Why Abdul El-Sayed might not be winning Black voters in Michigan
The Guardian · L · trust 49/100
Abdul El-Sayed during a news conference following the March for the Many in Detroit, Michigan, on 2 August 2026. Photograph: Sarah Rice/Bloomberg via Getty Images View image in fullscreen Abdul El-Sayed during a news conference following the March for the Many in Detroit, Michigan, on 2 August 2026. Photograph: Sarah Rice/Bloomberg via Getty Images US midterm elections 2026 Why Abdul El-Sayed might not be winning Black voters in Michigan The Michigan candidate for US Senate seat is running without directly acknowledging specific constituent groups
Prefer the Guardian on Google A bdul El-Sayed has an impressive résumé: Rhodes scholar, professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, executive director of the Detroit health department. And, at 41, the Michigan Democratic senatorial candidate represents a new generation of politicians, a shift that he also embodies sartorially. Whereas casual dress for many politicians is a tieless dress shirt with rolled up sleeves, El-Sayed has embraced a post-corporate, digital nomad-ish uniform: fitted black T-shirt, slim jeans and sneakers.
His progressive politics are having a moment among liberals, and he remains unswervingly disciplined about his message: “Money Out of Politics, Money in Your Pocket, Medicare for All.” On paper he appears well-aligned to Democratic sensibilities in this moment, and he is competitive in the polls. But his support is softer than overall Democratic sentiment would dictate, especially among Black voters.
A Washington Post-Schar School poll released last month found that among likely Black voters, 83% said they wanted Democrats to control the Senate yet only 67% backed El-Sayed. His campaign reps attribute some of this gap to a heavily financed onslaught of negative ads run against him in the primaries, and they’re desperately trying to undo the harm.
Read more But El-Sayed is attempting to do so in a novel, and risky, way: employing political universalism to focus on a common set of issues that he believes will be broadly resonant rather than focusing on the specific, sectarian and uniquely differentiated interests of the disparate groups huddled under the Democrats’ big tent.
In explaining his strategy, El-Sayed said, “Democratic politics too often tries to pander to folks on their differences rather than to bring us together across our similarities.” He continued: “I want to campaign on those things that all of us need and deserve in our lives.”
It’s a lofty ideal in principle – especially for older Black voters who might be more accustomed to direct appeals. But in practice it means that group-specific concerns go unacknowledged: the “Priorities” section on his campaign website doesn’t mention the names of minority groups or the words “racial” and “racism”. Instead, his references are oblique, sidestepping direct invocations.
Women and LGBTQ+ Michiganders are only explicitly mentioned in a section about healthcare freedoms with his pledge to “fight to codify the rights once protected by Roe v Wade into federal law”, and a stance that he will “oppose any effort to criminalize certain medications and the use of lawfare or funding cuts to stop healthcare providers from providing full-spectrum healthcare that meet all the needs of their diverse communities”.
The site focuses on immigration and his pledge to abolish ICE, without mentioning the words “Hispanics” or “Latinos”, even though the Detroit Metro Times reported in April that most of the people arrested by federal immigration agents in Michigan, as of that time, were from Latin America.
Under a subsection called “Civil Rights & Liberties”, El-Sayed simply promises to “protect the rights of all Americans, regardless of where they live, where their parents came from, how – or if – they pray, their sexual orientation, gender identity, how old they are or how much money they make”. And the site invokes the Flint water crisis without mentioning Black people or racism , instead saying that he will “fight for a federal water guarantee that every family has access to at least 50 gallons of clean water per person per day”.
The closest the site gets to mentioning Black people directly is in the use of the acronym HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities) among a list of education services and institutions he would seek to fund.
This lack of acknowledgment may well be manifesting in a lack of enthusiasm.
O n 3 October, a brisk, clear Saturday, El-Sayed held a public rally in Flint, a city of roughly 80,000 people, the majority of whom are Black. A line snaked around the St Michael Catholic church as people inched forward to get one of about 400 seats inside. But, when the event began, only about on in 10 of those seats appeared by the Guardian’s count to be filled by Black people. The stump speech, a little more than 20 minutes long, went much the same way that his campaign site does: sticking to the central platform message and not explicitly acknowledging the constituent demographic groups of the Democratic coalition.
When the attenders were allowed to ask questions, Michele Kelly, a 67-year-old grandmother, lifelong Flint resident and supporter of El-Sayed, said that many people in low-income housing where she lives lack information and enthusiasm. She asked him what he and his team could do to “get that demographic riled up and encouraged to come out” and support him.
Kelly said after the event that she was specifically referring to Black people in her question, and “if I hadn’t raised my hand, there wouldn’t have been no conversation about Blackness”. But, in his answer, El-Sayed never directly addressed Black people, instead referring to “those folk” and “people like that” and bemoaning money in politics and a “profound lack of trust”.
After El-Sayed won the primary in mid-September – without winning the Black vote – his campaign issued a press release “outlining the legislation he will introduce or support in the US Senate to directly…
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