Abdul El-Sayed on winning Michigan's Senate primary

The fatal shooting of a teenager at a protest in Seattle has gone unsolved for six years. This is open in your face. How are there no answers? Our investigation has uncovered new evidence and witnesses who say they've never talked to police. Did police ever call you? Not once. Listen to We Keep Us Safe, a new true crime series on the Embedded podcast from NPR. It's the Metro on WDET. I'm Robin Vincent. More than $60 million in outside money went into stopping one candidate in last week's Michigan primary. It almost worked. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate by fewer than 15,000 votes. And he won it without carrying any of the three big counties around Detroit. He's a doctor, an epidemiologist, and a former health director for both the city of Detroit and Wayne County. If he beats Republican Mike Rogers in November, he'd be the first Muslim to serve in the U.S. Senate. Yesterday, he joined me in our studio, the same one where he announced his run last April. Here's my conversation with Michigan's Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, welcome to the Metro. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. You sat in this very same studio the morning you announced your candidacy. It was April 2025. And that day, you told me what this was going to be about. Medical debt, air quality, putting glasses on 10,000 kids' faces. What it became. was the most expensive Democratic primary in American history. APEC's biggest spend ever on a single primary. How prepared were you for what this race became? You know, it's sad, but when you launch a campaign and you're trying to get money out of politics, put money back in pockets, pass Medicare for all, stand up to a system of politics that is corrupted. Too many politicians, frankly, on both sides of the aisle. That invites record amounts of spending against you because that's how our politics have become. They've become a tool by which the richest most powerful can enact their interests on the rest of us. And we wanted to run explicitly against that. So we were prepared, not quite to have a record amount of money spent against us, but we were prepared that we were going to get spent against. And we knew, you know, my positions on keeping our money here instead of sending our money abroad to drop bombs on other people's kids. We knew the fact that I believe in Palestinian rights to self-determination. We knew that my positions against corporations were going to invite outside spending. So we built a campaign that was brick by brick. You know, we launched last April. And since then, I've had the privilege of traveling to communities big and small, living rooms in Lansing and in backyards in Grand Rapids and VFW halls in Ascanaba and churches in Detroit.

to have conversations about who we are and who we wanted to be. And we built knowing that the only way we were going to be able to push back against that much outside spending on TV and 30 second ads was that people had had the opportunity to get to know me, to ask me their questions, to listen to my perspective. And I'm grateful that we did. I want to think a little bit more about all of the different places that you were throughout Michigan and how you won. Wayne Oakland and McComb are the three big counties around Detroit. Nancy Kafer, who runs the editorial page at the Detroit Free Press, wrote that in 26 years covering Michigan, she's never seen anyone win statewide without them. You lost all three, and you made it up in Grand Rapids, Lansing, Washingtonaw County, Traverse City, Marquette, and Alpena. You won a small white working class town up north. but you lost Detroit. Why? That's the consequence of having $60, $70 million spent against you. Think about how much air fire they were able to put, how much money they were able to spend to completely obliterate my record on TV. And unfortunately, that's the consequence. I want everybody to step back and ask, imagine there weren't $60 million spent in outside spending. What would this race have looked like? And even despite that, we were able to win. And, you know, winning or losing, it's a one zero probability. But really, it's not what happens. It's not like when you lose a county, you lose all the votes in the county. It's that we were able to keep it close everywhere. And we were able to keep it close everywhere because we literally went everywhere. We had conversations with folks in those communities. We were able to discuss what it is that folks really want in their lives. You know, that outside spending, you think about the way that the campaign was run against us. So much of it was about trying to attack my character or trying to mis and disinformed the public about certain people having come in to support a candidate. And in the end, we wanted to situate this campaign in the lives of people. What is it that you're experiencing? Why is it that you can't afford your groceries, that you can't afford a home? Why is it that you can't afford to see a doctor? And we wanted to have those conversations. And it turns out that even if they outspend you 11 to 1, if... You've situated the conversation in the lives of Michiganders and solutions that we can actually have to those problems. They're going to come out and they're going to support you even despite the outside spending. But yeah, I mean, there's a reason all these corporations and these special interests spend money because it's effective. But that money ran statewide. I mean, it ran in Marquette, too. Not to the same degree. And if you look at the way that the advertising was designed, it was designed specifically, as my friend and your colleague, Jonathan Cohen, says, a heat-seeking missile into particular communities to try to move a conversation that wasn't ultimately true. Back to what you ran on. It was Medicare for All. It was money in people's pockets. It was money out of politics.

