Abdul El-Sayed’s ascent to politics started in Detroit. Now, residents of the city may be the deciding factor in whether he becomes Michigan’s next US Senator.
El-Sayed is facing an uphill battle in the November election: Although he won the Democratic nomination, a majority of the city’s primary voters rejected him in favor of his opponent. Rep. Haley Stevens won the race in Detroit by 28 percentage points.
Now El-Sayed is in the final stretch of a hotly contested race against Mike Rogers, a former member of the US House and state Senate who is endorsed by President Donald Trump. Michigan is among a handful of battleground states that could determine whether the Democratic Party can flip the Senate, and consequently, how easily Trump will be able to push through his agenda for his last two years in the White House. The margin of votes El-Sayed is able to secure in Detroit could be the deciding factor in whether he is able to defeat Rogers.
Given Detroit’s strong Democratic presence, Rogers isn’t expected to make major strides in the city, but the race could come down to whether El-Sayed can energize enough turnout. Experts say racial, religious and generational divides are among El-Sayed’s greatest challenges in Detroit.
Veteran pollster Ed Sarpolus told BridgeDetroit that El-Sayed will need strong turnout among people of color. Black people make up about 14% of the state and overwhelmingly vote blue.
“The reason why Democrats win in November [is] because of the people of color vote, nearly 90 to 92% Democratic,” Sarpolus said. “Sometimes up to 16 or 20% of the Democratic vote is people of color. So if El-Sayed loses the people of color vote, it’ll be very difficult for him to win the general election.”
But polling indicates he has a tough road ahead. A Washington Post/Schar School survey last month found that among likely Black voters, 83% said they want Democrats to control the Senate, but 67% back El-Sayed.
At 30 years old, he made history in 2015 as the youngest public health official in a major American city. After he led Detroit’s health department from 2015 to 2017, El-Sayed left to pursue an unsuccessful bid for governor in 2018. From 2023 to 2025, he led the Wayne County Department of Health, Human & Veterans Services before departing to launch his campaign for Senate last April.
“I have a long history in the city. My whole history of public service goes back to my time in the city and the time in the county,” El-Sayed told BridgeDetroit during a recent interview.
Alyssa Brouillet, communications director for the Rogers campaign, said in a statement to BridgeDetroit that Rogers is “meeting Detroiters where they’re at and talking about real solutions to the challenges they’re facing.”
“From his four-step plan to make housing more affordable to incentivizing reading reclamation, Mike is ready to get to work for working families. Meanwhile, Abdul has taken these communities for granted,” the statement read.
If El-Sayed wins in November, he’ll be among 100 people in one of the most powerful chambers of the US government. Dale Thomson, a political science professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, said senators can be particularly powerful by way of “protecting a community from what might otherwise be damaging legislation.”
A big part of a senator’s role is also rooted in the committees they serve on. While assignments are ultimately up to party leadership, members can make requests. El-Sayed said he hopes to serve on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, an area he said he knows well when it comes to the city. From the Budget Committee, he said he wants to make federal dollars work for everyday Americans rather than against them, and on the Foreign Relations Committee, he said he would push for responsible tariff and trade policies to address the needs of Detroit’s auto industry. El-Sayed has also campaigned on redirecting foreign military aid to address domestic issues.
But the Democratic nominee still has a long road ahead to get there in January. El-Sayed, who has hosted over 600 events since launching his campaign, said his strategy in the final stretch is the same as it has been the last 18 months – to continue meeting Michiganders where they are. “You’ve never talked enough to voters.”
Connecting with Black Detroiters
El-Sayed says he has tried to connect with Black Detroiters after his primary loss in the city. He introduced a plan last month to address the federal government’s failures in meeting the needs of Black Americans. The plan includes efforts to address the housing shortage, food deserts, Black maternal mortality disparities, lead service line replacement, and passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
El-Sayed, an Egyptian American Muslim, said Black Detroiters have faced discrimination from people who look like him and said his commitment to racial equity is “foundational in why I do what I do.”
“Too often, when you’re a Black Detroiter, your interaction with somebody that looks like me is that you’re watching a kid get sold a Lucy (LSD) out the back, or interacting behind bulletproof glass, or being told that there’s not a bathroom when there really is one. That’s awful, unacceptable,” he said, referencing Black Detroiters who say they are mistreated and discriminated against at Arab and Chaldean-owned gas stations in the city. “My interaction with the city has always been to try to lead with, and for, Black Detroiters, and to frankly stand up to people who look like me when they’re doing the wrong thing.”
El-Sayed also noted his personal history to the work of the Civil Rights Movement by way of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that abolished discriminatory quotas and enabled El-Sayed’s father to immigrate from Egypt.
“I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the advocacy of the Black community for creating the opportunity that I get to live out right now.”
