I’ve said before that Abdul El-Sayed's Senate campaign is in full-blown panic mode. And I truly believe it. The evidence has been piling up for weeks. El-Sayed spent October flip-flopping old positions, rewriting old opinions, and calling in the Calvary to save him. Campaigns that are happy with their internal numbers don't behave this way, and the scramble tells you exactly what’s going on.
The flailing started with him backtracking on his signature issue. For years, El-Sayed was a die-hard advocate for Medicare for All, a plan that would outlaw private insurance and push every American onto a single government plan. He even floated repealing the Second Amendment and replacing it with a constitutional right to health care. Then, with Election Day only weeks away, El-Sayed flip-flopped.
"If you would like to have a private insurer, above that, you're welcome to do that," El-Sayed said.
Do you think that a candidate cruising toward victory abandons his own brand mere weeks before the election? The reversal strongly suggests El-Sayed's internal polling shows him trailing.
But his real problem appears to be with black voters.
Earlier this month, black Michigan voters on an MS NOW panel said El-Sayed isn't addressing their real concerns. Charles E. Williams, Michigan director of Al Sharpton's National Action Network, said the same thing in a Saturday interview. Meanwhile, Rogers has won over some black voters by campaigning in person in Detroit, Flint, and Pontiac, three majority-black cities. Some who can't stomach either candidate may simply vote "Uncommitted," as one woman on the MS NOW panel said.
According to the New York Times, “Conflict between Michigan’s Black and Arab communities could get in the way of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s pitch in the critical Senate race.”
Dr. El-Sayed is not just managing residual frustrations from a heated primary, in which Black voters overwhelmingly backed his opponent. He is also confronting age-old animosities between the state’s Black and Arab communities.
And he knows it.
That’s what makes the next move even more telling.
The campaign brought in Barack Obama himself for a rally in Detroit last week. Bringing in Obama was a desperate move, and an amusing one, because El-Sayed spent years tearing Obama down. Right after the 2012 election, he wrote in HuffPost that Obama had "perpetuated war, violated our civil liberties" and deported more people than any president before him.
ICYMI: If This Poll Is True, Democrats Are Going to Have a VERY Disappointing Midterms
In the same essay, he called his election-night excitement in 2008 the "silly emotions of a naïve young man," dismissed Obamacare as a "watered-down reform that kowtows to the interests of healthcare lobbies," and described his second vote for Obama as a lesser-of-two-evils choice against Mitt Romney.
He kept at it for years, too.
During his 2017 run for governor, he told Vox that Obama came up short on health care, bank regulation, campaign finance, and immigration. At a 2020 University of Chicago panel, he said the country was no better off after Obama's eight years and suggested Obama's record opened the door to Trump. So when his campaign released a statement this month gushing over Obama ahead of their joint rally, it looked like a desperate reversal, because it was one.
And the Obama rally clearly didn't work.
El-Sayed is still struggling to win over black voters, and his campaign knows it. How do we know? He's spending the final days before the election cranking out social media videos aimed squarely at black voters. He also spent hours at a black-owned barbershop and salon, where he talked about Medicare for All and data centers instead of the local economic issues people actually care about. Because... I guess he thought that was a good idea?
Black folks, if people like Abdul El-Sayed gotta do all this pandering just to get votes, just know it’s not genuine. This Arab came outta nowhere ordering fried chicken and now he’s at a Blk Barbershop just Babbling. 🤦🏾♂️ https://t.co/dXPWD2sruq
— Woodz 🇺🇸 (@Nibiru1000) October 28, 2026
Oh, and he wants black voters to know that he’s all about reparations for black Americans.
HOST: “Did I hear you say a tacit support for reparations?” EL-SAYED: “Oh, I'm not tacit, I’ve been very clear about this...I literally went on Jesse Watters and defended reparations.” https://t.co/R6gc8EBouP
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 28, 2026
For decades, Democrats have treated black voters as a guaranteed bloc that shows up for whoever carries the party label. El-Sayed is discovering, a little late, that loyalty has to be earned, and that no borrowed celebrity or last-minute barbershop visit can fake it in the final week of a campaign.