I realize that's a promise that's aimed at working folks who can't afford to get sick. But your biggest margins came, as Nancy Kaffer put it, in some of Michigan's most educated and affluent communities. What do you make of that? Look, you know, we have a lot of work always to do to continue to inspire folks around the movement we're trying to build. And anytime a politician tells you I've done enough to build the conversation with the community, that's a moment you need to start second guessing whether or not that person's in the right line of work. I will never have done enough to continue to listen, to learn, to understand, and to engage people on the issues that are happening in their lives. And I've been clear to our team, like our campaign doesn't end even when we win in November because I'm not really campaigning just for a seat. I'm campaigning to actually pass legislation. And that requires a movement of people. And at the same time, you know, I think folks sometimes when these campaigns end, we cover them as if there was no opposition. But again, we beat 11 to 1 spending. So ask yourself where that spending was likely the most effective. Ask yourself how that spending was designed and who it was designed to target. And then ask yourself again, what if we reran this campaign and there was no outside spending at all? Which gets me to my first point. We need to get money out of politics because it obfuscates an actual conversation about what it looks like. to actually run on issues that matter in people's lives. When you can spend $60 million, I mean, let's think about where that spending came from. Like you said, A-PAC set a record. A-PAC is not interested in the well-being of people in Michigan. If they were, they'd be campaigning to keep our money here in Michigan. A-PAC is interested in taking our taxpayer dollars and spending them somewhere else to obliterate other people's lives instead of investing them here at home. A-PACs turned around and said, yeah, we didn't beat them in the primary, so we're going to spend another $30 million to try and beat them in the general. Good luck. But all of that is to say, APEC is not interested in the well-being of working people. So the idea that somehow our margins say something about what's in the best interest of folks tends to... tends to look past the impact of outside spending. Then who else spent? Big pharma, big tech, DTE, Blue Cross, all of the worst actors. So if we want to say that that spending, you know, it was certainly aligned with the interests of working people. Again, this is the problem with our politics in the first place, is that the corporations that pick our pockets can spend huge amounts of money to run mis and disinformation campaigns to support a kind of politics. That is about picking your pocket. That's everything that's wrong with our politics right there. I mean, you're talking about seismic change. People living closest to the edge often have the least appetite for that kind of big change. And that's because they have the least to fall back on if it fails.

Is that part of it? It might be. And look, my job is to go and continue to have those conversations. I would love to do it outside of the bounds of $60 million of spending. Again, a record amount of money spent against me. Why? Because the people who spent that money understand exactly what they're spending against. They understand that I'm the only one who's going to actually go up there and fight against them. I'm the only one who's not taking their money. I'm the only one in this race who's been crystal clear about what I want to do, whether they spent against me or they didn't. There is a way in which a cynicism of outside spending is about trying to exploit people who've been exploited by the system even more in ways to tweak fears about what could go wrong rather than to talk about what could go right. Again, ask yourself, if there was no outside spending in this campaign, where do we think votes would have gone? And that is the only way to answer this question. Well, let's think further about what could go right when it comes to policy in your eyes, because that's kind of gotten lost in all of this. You campaigned on data centers. Two months after Oracle and Open AI broke ground in Saline Township, you held a rally at the site. Residents largely did not want this. The township board had voted the project down. The developers sued. The township settled. Governor Gretchen Whitmer was at the groundbreaking. Her office called it the largest investment in Michigan history. You've called for local and state moratoriums until the federal government sets its own guardrails. What would those guardrails look like? So I think we need to know exactly what the floor is for any operator building a data center anywhere. And the way this works is that you've got the richest, most powerful corporations in the history of the world who can throw huge amounts of money around pitting local communities against each other. They put local officials under NDAs even to discuss the projects themselves. So they're not really able to bring sunlight into this, which is what our democratic process is supposed to protect. And then... they pit them against each other, say, look, you're going to lose the project if you don't agree to the following terms because other community B has agreed to the terms that we set. So what we want is a terms of engagement that sets the floor of the bounds of the debate. You cannot touch our water resources. You will not take our water. You will not touch our water infrastructure. You will not dump your extra water into our water resources. Two, that you cannot increase our utility rights. Three, that some of the revenue that you invest ought to protect us from losing our power for five days because the wind blew. So you should invest it in improving our reliability, not just keeping it where it is. Four, if you promise jobs, they better be good union jobs and you better create all the jobs that you said you were going to create. Five, there needs to be a community benefits agreement that's negotiated in good faith with the local community, meaning full transparency. Six.

