Abdul El-Sayed on the Senate Campaign Trail

how they're going to make sure to take care of grandma as she ages. These are the things that keep people up at night. And my solutions aren't radical. They're not progressive. I don't know what that even means. They're just common sense. Like in the richest and most powerful country in the world, maybe instead of fighting wars, we don't need that lift our gas prices to five bucks a gallon. Maybe instead we should just give people health care in this country because we can. Maybe instead of letting corporations dominate our working people to like offshore and automate them via an AI data center they want to put in their backyard, maybe instead we should empower unions so that unions, like they've always done, can fight for a middle class and we can believe in. These aren't left-right questions. These are common sense questions that happen when you stop putting corporations in the middle of our politics and start putting everyday people in the middle. So can we have Medicare for All without raising taxes just by? choosing wiser where to spend the money that's already coming in or would we have to raise taxes? That's part of the solution. But I just want to tell you this, right? Everybody's so worried about raising taxes. But you know who gets to raise your premium every year? The private health insurance company. So I think most people aren't walking around being like, huh, I wonder where it's going. They're like, I think I'd rather be able to give a little bit more if it meant that my health care would be there for me. If I got a job, lost a job, turned 26, turned 65, got married, got divorced, that it would still be there for me. And right now, all of us are at the whim of a big corporation, like Blue Cross, who can raise our prices 15% like they did last year. And then we still get pegged if we get sick because of our deductibles are, what, $4,500 on average, $6,000, $10,000 sometimes. So the question is, what are you getting for what you pay for, which is the question most of us are asking. There's no doubt that Medicare for all is a way better deal than what we're getting right now. The auto industry is huge for Michigan's economy. Where do you stand on the balance between aggressive climate policies and protecting auto-manufactured jobs? Well, look, my dad came to this country to make cars. I'm honored to earn the UAW endorsement. I believe in the future of the auto industry, and I believe that that has to be sitting here in Michigan. We've got the best engineering and manufacturing talent in the world. And I think we've got to lean in to the future while holding what we do best. So we need to continue to be the world's best at making internal combustion engines. And we've got to recognize that because of the influx of cheap EVs into the rest of the world from China. that we've got to be the best at making those two. It's not one or the other. It's both. And so I think we can both make internal combustion engines that there should be no mandate. But we've also got to invest in subsidizing EV technology so we can be the best at making it and that we can still continue to compete across the rest of the world for the kinds of cars that people are buying in places like Europe and Africa and Asia. There's a debate going on in Washington right now about banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks while in office. Where do you stand on that? Look, I've never traded individual stocks. I don't plan to start ever. And I don't think it should be okay for people who have insider information to be trading on that information. You shouldn't be getting rich off the information you get because you're a sitting congressperson. So I definitely agree with banning stock trading. And frankly, I think every single congressperson should agree that they should stop doing it immediately.

So obviously, affordability is the biggest issue for most voters, cost of living. What is the first thing you would do in the Senate to lower grocery housing or energy costs? I would ban the way that people use tech algorithms to raise prices on us. So just use growth-free costs. One of the fastest growing line items on your grocery budget is going to be for meat. And right now you have four meat packers that control like 75% of the entire meat industry. And what they use is these algorithms that set their prices based on everybody else's prices. And of course, those prices just keep going up and up and up, and there's no relief. And so I think you've got to ban that kind of practice from allowing these corporations to collude with each other to raise prices on this. It's the same thing that they do in the... airline industry, same thing that's leading to higher prices for your mobile carrier, for example. I think that kind of thing needs to be addressed. And all of that goes back to empowering the Federal Trade Commission to actually enforce the laws that we got on the books. And I believe that getting to the point where we're standing up against big corporations and their monopoly power is going to be the most important thing that we can do to bring down prices for people. Where do you feel on abolishing ICE and defunding the police? I want to make sure that everybody can get home safely, regardless of who you are. I got to work alongside law enforcement in my time in Wayne County, and I know that they got the same goals we do. I've never been for ending police at all. I've always been for making sure that we can empower police through retention, recruitment, retirement, so folks can police in their own communities, and that that policing is native to the communities from where it comes from. And at the same time, I don't think that every solution to... to unrest is a person with a gun. I think too often, you talk to law enforcement, they'll tell you, we don't want to take the runs where somebody's having a mental health crisis. So why don't we empower our counselors to be able to take some of those runs too? So we got to be investing in the things that we need. When it comes to ICE, we don't need ICE. For most of our lives, ICE has not been part of the solution. It's only 25 years old. ICE has become something that the president can weaponize against the idea of immigration itself. They're running around shooting people in the back of the head and the face. It's not making us any safer. We can have a safe and secure southern border. We can enforce immigration policies, but we can do it without violating the Constitution itself, which is why I believe we have to abolish ICE and that we have to be a lot more thoughtful about how we enforce immigration policy that is done humanely and done with the Constitution at the front. Where can people find out more about your campaign? Go to Abdul Firstendid.com or follow us on social media. Out Abdul-Elsaia. Abdul-Elsaia. Democratic Senate candidate. Thank you for your time. We appreciate it. Good luck in the campaign. Thank you, Kevin. It's all talk. I'm Kevin Deetz.