville’s advice to “roll over and play dead.” For El-Sayed, the fear of seeming “mean” gives the advantage to bullies like Trump. “What did you think fighting was?” El-Sayed asked me. Being meek and polite when the times call for blunt talk, he says, “is why we lose.”

With his credentialed background and soaring speeches, El-Sayed was compared to a left-wing Barack Obama during his first run for office. But he says that Obama’s conciliatory approach toward Republicans produced disappointing results. While “as a man and as a statesman, [Obama] was unparalleled in our time,” El-Sayed told me, “one of the big lessons that I’ve learned is [Republicans] are never going to negotiate with you in good faith, so at the end of the day, don’t give an inch on the things that people need, don’t go in there assuming the compromise because they’re going to fight it tooth and nail.”

And so you won’t find El-Sayed paying cordial tribute to the fundamental decency of Republican candidate Mike Rogers. “I have zero love lost for Mike Rogers,” he told me. “He is a scion of a system that is picking people’s pockets left and right. I’m coming for him. I’m coming for his political future. I want to make sure he never gets to run for office again, because everybody will remember what happened to him in 2026.” Rogers recently threatened to sue El-Sayed for calling him a “pharma lobbyist,” which Rogers is not, although he did receive substantial campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry and arguably served their interests in Congress. (El-Sayed may have been following LBJ’s famous notion that it’s worth it to make your opponent deny an outrageous charge. In a blatantly insincere apology, he said: “My mistake… When I say Mike Rogers, do not think of a pharma lobbyist. When I say pharma lobbyist, do not think of a Mike Rogers.”)

But behind the trash talk and weightlifting videos, El-Sayed is at heart a policy wonk. A Rhodes Scholar with an MD and a PhD, he taught epidemiology at Columbia, and his Google Scholar page is eye-glazingly long. He is not just an advocate for Medicare for All but cowrote the most comprehensive scholarly book on it, a densely end-noted volume from Oxford University Press, as well as co-editing the textbook Systems Science and Population Health, also published by Oxford. Through stretches as health director for both the city of Detroit and Wayne County, El-Sayed focused on small interventions that could improve lives, like giving free eyeglasses to poor children and testing schools for lead.

El-Sayed is not, however, a technocrat stressing incremental tweaks. He wants to fundamentally overhaul the political system, which he says is “spitting out billionaires while union participation is at an all-time low.” He wants to “end the system that allows these 527s and 501(c)(4)s and super PACs to buy politicians and rig the system against us.” In 2018, he described his campaign as an effort to “take and build on what [Bernie Sanders] had done” two years prior. Bernie, he told me, taught him that “standing consistently and deliberately and passionately and confidently on principle matters.”

El-Sayed is running as much against Chuck Schumer as against Donald Trump, drawing applause when he says that anything Schumer and Trump agree on is probably bad for the country. They agree, he says, that we can’t have universal healthcare, that we have to send money to Israel, and that “it’s more important to give a corporation a fat check than to raise the minimum wage for everybody.” Plus: “Go talk to Chuck Schumer and Donald Trump and they both agree that I shouldn’t be inside the US Senate!” (Schumer has not publicly endorsed in the race but has privately signaled his support for Stevens.)

At a July 3 rally in Grand Rapids’ historic Harris Building, El-Sayed........

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