We need to make sure that that's funded in escrow, meaning you put the money up up front rather than, you know, something happens with the project and then we don't get the project, but now we have this colossus sitting in our backyard that's non-functional. Seven, that all of this needs to be enforceable via very clear fines fees and the possibility of shutting you down if you don't meet those needs. That should be federal policy. Because then it protects any local community from being beat up by the richest, most powerful corporations in the history of the world. And look, if I'm a local community right now, if I'm the state, I'm saying, until you guys have that protection, we're not going to engage on this. And it requires all local communities to sort of decide that they're going to do this. Now, I just want to be clear about what we're talking about here. You're talking about the biggest corporations in history with huge amounts of money flowing. who have an incentive to race to build these things, to prove out to their funders that they have the best infrastructure to be able to build the future of AI, an industry itself that could, in their own words, automate 50% of the white-collar jobs in the entire economy. And we have no real federal guidelines. Why? Well, let's go back to money in politics. You've got two $100 million super PACs that are out there playing to try to make this industry ungovernable. You've got the CEO of OpenAI talking about his industry being quote unquote too big to fail. So even if they mess around, we're still supposed to bail them out. And they're trying to buy politicians. And then to many of the legacy politicians that we've got aren't actually doing the work of understanding this technology. So we got a lot of work to do. When you talk about these massive power struggles, I mean, that brings to mine something else that's central to your campaign. You'd be a freshman senator, probably in the minority. Keith Williams, who chairs the state Democratic Party's Black Caucus, put it this way. You don't have enough votes in the country to do all-out universal health care. It's a process. You can't get it all in one go. What do you actually get done in your first term when it comes to health care? So I've got six years, God willing. And in those first two years, Donald Trump will be president. My job, should we take the majority, God willing, then it's to hold Trump and his administration accountable for all they've done. Throw as much sand in the gears as we can. Investigate the choices that they've made that leave us dodging lettuce and breathing on poor quality air with a CDC that doesn't work. Investigate how they made $2.2 billion. The president's crypto scheme. all that Pete Hegseth has done and not done when it comes to firing top officials, their use of ICE to do things that are anti-democratic. And in the next two years, I have the opportunity to demonstrate what... the people of Michigan had just chosen. Because if I win this race, what the people of Michigan are telling us is they want a clear departure from politics as usual, bought off by corporations and special interests. And should someone want to be president in 2028, they're going to need to win Michigan twice in a primary and a general. And my goal is to make sure that the will of Michiganders gets done. So,