Tijuana Morris, a community activist and retired Detroit police officer, told BridgeDetroit at a campaign event last month that she has been supporting El-Sayed since the primary because of his background as a doctor. Morris, who is part of the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality, appreciated his effort to set up free Narcan vending machines when he was running Wayne County’s health department.
“In an unorthodox way, he sees the illness in Detroit, as well as Michigan, and he’s trying to heal to the best of his ability, and that’s what a doctor does,” she said.
Morris, 71, is a member of the Barton-McFarlane Neighborhood Association on the west side and said the community has built bridges with Dearborn. But a “great divide” emerged in the 2024 presidential election over disagreements on then-Vice President Kamala Harris, who would’ve been the country’s first Black Indian woman to be elected to president had she defeated Trump. El-Sayed, for his part, had endorsed Harris the day after she announced her campaign, and she’s since joined him on the campaign trail for his Senate race.
Morris, the Democratic Party’s 12th precinct delegate, said she pressed El-Sayed on key issues when he visited her precinct, including how he voted in 2024, and she supported him after that conversation.
“I found out he’s an American,” Morris said. “I’m Black, but I’m also American, and that’s our common ground. You don’t have to expect everybody to be the same. So he’s bridging the gap.”
District 7 Detroit City Council Member Denzel McCampbell, who is also supporting El-Sayed, points to the outside spending in the primary as the driving force behind the candidate’s loss in the city. That included a record-setting $30 million from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, which endorsed Stevens over her support for Israel. Another $17 million came from A Stronger Michigan, a dark money-funded super PAC created this summer that closed down after the primary.
That money funded a swarm of ads largely targeting Black voters at the apparent urging of Stevens’ campaign. A section of her campaign website, often referred to as a “redbox” that is used to coordinate messaging goals with super PACs while circumventing federal rules, specifically called for ads to target Black Democratic primary voters, both across the state and specifically in Detroit.
Some ads ran on false claims that El-Sayed was sexist and had disrespected former First Lady Michelle Obama. Others appeared to imply that former President Barack Obama had endorsed Stevens. After the primary, Obama endorsed El-Sayed and is scheduled to appear at an Oct. 24 campaign rally in Detroit in support of him and the rest of the state’s Democratic ticket.
Religion plays a role
Ads also criticized El-Sayed’s support for the Uncommitted movement, a protest vote in the 2024 Democratic primary when then-President Joe Biden was the presumptive nominee. Pro-Palestinian supporters used the otherwise inconsequential primary to register their dissent with the administration about its handling of Gaza and voted “Uncommitted” instead of for Biden. After Harris replaced him, putting the country on the path to electing its first Black woman, some pro-Palestinian advocates who typically voted Democrat rejected the party’s nominee.
Keith Williams, chair of the Michigan Democratic Party Black Caucus, endorsed Stevens in the primary, saying she had reached out to him and they’d built a relationship over three years. He also criticized El-Sayed’s support for Uncommitted, which he said dissuaded voters.
“Haley is a wonderful person. I was working my butt off to get her elected, but God knows best,” Williams said.
For November, he said he’s trying to give El-Sayed the “benefit of the doubt” and the resources to beat Rogers.
“For the next two years, Donald Trump needs to be stopped. And so, from that perspective, I just think Black voters should do the right thing and get out the vote,” Williams said. “Let’s get rid of what is wrong in our country. That’s Donald Trump and their politics.”
El-Sayed agreed that the November election has more at stake.
“[In the primary], it was an intra-party disagreement. This is Democrats versus MAGA, and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a lot of MAGA here in the city of Detroit,” El-Sayed said. “And, in winning that primary, the way we won, I think we showed a lot of Detroiters that we got the grit to take on Trump.”
According to the Washington Post/Schar School survey, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jocelyn Benson has a larger advantage over Republican John James than El-Sayed does in his race. The Post reported that Benson gets slightly more support from Black voters, independents and others who also say they would be unwilling to support a Muslim for president.
Rogers has campaigned off that sentiment. The day after the primary, he released a statement calling El-Sayed an “extremist” and purported he had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Attack ads since then have echoed the same tropes.
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Thomson said Rogers has been running an “extremely negative campaign, really trying to stoke fear in people to get them out to vote, if not for Mike Rogers then against El-Sayed.”
“It’s pretty clear that he’s not running on any of his own issues so much as he is trying to say ‘I’m a safer candidate,’” Thomson said. In a Democratic stronghold like Detroit, he said that even if Rogers can’t attract votes from Democrats, it will help the Republican nominee even if they simply stay home.
