Democrats are locked in a three-way primary battle in the race for US Senate. The candidates are Abdul El-Sayed, Congresswoman Haley Stevens and Senator Mallory McMorrow.   

El-Sayed spoke with WDET about how he sees himself reaching key demographics among Democratic voters. He says his experience leading health departments in Wayne County and Detroit steers his views on policy.

El-Sayed: Well, you have to ask Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons about the MD they gave me. I might have have gotten duped. Maybe it was just a fake one, but I did put in the work. And then there was also the matter of the doctorate from Oxford University. But honestly, I don’t really care as much what people think about my education. I care that people in Michigan get a good education. I don’t care if you think I’m a doctor, I want you to be able to see a doctor. And those are the issues that we really ought to be talking about. 

McNamara: Stevens, yourself, McMorrow, you’re all very polite in person. Everybody’s really, really nice. It seems like there’s a lot of dirty work being done in the media right now. Every once in a while, stories will appear in Politico. Are we gonna actually take some of this mudslinging to each other, or are we just going to work through the media? 

El-Sayed: I will tell you this, I’m not here to sling mud, and when you see those stories, they’re not coming from our team. We’re a lot more focused on getting our message out to the people. I’ve been to 96 different cities now. On the way up here, we were in Cheboygan and Gaylord, and I want folks to understand what I’m about. I want to get money out of politics, put money in your pocket, pass Medicare for all. I think part of what people hate about the politics is that too many politicians run with no message at all, so instead their message is about how the other candidate is so much worse. You don’t have to do that when you actually have a message about what you want for people in our state. 

I’ve known exactly what I want for people, because I took the time to listen through my 10 years in public service, leading Detroit’s health department, running for governor back in 2018, leading Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human, and Veteran Services. People tell me it shouldn’t be this hard to afford a second bag of groceries, shouldn’t be this hard to send your kid to a dignified school, should not be this hard to see a doctor in the richest, most powerful country in the world, and I agree.

And so our politics is not about slinging mud at other people, our politics is about trying to bring ease to the 10 million people in this state who have had a bad go of things as a function—frankly, of deals that are being cut right behind us on that porch between corporations and corporate ball politicians. I don’t play that game. I don’t think anybody should. I’d like to make it illegal, and that’s a big reason why I’m running for U.S. Senate. 

McNamara: Your message has been resonating with younger voters, according to polling. What are you doing to reach out to Gen Xers, boomers who are hesitant? 

El-Sayed: Look, we’ve been talking to everyone, going everywhere, and I think what we’re seeing is overwhelming support among young people and very strong support among millennials, Gen X and baby boomers, and I think what’s always interesting to me is when I was in Cheboygan, I had this older woman come up to me. She said “You’re the first candidate about whom my granddaughter has been excited, and she turned me on to you.”

I think the most important thing any of us do every single day is care for our future that gets manifested in the in the bodies of our kids and our grandkids. We spend so much time taking care of them, and I think when young people are inspired by something, by a movement to actually bring politics back to the problems that we want to solve with them, I think what happens is you start to see older folks take note and take heed, and we’ve been seeing that up and down the state. 

McNamara: Black women make up the base of the Democratic Party, the most consistent voting bloc. What are you doing to reach out to them specifically? 

El-Sayed: I think the most important thing you can do is have listened, and as I said, we spend a lot of time in local communities, whether it’s Bible study, whether it is church on Sunday, whether it’s block clubs, whether it’s local democratic groups listening and learning. I think the most important thing is a message that is resonant. You think about the challenges facing Black women in our state, there are many of the same challenges everybody faces—the affordability of housing, the affordability of groceries, whether or not you could see a doctor, but those problems are exacerbated by structural racism in our state. The fact that too often Black women are left to Medicaid, which reimburses at half the rate, which is part and parcel why we continue to have the kind of maternal and child health epidemics that we see in our state, issues that I worked on.

My background is as health director for the city of Detroit, health director for Wayne County. Our work has been about trying to care for Black moms and babies. We led the single biggest expansion of Rx Kids in state history, built a program called Sister Friends back when I was in the City of Detroit that did things like provide free lift rides for prenatal care, so these are communities that I’ve been thinking about, listening to and delivering for for most of my career in public service, and you see that reflected in what we’re running on.

When I talk about Medicare for all, everybody focuses on the “all” part, because I want everyone in, nobody out. But ask yourself, for whom that Medicare for all is going to be the most important. Yes, it’s going to be in rural communities, very close to here, but it’s also going to be in urban communities, where too often, even if you are covered on Medicaid, your Medicaid reimbursement is so low that you can’t actually find a primary care doc, and you know that you’re going to be discriminated against at the point of care. These are all issues that come up when I’m in communities, and issues that we’re talking about and bringing to the fore in this campaign. 

McNamara: Do you have TV ads? Because the only ones I’m getting are for Haley Stevens and for Shri Thanedar. Those make up most of my TV watching experience right now. 

El-Sayed: I’m sorry to hear that, and I’ve seen those ads. They are very boring, but I will also tell you this: I don’t have AIPAC behind me, and AIPAC moves its money through a whole system of shell PACs, and those are the ads you’re seeing. So, we’ve seen what $7 (million), $8 million are spending already on behalf of Congresswoman Stevens by AIPAC–not telling you about her record on sending your tax dollars to a foreign government, but instead talking about, I don’t know what they’re talking about now, but, but that’s exactly how they work.

They flood the airwaves with ads, disinforming you about a particular record, because what they really care about is making sure that our foreign policy is driven by the interests of a foreign government, rather than for you. And I am going to be the biggest opponent that they have in the 2026 cycle, and they’ve already said I’m the single biggest danger to the U.S.-Israel relationship, and it has nothing to do with my position on any one group of people, because frankly, I don’t think we should be sending foreign military aid to Egypt either, where my family came from.

It has everything to do with the fact that I was the health director in a city, Detroit, watching kids try to go to school in classrooms with icicles hanging off of them, trying to provide kids glasses, trying to make sure that people didn’t fall into medical debt, and I happen to think that we should be using our tax dollars here to invest in health care here and education here, rather than sending it over there to buy bombs and tanks that get used to drive apartheid and genocide there. That should not be a difficult opinion to hold, but that kind of money is what gets spent on you when you say things like I just said.