That means that because of the race, because of the profile of this, you know, should people want to win Michigan, they're going to have to come through here, and I'm going to make sure that Michiganders get to know their candidates and those candidates get to know Michiganers. And so we get to pave a pathway where the next president of the United States is ready to go on doing the things that Michiganers need and deserve. So yes, you can't get it all done in one shot, but politics, as all of us know. It doesn't just move linearly. That's not how this works. It's that we move on ideas because politicians finally catch up to where the people are. And I wanted to start this campaign knowing where the people were, which is why we went and traveled to 110 cities, 500 public events. And Michiganers right now are sick and tired of being tired of being told what they can't have, shouldn't fight for. They're sick and tired of not being able to afford their groceries, not being able to afford their homes, not being able to afford their gas, wondering why our government is fighting wars. We have no business fighting while they can't go see a doctor. And I think we have an opportunity to make sure that not only Michigan's next senator in 26 understands that, but Michigan's next president in 28 understands that. So what you're saying is that this race for as vitriolic as it became has also been a really good thing for Michigan because it has put Michigan on the map in a political way. that it hasn't been before. And you feel that this is going to make people at the federal level listen to Michigan in ways they haven't before. People always listen to Michigan because we're the microcosm of the country. But we are reminding the country that we are not some quote unquote purple state. Like nobody here is purple. Okay. If they're purple, they're choking on something, give them a high look maneuver. We are not some combination of red and blue and people walking around thinking, where do I sit on a left-right spectrum? Most people are walking around thinking, how am I going to afford next month's rent? what's going to happen if my kid gets sick? Why does my kid's school look like it did 50 years ago? And you think about where we came from. So in 2016, Michigan voted for Bernie Sanders in a primary, then voted for Donald Trump, then voted for Joe Biden, then voted for Donald Trump again. And Michiganers just voted for me in a Democratic primary. So it's either that we're completely all over the map. which we're all here in Michigan. We know Michiganders. We know what we want. Or we keep going to the buffet and not finding what exactly we want. So what happens when we offer a politics that does not look like the corporate corruption that too often plays on both sides of the aisle is dead serious about trying to solve problems for you and recognizes that our politics ought to be about the challenges you actually care about rather than some question on the left-right spectrum. So that's what we're trying to do in this race. And When we do, because we matter, because this state is so important, because anybody who wants to be president has to win Michigan twice, we have the opportunity to show the rest of the country what it is we really could have if we're willing to think past the corporate corruption. And look, I mean, if coming through a primary where $60, $70 million were spent against me tells us something.

It's that Michiganders are tired of the games. They're tired of being told from a corporate consultant's mind in D.C. what they should pick. They're tired of having their airwaves bombarded by lies. And there are a lot more interested in the politics that is actually about trying to answer for them. Getting money out of politics, putting money in pockets, passing Medicare for all. And anybody who is interested in being president in 2008 ought to be watching this race. What you've been talking about, though, policies. A lot of folks have lost sight of them. And I think that's because this race became about Israel and APEC. And I want to consider one reason why. You've called what's happening in Gaza a genocide and you're not alone. A United Nations Commission of Inquiry and the International Association of Genocide Scholars have both reached that conclusion. You've said Israel shouldn't get military aid. I'm wondering, did saying those things, though, eclipse your message on health care and affordability? And if so, why? People are both asking, what you're going to fight for, and how do I know you're going to fight for it? And too often people come and tell you, oh, I'm fighting for your health care, I'm fighting for your housing, I'm fighting for your affordability. And then they cannot name obvious things for what they are. And that how do I know you're going to fight for a question is, How do you put political expediency first or do you put principle first? I put principle first. I'm not going to look at a genocide and say, yeah, that's not a genocide because I'm afraid of what they're going to spend against me. Because at the end of the day, my job here is not simply to say the things that get me elected and find myself hamstrung to do the things that I'm actually wanting to get elected to do. The job's not worth it. The work is worth it. The job is not worth it. So why would you put political expediency ahead of principle to get the job only not to be able to do the job? So people know I'm going to say the thing, I believe. Whether you spend $30 million against me, $60 million against me, $70 million against me, you know where I stand. So that question of how do I know he's going to fight for it? Well, the man's fighting for it. And that's the thing I think a lot of voters are... coming to realize is that too often their politicians will tell them the right thing only to do a different thing. And my job here is not to allow political expediency to get in the way of saying the truth. Now, you talked about this question of a genocide. I'm not the one who said it. I just... said the obvious thing that experts said. It'd be like, you know, the sky's blue, but, you know, somebody's going to pay against me if I say that the sky's blue. So I'm just sitting here out here being like, well, the sky's white, right? The sky is, it's a color that's not green. No, this guy's blue. So if you want to spend money against me, you know, because I said the sky is blue, I'm not going to stop saying the sky is blue. And I think to your point about eclipsing, that's a choice, I hate to say it, that you're industry made. I go on national media all the time and people talk to me about the theoretical right to exist of a country that's not mine. They're not talking to me about why kids can't afford. That's why we're talking to you about that today. Which I'm grateful for, right? But that's my point is that.

