Next week Kamala Harris campaigns in Michigan with Abdul El-Sayed, the Sanders-endorsed nominee who says he’s a capitalist. She endorsed him after he almost lost the primary. This will be their first appearance together.
Michigan is not friendly terrain for Harris on paper. Trump won the state in 2024.
They will appear together Tuesday at a black maternal health roundtable to discuss costs, outcomes, and disparities in pregnancy and birth. In a 2022 interview, El-Sayed said a privatized, partitioned insurance system reimburses “different people’s bodies” differently by income, and that income “differs based on the color of their skin.” He added that racism still blocks investment in public goods and outweighs “the self-interest of … lower income white folks.” That is the racial frame Democrats still try to run on.
Democrats believe they need black voter turnout in Detroit and Wayne County, plus enough suburban and union voters, to keep Rogers from running up the rest of the map.
Harris’s spokesman, Eduardo Negron, pitched the Michigan stop as turnout in a critical state and a chance to flip the Senate against what he called Donald Trump’s corruption.
El-Sayed told Politico that people in places like Detroit look up to Harris as an “inspirational leader,” and that he was grateful she was coming to have “conversations about what it takes to get the turnout up.”
He has never held elected office. In 2018 he lost the Democratic primary for governor to Gretchen Whitmer by more than 20 points. He later rebuilt a public-health resume and ran again on Medicare for All, money out of politics, and a hard line on Israel’s war in Gaza.
In August he narrowly beat Rep. Haley Stevens, the establishment favorite backed by Gretchen Whitmer, outgoing Sen. Gary Peters, and Chuck Schumer. The margin was under a point after more than 1.5 million votes. El-Sayed ran against outside money, but the primary was still ugly and expensive. Tens of millions in super PAC ads buried the airwaves for Stevens, including a large share from pro-Israel groups. CAIR Action’s PAC put $175,000 behind him, and CAIR-linked donors gave his campaign more than $100,000. He won the liberal strongholds, the college towns, and Arab-majority Dearborn, home to one of the largest Muslim communities in the country.
After winning, he immediately had to sell himself to the rest of the party. Democrats believe Harris’s endorsement will help with some of that cleanup.
It will not erase the money problem. El-Sayed ran against money in politics. Senate Majority PAC, bankrolled in part by a $61 million dark-money transfer from Majority Forward, plus megadonors including Soros’s Democracy PAC, which gave the group $9 million, and and others still reserving tens of millions to elect him.
Republicans are treating the result as a gift. They have branded him a radical who wants to abolish ICE and impose Medicare for All on a state of auto plants and farms.
On Wednesday, The Detroit News endorsed his opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, and said El-Sayed had deleted posts and taken down roughly 100 YouTube videos. A candidate who hides his past, the paper wrote, is “not someone who can be trusted.”
Cook rates the open Peters seat a toss-up. A Hill/Emerson poll out Thursday had El-Sayed up 48–46. College graduates were with him; non-college voters were with Rogers; independents were barely on his side. A Washington Post–Schar School survey the same day had him 48–45. An August Fox News poll of registered voters, still cited by the network today, had Rogers ahead 51–47, with near-total GOP unity and weaker Democratic consolidation after the primary. That split is why a two-point lead is not a coalition anyone should bank on in a midterm.
Harris remains a familiar surrogate, though the 2024 loss still clings to her name. The Michigan stop is as much about optics as turnout, and it tests whether that name can still move votes among black Democrats, the constituency where El-Sayed ran weakest; and whether a candidate who scrubbed his archive can outrun the record he tried to bury.
