It’s gonna be awwwwwkward in Ann Arbor this week.
Abdul El-Sayed may have a narrow edge in polling, but the pollsters had him up by double digits in Michigan’s Democrat primary, too. He barely edged Haley Stevens, thanks to a lack of support from black voters in Detroit. A recent MSNBC focus group of black voters in Michigan made clear that El-Sayed hasn’t convinced them to turn out for him in this election.
To address the dangerous enthusiasm gap, El-Sayed sent up an emergency flare over Chicago. Barack Obama has agreed to appear at a rally for El-Sayed and other Democrats on October 24 in Detroit:
Former President Barack Obama will campaign alongside Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Detroit later this month, lending his support to the progressive nominee after a bruising Democratic primary exposed divisions within the party.
Obama will appear with El-Sayed at an Oct. 24 rally that will also feature other top Democratic candidates in Michigan, including Jocelyn Benson, the party’s nominee for governor. Obama is getting significantly more involved in the midterm elections, with additional campaign stops and advertisements expected to come in the closing weeks, according to plans shared first with The Associated Press.
The Detroit event is a notable show of support for El-Sayed, who defeated moderate Rep. Haley Stevens in an August primary and has since worked to consolidate Democratic support in his race against Republican Mike Rogers. The open seat is expected to be among a handful that will decide which party controls the majority next year.
To be fair, this is a pretty smart strategy. No one has the draw among black voters on the national level like Barack Obama. He’s the one figure who could possibly sell El-Sayed and his Islamist/Marxist policies to working-class black voters who resent the way in which DSA-adjacent candidates have eclipsed their interests for the agendas of others, perhaps especially the obsession with “Palestine.”
It is worth noting, however, that Hillary Clinton tried this same strategy ten years ago nearly to the day when she asked then-President Obama to conduct a last-minute rescue of her failing campaign. Donald Trump ended up winning Michigan anyway. Does Obama have more juice now for El-Sayed than he did in 2016 while still in the Oval Office? Color me skeptical.
And you know who else would be skeptical? Abdul El-Sayed. Until this week, the Democrat nominee for the Senate spent most of his time dismissing Obama and his presidency. CNN K-File reporter Andrew Kaczynski dug up a number of statements from El-Sayed over the years blaming Obama for everything from healthcare to Barack Obama:
In comments reviewed by CNN’s KFile from Obama’s 2012 reelection through the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign, El-Sayed faulted him for perpetuating war, eroding civil liberties, overseeing record deportations and preserving economic and healthcare systems that he said favored corporations over ordinary people.
He also dismissed the Affordable Care Act as insufficient and argued that Obama’s incremental approach helped create the conditions for Donald Trump’s rise. ...
In a 2012 HuffPost essay written shortly after Obama won reelection, El-Sayed — who said he had voted for him — accused the president of failing to deliver the “hope and change” that defined his 2008 campaign. “This leader has perpetuated war, violated our civil liberties, deported more people from our shores than any other president before him, and the list of his failures goes on,” he wrote.
“That memory will serve not as a reminder of the history we made that night – but of the silly emotions of a naïve young man who didn’t understand that hope and change required more than flowery prose and a winning smile,” El-Sayed wrote of Obama’s first election. “I have little hope because there has been less change.”
Kaczynski even dug up a Vox interview from 2017, when El-Sayed ran for governor, in which he rejected the idea that he was some sort of Arabic Obama:
Though he praised Obama for expanding perceptions of who could aspire to a career in politics, El-Sayed said there were “a lot of things I disagree with President Obama on” in both domestic and foreign policy and described Obama’s politics as “fairly centrist, middle-of-the-road Democratic policies.”
“There’s frustration [among voters] with the fact that they’re being told by elites that their economy is back and that they should just be happy,” El-Sayed said. “But it’s not. Frankly, the economic comeback has largely benefited corporations and has not really benefited people like them.”
And guess who El-Sayed blamed for Donald Trump’s victory in 2016?
Speaking in January 2020 at a University of Chicago Institute of Politics panel titled “Democrats: Whose Party is it Anyway?,” El-Sayed argued that Democrats needed sweeping structural changes to address inequality rather than more incremental policies, warning that otherwise they would repeat what he called the “same mistakes” of the Obama years.
“We are going to continue to make the same mistakes of the past eight years under Barack Obama,” he said. “We are not, as a country, better off eight years after Obama was elected in 2008 than we were when he was elected. And I say this as somebody who loves him deeply.”
Suuuuuuuuure, pal. El-Sayed will certainly try to pretend he loves Obama, and Obama will pretend he loves El-Sayed. Will black voters buy this sudden mutual respect? Or will they recall a full decade of El-Sayed trashing Obama before getting desperate enough to beg for Obama’s support? Stay tuned, but also remember Morrissey’s First Axiom of Dating and Politics: Desperation is not an aphrodisiac.
Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.
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