We have a choice in this country about what we really want to talk about. And I'm going to consistently be talking about our kids, about whether or not they can get health care, about the quality of their schools, about the food that they eat, about their probability of getting gunned down in their streets. That's what I'm going to be here talking about. And so long as we're wasting our money, doing dumb stuff, gunning other people down in their streets. And not investing in our kids here at home, I'm going to say something about it. And a lot of people would be mad at me because they want a politics that conveniently ignores the important things. I'm just not in it for that. But for a lot of Jewish voters in this state, Israel isn't a policy position for them. It's family. It's where relatives live. It's part of how they understand themselves. Many of them draw a distinction between the Israeli government and themselves. And yet they still feel you're talking about them when criticizing Israel. What do you say to a voter like that? I've been very clear. And I grew up in Bloomfield. I was really blessed to grow up in a community with a large Jewish minority, 40% of my high school. And I learned so much about Judaism and the Jewish people. Judaism and the Jewish people are alight unto the world. We're so grateful for the contributions that they've made to American life. I was honored to be invited to Shul and to Seder and to celebrate bar and bat mitzvahs. But Judaism and the Jewish people are different than A-PAC and the Israeli government. Those are different things. And I think all of us have to step back and ask, what is our responsibility in our country? Should our... country and our foreign policy and our taxpayer dollars be about subsidizing the military of a foreign government? And that's not just Israel. That's Egypt where my family immigrated from. I got a lot of family in Egypt. I don't think our taxpayer dollars should be subsidizing their government either. And then the question is, you know, Who has a right to our tax dollars? I think our kids have a right to our tax dollars. You cannot tell me that while kids are going to substandard schools, you cannot tell me that while we cannot provide everybody clean drinking water, that it makes sense for us to send billions of dollars to a foreign government. And then finally, I believe in equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination. I just don't believe in ethno states. And I don't think we should be backstopping them. So the notion that somehow the self-determination of Jewish-Israeli people has to come. at the cost of self-determination for Palestinian people, I just don't believe. What do you think it looks like to make some inroads with some of those Jewish voters that I mentioned? Right now, we all share this state. And my commitment to the safety of Jewish children is the same as my commitment to my own kid's safety. You know, if I have a political philosophy and summing it up is simple, it's, What would we build? How would we behave if we treated all of our children like all of our children? Whether that's a Jewish child or an Arab child or a white child or a black child or a native child or a Hindu child, what would we build? How would we behave? And right now it is impossible to tell me that the best use of our tax dollars under that framework.

is to send our money to a foreign government that has killed tens of thousands of children somewhere else, while our own children go to schools where the heat doesn't work and the water is not clean. So I just think that, you know, at this point right now, I'm committed to coming together to take on the scourge of anti-Semitism. And let's be clear, anti-Semitism is on the rise, as is Islamophobia. And you're not going to find somebody who is more committed to taking on the discrimination people face because of how they pray, like someone who has faced a lot of discrimination because of how I pray. Like we are bound in that work. And I'm looking forward to rolling up my sleeves alongside Jewish Michiganders to take that on. And at the same time, that should not have anything to do with the interests of a foreign government. Those are two different things. It's the Metro on WDET. I'm Robin Vincent. Coming up, more from Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. He says black Detroiters have good reason to distrust Arab business owners in their neighborhoods. He's Arab American, and he's been making that argument to his own community for a decade. We'll hear more next. Stay with us.

