El-Sayed’s Trouble with Minority Voters

I t seemed to me that, while Mike Rogers delivered an underwhelming performance on last Thursday night’s debate stage, he probably succeeded in his effort to incept concerns in viewers’ minds about Abdul El-Sayed’s judgment and loyalties. The Jewish Insider reinforced that impression when it asked Michigan’s Jewish Democrats how they felt about the conduct of the Democratic Senate candidate.

“He’s not really made any accommodations whatsoever” to Michigan’s Jews, said prominent Democratic fundraiser David Kramer, “and the debate was just the latest example.” Kramer added that he’s hearing from his fellow Jewish Michiganders the general belief that El-Sayed is “absolutely showing who he is.” Michigan Democratic Party Central Committee member Joan Lowenstein agreed. Debate watchers “didn’t get anything new about what El-Sayed thinks, or what he was willing to do for Jewish safety,” she said, “not at all.” Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus secretary Zach Nessel (who is the son of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel), agonized over the choice before Michigan Democrats. “It was a sorry excuse not to stand up for our community three years after the Oct. 7 attack,” he said of El-Sayed’s refusal to honor the anniversary of the October 7 massacre. But then, perhaps the candidate’s silence was preferable. “I don’t think anything he would say would have been true to his values and probably would have been inflammatory,” Nessel added.

Influential as its individual members may be, Michigan’s Jewish community is small. Although he seems to have thoroughly alienated them, that does not spell defeat for El-Sayed in November. The candidate’s problems with the Wolverine State’s black voters are, however, another matter.

Longtime political analyst Ron Brownstein recently recalled a moment just prior to the state’s Democratic primary in which he found himself in a “black church in Detroit” where El-Sayed was “excoriated” from the pulpit. The church’s minister “said he was more concerned about Gaza than Detroit,” Brown observed. That mistrust persists.

Kamala Harris has already parachuted into the state to campaign on El-Sayed’s behalf, though her power to persuade Michiganders didn’t amount to much two years ago. Barack Obama will follow suit next week, and the former president has cut a 60-second spot endorsing “Doctor” Sayed. But while Democrats still believe that Obama’s popularity can transfer to other politicians, that has almost never been borne out in electoral results. What’s more, no one should expect the Democratic Party’s heavyweights to paper over the black community’s displeasure with El-Sayed or the constituencies he’s perceived to represent.

“They expect us to come get in lockstep and like him,” Detroit-area commentator Adolph Mongo told NewsNation. Mongo believes, NewsNation wrote, “that some Arab American political leaders have not sufficiently supported Black candidates or invested in the Black community.”

Writing for The Guardian, longtime columnist Charles Blow detected a similar discontent with El-Sayed among black Michiganders. Attorney Christopher Burtley, the chairman of Michigan’s black leadership advisory council, “says that the overwhelming feeling he detects toward El-Sayed from the Black community in Flint is ‘unfamiliarity,’” Blow reported, adding:

Phyllis Sykes, founder and executive director of the International Center of Greater Flint, and Burtley’s cohost at the meeting, chimed in: “People were on the fence. . . . I don’t think he has really been plugged into the African American network or whatever here like I know he has with some of the international populations.” None of that bodes well just a month out from election day. Both Burtley and Sykes are supporters of El-Sayed.

Then there’s the Hispanic vote. The New Yorker reported earlier this month that some of the El-Sayed’s allies fretted that he had not formalized his campaign’s outreach to Hispanic voters early enough, and they warn that he talks too much about abolishing ICE at the expense of “cost-of-living issues.”

In the August primary, El-Sayed performed strongest both in youngish urban precincts and “majority-Hispanic areas.” Progressive activist groups claim that the primary “saw an increase of 13% to 18% in Latino turnout compared to the 2022 primary,” suggesting the Hispanic vote is “fertile ground” for El-Sayed’s campaign to till. But El-Sayed will soon welcome another progressive celebrity with a conspicuous agenda to the state, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Beyond rallying with the candidate in college towns, AOC will host a “Latinos for Abdul” event in Detroit.

Unlike in previous cycles, high-quality polling has been scarce. The Senate race in Michigan is no exception. The last reliable poll of the race, Fox News’ late-September survey, found El-Sayed with a one-point lead over Mike Rogers but still winning with a narrow (50 percent) majority of the vote. And yet, that poll showed El-Sayed earning just 46 percent of white voters, 77 percent of black voters, and 68 percent of the “non-white” vote.

When Senator Elise Slotkin just barely won her 2024 race, by only 76,000 of the 5.4 million votes cast, according to the exit polling, she did so with the support of 44 percent of white voters (who made up 76 percent of the electorate), 40 percent of Hispanics (6 percent of all voters), and 85 percent of blacks (11 percent). In Fox’s poll, El-Sayed is winning 54 percent of the female vote and 49 percent of self-described independents. Slotkin won 53 percent of women in 2024 and 51 percent of independents.

These core constituencies will make or break El-Sayed’s political career. Right now, the candidate has more pathways to victory than Rogers, but not nearly as many as he’d probably like.

“If they want to make me the main character in the midterms, I’m not shying away from it,” El-Sayed told the Los Angeles Times in a recent interview. “Run against me. See how well that works out for you.” Given his middling performance in the polls, even as gusty tailwinds boost Democratic prospects almost across the board, Republicans might want to take El-Sayed up on that offer. Rogers needs to transform Michigan’s Senate race from a referendum on Donald Trump’s presidency into an up-or-down vote on El-Sayed’s fitness for office.

If the polls are right, Michiganders aren’t sold on El-Sayed. It remains to be seen whether Rogers can capitalize on their trepidation.