A new Michigan Senate candidate is setting himself apart from Democrats seeking to cast aside Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
“Anybody who tells you that they’re going to unilaterally oppose one potential candidate without knowing who the alternative is, is either unnuanced or unsophisticated,” said Abdul El-Sayed, who officially launched his bid for Senate on Thursday. “So I want to know who is available, who is actively seeking the leadership. I’ll make a decision from there.”
It’s a tacit rebuke of state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and other Democratic candidates who have said recently that they would oppose Schumer amid an intraparty fight over his handling of a GOP-backed government funding bill.
El-Sayed, who had served as the director of Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human, and Veterans Services, is joining a crowded race to succeed retiring Sen. Gary Peters that includes McMorrow, who’s already launched her campaign. Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) and former Michigan state House Speaker Joe Tate are also expected to join the field in the coming weeks.
El-Sayed took up the left lane during a 2018 bid for governor, when he was endorsed by progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), but he lost to now-Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. This time he said he’d eschew labels but would run a campaign “focused on workers.”
“What we need right now is somebody who’s willing to take the fight directly to Trump and Musk, but then also knows how to rebuild a version of our federal government that better serves working people after the carnage that Musk and Trump are going to leave behind, and I think I offer that,” he said.
He also warned against his party taking the “wrong lessons” from its losses.
“If you cut corners and trim your message and you triangulate to the least common denominator, you can find something that’s perfectly inoffensive to everyone, and the problem with that is that you’re not actually saying anything,” he said.
Some Democrats have privately fretted about a messy Senate primary spoiling their chances in the general election in Michigan, a critical battleground, especially if the American Israel Public Affairs Committee gets involved. After the 2024 election exposed deep divisions among Democratic voters over Israel and Gaza, there’s concern among Michigan Democrats over re-litigating their divides.
The deep-pocketed group spent heavily for Stevens in the 2022 cycle when redistricting forced her into a bruising member-on-member primary against Rep. Andy Levin.
El-Sayed had been a prominent backer of the “uncommitted” movement during the presidential election, though he stressed at the time that he would support Democrats for president in the general election over Donald Trump. He said he isn’t concerned about AIPAC’s potential spending in the race.
“Everybody is unified around leadership that reminds the Democratic Party that we ought to be the party of peace and justice, that we ought not to be the party sending bombs and money to foreign militaries to drop bombs on other people’s kids in their schools and their hospitals, when our kids need more, our hospitals and schools need more, and we should be spending that money here at home,” he said.
Michigan is set to be one of the most hotly contested Senate battlefields this cycle, after Trump won the state in 2024. Among Republicans, former Rep. Mike Rogers is already running, and Rep. Bill Huizenga has also floated a bid.
El-Sayed, who met privately with the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm on Tuesday, said it his is “understanding” that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee will stay out of the primary.
The DSCC has previously indicated it would evaluate primaries on a “case by case basis.”
If the campaign arm doesn’t get involved in the primary, it would mark a departure from Democratic leadership’s stance last cycle in Michigan, when party leaders actively steered potential candidates into other offices and talked up then-Rep. Elissa Slotkin’s campaign in a behind-the-scenes effort to head off a competitive Senate primary for an open seat.
In the end, Slotkin cruised to victory in the primary over Hill Harper.