on WDET. I'm Robin Vincent. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan's Democratic primary for U.S. Senate last week by fewer than 15,000 votes. So far, we've discussed how he pulled that off. He lost the three big counties around Detroit. He made it up in places like Grand Rapids, Lansing, and Northern Michigan. We talked about the 60 million spent trying to beat him and about what he says to Jewish Michiganders who hear his criticism of Israel as criticism of themselves. Now, black voters in Detroit. Many went for Haley Stevens. We get into why. We also talk about the tension between black and Arab-Michiganders and what Republicans are doing with El-Sayed's name. Let's listen. Dr. El-Sayed, I want to turn to black voters in Detroit, where Haley Stevens beat you. A lot of resistance you met in Detroit goes back to 2024. That February, over 100,000 Michigan Democrats, 13% voted uncommitted in the presidential primary in protest of American support for Israel's war in Gaza. You were one of them. The day after Biden withdrew, you endorse Kamala Harris. But many black Democrats here believe that that movement... helped cost her Michigan. Keith Williams, who chairs the state Democratic Party's Black Caucus, endorsed Haley Stevens and said you were with Uncommitted when it was convenient. What's your answer to him? It's interesting that's framed around convenience. Convenience would have been to say nothing and stay quiet. I just don't say nothing and stay quiet when I think that there's injustice afoot. And I also think, you know, I take a lot of inspiration from the role that the black American community played in ending apartheid in South Africa. That was a moment in which the black community said, enough is enough. We are not going to continue to support a foreign government who is actively destroying the well-being of other people in their own country because it's wrong. I supported... Vice President Harris, because I understood that whether you saw the 2024 election from the eyes of a child in Detroit, who I was responsible for as health director in Wayne County at the time, or the eyes of a child in Gaza, Donald Trump would be worse. I supported uncommitted because I believed that our party that stands for human rights, that stands for the dignity of all people, that stands for international law, could not continue under the Biden administration. to support that policy of backstopping a regime committing genocide at the time and say that we stood on those values. When I endorsed uncommitted, you can imagine a lot of folks in the Democratic Party told me, what are you doing? This is crazy. And when I endorsed Vice President Harris, you can imagine a lot of folks in the Arab and Muslim community sat me down and said, what are you doing? And I said, it's a time for courage. And courage is about saying what is right?

when it's right, even if you're going to face blowback. So right now, where we stand is this. I wish Vice President Harris would have won that election. She didn't. And we saw an election in which communities were divided on this question. The question now is, do we want to stay divided and allow Mike Rogers this U.S. Senate scene? I'm also grateful to say that just this weekend, Vice President Harris endorsed me in this campaign. So I don't think she thinks I'm the reason that she lost. I do want to think a little bit more about this division, though. And I'm talking about specifically between black and Arab folks. You've said a lot of the mistrust black voters in Metro Detroit have is well founded, that there's been a double standard in how Arab and Muslim business owners do business in black neighborhoods. There's money coming in and it's never getting reinvested. And that your own community can't talk about anti-Arab racism unless it's willing to look inward. You said that's a conversation you've been having with Arab and Muslim-Michiganders for a very long time. What are you asking them to do differently? Standing up against racism is about principle. It's not about tribalism. You should stand up to racism regardless of who it's against and regardless of who's perpetrating it. And so all communities have a responsibility to fight for equality. And too often, I've seen a sort of tribalist kind of argument against racism. Well, it'll be racist against me, but if I commit racism against somebody else, well, and I think all of us have a responsibility to stand up against that. And, you know, I am I'm Egyptian-American. I am both African and Arab. That's what North Africa is. And if I want to teach my daughters about their African heritage, you know where I take them? The Charles A. Tribe Museum has the best Egyptian antiquities exhibit in the Midwest. I can also take them to the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn as the best exhibits on Arab history. Both of those things are critical to me. And so in some respects, it puts me in a position to be able to speak to both sides of that heritage. To say that too often, there is a kind of racism, especially in economic racism, perpetrated in black communities by business owners who share my Arab ethnicity. And I think it's important for us to have that conversation about what it looks like to be invested in the communities in which we work. And I'll tell you, the conversations come a really long way. I mean, when I started as health director in 2015, it was a very different conversation that it is right now in 2026. And I hope that a lot of my advocacy and my work played a part in that. What was it, if I may? What was the conversation like in 2015 versus today?

