El-Sayed has also come under fire for backing the ‘defund-the-police’ movement and for organizing protests that turned violent.
Michigan’s three-way, 2026 Democratic Senate primary is starting to get messy. And as Democrats compete for the nomination in what’s expected to be one of the most competitive Senate races of this midterm cycle, one candidate is in the hot seat for his history of left-wing rhetoric surrounding crime issues: epidemiologist and progressive public health activist Abdul El-Sayed.
The former Detroit health director and unsuccessful 2018 gubernatorial candidate has come under fire this month for since-deleted social media posts uncovered by CNN that show him throwing support for defund the police efforts during the unrest of summer 2020.
At this early stage of the primary, far less attention has been paid to his left-wing views on decarceration and cash bail.
During an August 2020 a webinar titled “I Don’t Want to Die in Prison,” El-Sayed expressed his support for depopulating prisons during the COVID-19 pandemic over concerns that carceral facilities were dangerous incubators for the virus. “Decarceration generally is really, really critical here” because society has “used policing and jails as a stopgap” for society’s failures to deal with real problems. “This pandemic has shown us what a folly that is.”
In El-Sayed’s view, the human cost of letting convicts “who don’t need to be there” languish in prison often outweighs the societal risk of releasing them early.
“Any and all efforts to get people out of jails and prisons and to keep people out of jails and prisons is policy that we need to be investing in, particularly right now,” he said in 2020 during the early stages of the pandemic. “But this doesn’t end when the pandemic’s over, right? We shouldn’t have to have a global pandemic to force us to find our humanity. This should just be what we do because it’s the right thing to do.”
In April 2021, he co-authored an academic study in the Lancet advocating for the “disinvestment from carceral systems and investment in social and public health services, such as community-based treatment of substance-use disorders.”
And in a now-deleted blog post from that same year, El-Sayed wrote that “cash bail does nothing to protect communities from dangerous people who could pose a flight risk (cough, Kyle Rittenhouse, cough).” In that same blog post, he argued that there were several things “we need to do right now to vastly reduce the number of people in jail,” including reducing the number of arrests for “absurdly minor charges,” eliminating cash bail, and “end the escalating system of court-imposed fees and fines.”
This of course follows Sayed’s ultra-progressive gubernatorial campaign in 2018. The criminal justice reform section on his campaign site that cycle included subsections on “reducing sentence length” and “reducing the prison population,” and a campaign policy paper he published that year expressed support for ending cash bail, pretrial detention, and prioritizing alternatives to prison time for drug-related convictions. Those campaign priorities are notably absent from his 2026 Senate campaign site.
All this, along with a recent report in the Washington Free Beacon showing that he served on the board and later as president of a Detroit-based anti-police group that organized protests that turned violent in 2020, as well as since-deleted posts uncovered by CNN throwing his support for defund the police efforts during the same time frame.
“Most major US cities spend WAY TOO MUCH on police departments to police poverty & WAY TOO LITTLE on public schools, health departments, recreation departments, & housing to eliminate poverty. Fixing that is what the #Defund movement is about,” El-Sayed wrote on Twitter in June 2020. “The police have become standing armies we deploy against our own people,” he said in another post that same month.
Now, he says journalists are taking his words out of context.
“I want to be clear, I actually never, never called for defunding. My goal in that conversation was to help everybody to understand what we were talking about,” El-Sayed recently told the Detroit News. “Law enforcement exists for a reason, but ideally you want to make sure that there are not folks out there committing crimes in the first place.”
“Structurally, we got to get right about the fact that too often crime is a function of the investment that we make in certain communities, and I think we need to be making a lot more investments in things like quality education and housing,” he added.
Increased scrutiny of El-Sayed’s past decarceration and anti-police rhetoric comes as Michigan Democrats’ already competitive primary continues to heat up heading into 2026. Democrats are locked in what’s seen as a very competitive three-way race for retiring Democratic Senator Gary Peters’s seat.
El-Sayed’s campaign did not respond to NR’s request for comment.
A Competitive Democratic Primary
Primary polling is still sparse at this point in the race. Whoever wins the Democratic nomination is expected to face former House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers—who is endorsed by Donald Trump and narrowly lost the 2024 Michigan Senate race to Elissa Slotkin—in the 2026 general election.
The Bernie Sanders-endorsed El-Sayed has staked out the progressive lane in the Michigan Senate primary. He is a staunch critic of Israel who is hoping to shore up support from the left-most flank of the party, including the state’s sizable anti-Israel constituency in Dearborn and beyond.
Then there’s Mallory McMorrow, Senate Majority whip for Michigan’s state senate Democratic caucus who casts herself as an anti-establishment Democrat and recently called for new Senate Democratic leadership amid the party’s post-shutdown feud. She is toggling somewhere between the progressive and moderate Democratic lanes, risng to national prominence in 2022 after delivering a viral speech in support of LGBTQ-identifying children. In early October, she clarified her stance on the war in Gaza by telling voters that she now believes Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian people and won’t accept support from AIPAC, the pro-Israel advocacy group reviled by progressives.
Representative Haley Stevens is considered the most moderate candidate of the three whose frontrunner status is starting to fray amid concerns from some Democrats that her campaign isn’t inspiring to voters. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Stevens responded to these criticisms by comparing herself to former Representatives Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Mike Sherrill of New Jersey: two pragmatic Democrats who ran successful House campaigns and swept their states’ gubernatorial elections earlier this month.
“The same pundits and prognosticators went after my colleagues,” Stevens told the Times, adding that both women won both of their gubernatorial races in a landslide.