Rogers has attempted to make inroads in the Democratic stronghold. About two weeks after the August primary, he launched a “Democrats for Mike Rogers” outreach effort. State Rep. Karen Whitsett, a conservative Democrat, has helped lead the coalition, and the campaign held a press conference outside of Whitsett’s mother-in-law’s house to announce it. Whitsett did not respond to BridgeDetroit’s requests for comment. Rogers recently ran an ad featuring Black Democrats from Southeast Michigan who are backing him over El-Sayed. Valeria Berry, a Detroit resident and former staffer to US Rep. Shri Thanedar, says in the ad that El-Sayed is “way too arrogant and way too extreme.”
District 6 Council Member Gabriela Santiago-Romero, who endorsed El-Sayed last year, told BridgeDetroit she believes some Detroiters chose Stevens in the primary because she is a “Democrat that is known,” and residents wanted to make sure the party’s nominee could win in November.
“There’s also the other truth, which is that there is so much division right now within our communities, our Black and brown communities. There is some very real hate and racist rhetoric against Abdul for being Muslim, and that’s something that the city, right now, we are reckoning with,” she said.
Immediately after the primary, Santiago-Romero said she’d heard from colleagues that some residents planned to vote for Rogers because of El-Sayed’s religious identity. Santiago-Romero blames white supremacy for the division.
“This playbook that is old as time – divide and conquer – is nothing new,” she said. “Unfortunately, it works very, very well, time and time again.”
Barb Matney, a community leader in Warrendale, which borders Dearborn and Dearborn Heights, said the tension between Black and Arab Americans was not as widespread as it appeared in the public sphere. Matney, president of the Warrendale Community Organization, told BridgeDetroit that she’s seen instances of mistreatment from both communities but residents for the most part get along.
“Sometimes I think the media blows things up a little bit just for a story,” Matney said.
Matney, who’s supporting El-Sayed, said people should vote based on the issues rather than the skin color of a candidate.
Generational divide
Detroit’s primary results also suggest El-Sayed faces a generational divide. Both Democratic candidates received a similar number of votes from early and same-day ballots. But Stevens soared in absentee ballots, receiving over 31,000 votes compared to El-Sayed’s 8,924. A majority of absentee ballot voters tend to be older Americans.
Overall, Democrats dominated in the August election, with over 1.5 million people voting in the Senate primary compared to roughly 930,000 in the contested Republican gubernatorial race.
“The bottom line is Mike Rogers has to hope that what happened in the primary does not happen in the general, because if the Republicans stay home, it’s very difficult for him to win,” Sarpolus said. “With El-Sayed, he has to hope the younger vote shows up.”
Thomson, the University of Michigan-Dearborn professor, notes that while El-Sayed hasn’t galvanized everyone in the party, he has built up excitement among younger Americans and progressive voters, which he credits for the nominee’s primary victory.
“For him to be able to do that against a candidate like Haley Stevens, who seemed to have all of the incumbent advantages, including support from pretty much everyone in the establishment of the Democratic Party at the state level and the federal level, that says a lot about the enthusiasm out there,” Thomson said.
But in November, both parties face an uphill climb to engage a broad enough swath of voters in a midterm year, especially amid a “general exhaustion with politics.” History suggests the Democratic candidate has some advantage, however, as midterm elections can spur opposition to the party in control of the White House, which would benefit El-Sayed.
“Trump, whether he’s on the ballot or not, seems to be a galvanizing force in both directions,” Thomson said.
El-Sayed has used Rogers’ support for Trump against him, pointing to the war in Iran and the affordability crisis. He also pointed to Rogers’ past legislative record, including his support of the 1999 takeover of the Detroit public school system.
Rogers, meanwhile, has made inroads in the business community. Last month, the Detroit Regional Chamber PAC endorsed him after what President Sandy Baruah told BridgeDetroit was a near-unanimous vote of the board and a “fairly short conversation.”
“He’s someone who can and has reached across the aisle to get things done,” Baruah said, adding that he knew Rogers when he was in the House.
Rogers has repeatedly questioned El-Sayed’s medical credentials in his campaign, reviving controversy that bubbled up during the Democratic primary. El-Sayed is a doctor — he earned a medical degree from Columbia University — but has faced criticism for calling himself a “physician” even though he doesn’t have a license to practice medicine.
El-Sayed went into public health, serving as director in Detroit and Wayne County, rather than practicing medicine.
To those who supported Stevens or state Sen. Mallory McMorrow in the primary and are reluctant to vote for him now, El-Sayed said that “even if you are concerned about some of my positions, the things we agree on are so much bigger,” including the fight against Trump.
“If you believe in democracy, if you believe in union rights, if you believe in reproductive rights, if you believe in economic opportunity, if you believe that people shouldn’t be able to corrupt their office to make millions off the back end, if you believe in more health care for people, then I am your choice,” he said.
“We’ve got an opportunity in this race to go and fight for a US Senate that sees us, and I’m going to make it see us.”