It was this assessment that there was no responsibility paid to the people who are your customers in your local community. You own that business. It's your business. Do as you will. Not quite. Meaning we're talking about Arab and Muslim business owners, maybe who own a liquor store or a gas station within the city of Detroit. And there is a responsibility, I think, to recognize that everything from the products you carry to the way that you treat your customers, to how you move money in the local community. has to signal a kind of respect and appreciation for and an empowerment of that local community. And I think that, again, that conversation has come a very, very long way. But we're in a moment right now where Donald Trump is an existential threat to the well-being of all of us in this state, our ability to afford the basic things, and certainly the Arab and Muslim community, and certainly the well-being of the black community. You think about the assault on the Voting Rights Act led by the folks that he appointed to the courts. we have to come together beyond differences to recognize that we're all in the same boat now. And we've got a responsibility to come together to build the future that we want. I think what happens, though, is that there's this tip for tap, right? We're always fighting the last war. We're always trying to focus on what happened last rather than what do we want to happen in the future. And I'll tell you, when I endorse Vice President Harris, I took it on the chin from a lot of folks in the Arab Muslim community. And my point was that a vote is not about the past. A vote is about the future. So who would we rather have in the Oval Office? Donald Trump, who could care less about our communities, whose first act while he was in office the first time he got elected was the Muslim ban or Vice President Harris who sees our communities even though we might vehemently disagree on foreign policy? Because at the end of the day, right, where are we going now? What do we want now? And I've got a lot of work to do, continuing to go into communities that might not have supported me in the primary. I think a lot of that has to do with missing disinformation and $60 million of outside spending. But a lot of that has to do with the fact that if you're serious about earning people's votes, there's a responsibility to go and continue to have the conversations. But I'm proud of my record in the city in Wayne County. We fought to put glasses on tens of thousands of kids faces. Take on big corporate polluters at the edge of whose smoke stacks you're seeing lung disease and asthma and kids. We... were able to keep our schools safe from lead after the Flint water crisis, eliminated tens of millions, upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars of medical debt. And I'm looking forward to continuing to share that work and to talk about what it looks like, to continue to uplift black communities, to take on. too much of the racial inequity when it comes to health, when it comes to access to schools, when it comes to access to clean air and good water, when it comes to access to infrastructure. I mean, we have this flooding epidemic. We don't call it that, but it's a flooding epidemic in the city of Detroit because we have not invested in basic water infrastructure in the state with more fresh water than any other state in the country, right? And who does it affect?

majority black communities. So we've got work to do to continue to talk about what we can deliver and continue to talk about what I have delivered as pretext for what I hope to deliver in the U.S. Senate. You've mentioned President Trump's name quite a few times. I realize that he likes to say my name too. He does. And that's where we're going with this next because. He didn't waste any time throwing the insults your way. He's got the biggest platform in America. The National Republican Senatorial Committee, that's the group that runs Senate campaigns for the party, put out its first ad against you. They called you Abdul Rahman Muhammad Abdul El-Sayed. That's your full legal name. So are my parents. I love that name. I wish they learned how to say it, but, you know. What I want to point out is that until that week, They had written Abdul. What do they believe your full name does to a Michigan voter? Let me just tell you, remind us all of some history. You know what they called Barack Obama, Barack Hussein Obama, two-term president who won Michigan twice. So go on and keep saying my whole name. And I'm going to remind you what my opponent's name is. Mike Rogers, named after the word he says to the corporations who try to buy them off. They want to put a data center in your backyard. He's going to be out there saying, Roger. Donald Trump wants him to do his bidding, Roger. Support a dumb war that's raising our gas prices, Roger. So, look, I'm looking forward to this debate. Mike Rogers still hasn't answered whether or not he'll do the five debates I'm asking for. I think he's kind of afraid to debate me. I would be too if I were him. He's a bit slow, a bit clunky, has old ideas. So, yeah, go ahead, keep using my whole name, and we'll see how that works out for you. And of course, we have invited Mike Rogers to be on this show. We have yet to hear back. Wait, wait. He didn't answer back. Mike Rogers is afraid of an interview? We've asked him a few times. We've asked him a few times. We hope to have him on the show. So this is the open invite that I'm re-upping here on the metro right now. Mike Dodger. You hear that? But I want to think more. Okay. I want to think more about what's wrapped up in a name because it's personal identity. But clearly it's also a way for the world to decide your identity. Almost 20 years ago, you gave the student commencement address. at the University of Michigan. And former president, Bill Clinton, was the keynote speaker. Backstage by your telling, Clinton told you you had a real gift for speaking and you should consider a career in public service. And you said back to him, have you seen my name? So you told him you didn't think it was possible for you. When did you realize it was? When Barack Hussein Obama won the presidency in 2008. It was literally the next year. And I got to say in 2004, when he gave that DNC floor speech, it was the first time I ever saw myself in a politician at all. I really did think that politics was out of the cards for me. I even studied political science in college because it was an area of interest, but I wanted to be a doctor's doctor. I mean, you don't do an MD and a PhD, you know, not to practice medicine. But it was the first time I actually ever saw someone with a name like mine.

succeed in American politics. Now, it took me 10 years to turn around and run for office after that in 2018. And I still thought that that was kind of out of the cards until Donald Trump got elected. It was the combination of President Obama showing it was possible and Donald Trump showing me just how low the bar was. There are less than 90 days to go till the general election. The last independent poll before the primary had Mike Rogers beating you 46 to 43 and had Haley Stevens beating him. Let's say there's a woman in McComb County who voted for Elissa Slotkin two years ago and she hasn't decided about you. What's the first thing you want her to know? It doesn't have to be this hard. You're watching your groceries get more expensive. Your job is teetering on the edge. If you have kids, their school is in desperate need of an upgrade. If you have younger kids, you probably can't afford your child care. Your gas prices are through the roof because of war they swore they would never take us to. That doesn't seem to have an end in sight. All at the interest of the same corporations that have bought almost all of our politicians before this. The Exxons, the Chevrons, the DTEs, the Blue Crosses, the big techs, the big pharma's. And we have a very simple choice. Do we want government of the people, by the people, and for the people? Someone who's never taken a dime from a corporation to run a campaign and never will, who will be showing up every single day to fight like hell for you, or a guy who's never seen a corporate pack check he did not want to take. who voted to raise prescription drug prices 19 times, who's so awash in data center money that he will look away when they try to put one in your backyard, who is out here chasing a place on a board of a weapons manufacturer so you know he's got an interest in keeping this war going and is going to be an ultimate rubber stamp on Donald Trump after swearing before Donald Trump's rise that he would never support him. This is that choice. So I hope I can earn it. I'm looking forward to coming in your community and I hope I get to meet you. Last one. You have two young daughters. They're the best. Less than 90 days from now, this is either the year their father won or the year Michigan turned him down. What do you want them to remember about it? You know, this is going to be an interesting answer because I hope they remember nothing about it. I hope their experience of this year is like a normal kid's upbringing. We try really hard to shield them from this. Sodom, my wife, is the best of us and has taken most of that work on of making their childhood normal. I hope their childhood stays normal, whether I win or I don't win. But that to me was the biggest consideration of all of this. Can we keep them out of the limelight? Can we make this normal? I hope that they read about this in the history books. And they asked me what it was like. And they remember bits and pieces of it. But that it wasn't such a shocking experience to them.

Because at the end of the day, if you want to build a world that is good for kids, you've got to start with your own. And Sarah and I are just very, very cognizant of what this can mean for a kid. So, you know, my three-year-old is blissfully ignorant of the whole thing. My eight-year-old is starting to, the walls are starting to feel it a little bit more. But, you know, Sada is just such an amazing job of keeping their experience normal. I've tried my best to do the same. Obviously, don't get as much time with them. But I also hope that when they understand what this all means, because if I do win, it's going to be a lot of time away from them. I hope they can look and say that the world we grew up in and the world that we lived in is a place that was more welcoming of us and all of the kids that we grew up with. because of the work. And I mean, that's the reason to do it, right? Again, what would we build if we treated all of our kids like all of our kids? And that's what I hope we can do in the U.S. Senate if I win. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is a Democrat running to be Michigan's next U.S. Senator. Dr. El-S. Sad, thank you. Thank you. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed faces Republican Mike Rogers in November. The Metro has reached out to Rogers several times. We haven't heard back yet. The invitation stands.

It's the Metro on WDET. My conversation with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is a Metro Detroit discussion with national stakes, and that's the work we do here every day. We're community-powered at WDET, and the listener's survey is one of the best ways to tell us what you think of this work. Take it today at wdet.org slash survey. It only takes a couple minutes. That's wdet.org slash survey. Coming up, most migrant farm workers now say they're afraid of being arrested or deported. We'll hear what that fear is doing to families in Michigan. Stay with us.