Abdul El-Sayed Is The Best Candidate For The Job
U.S. Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed visited with voters for a meet and greet at Ferndale’s First United Methodist Church on July 8 to talk about why he’s running for Senate, and what steps he’d like to take in order to improve things for all Americans.
Now, for the cynical folks that might have their eyeballs on this: in a lot of ways, we find that politicians and talkers can’t be trusted. We’ve been told time and time again about someone’s platform and policies, and watched them waver and shift based on who they’re speaking to and what they want from those particular voters.
The difference is, Abdul El-Sayed isn’t a politician first. He’s a doctor who wants to put Michigan first, and directly behind that, the United States.
El-Sayed began Wednesday evening by cracking jokes about his name being “tailor-made for U.S. politics” before beginning to speak about what we’ve been experiencing: higher grocery prices, higher rent, struggling to keep our homes, and more. He shared that he wanted to be a doctor, and he thought that he could help people by doing so, but then he found that the American medical system was too often part of the problem. And that’s when he decided to step toward making a change from a different angle.
The meet and greet was held in the basement of First United Methodist Church on Woodward Avenue in Ferndale, Michigan, on July 8, 2026. (Photos / Ami Nicole ACRONYM)
At 30 years old, he was appointed the health director for the City of Detroit. After rebuilding it, he found ways with the team to enforce it with composing programs like providing free glasses for kids, going after the polluters of our state, and even bringing water testing to Flint after the water crisis for schools, daycares, and Head Start programs, among other important programs (if we listed them all we’d be here a while — let’s just say he’s been going the correct direction for a while). One of the biggest achievements: examining the counties’ medical debt and finding a way to work to remove it. They set aside $7 million and ended up getting $700 million ground down for 300,000 families.
Then, the presidency changed hands, funds were frozen, and Senator Gary Peters decided not to seek reelection. So he thought, why not me? If he is elected in November, he will be the first democratic doctor elected to the Senate since 1969. He will also be the first public health official elected to the U.S. Senate. Which, let’s be honest… That can’t hurt since RFK’s currently around and isn’t qualified for the role he’s currently in, only due to Donald Trump and not qualifications.
El-Sayed doesn’t sugarcoat his thoughts on the president, which honestly is a breath of fresh air for people who are sick of others pretending to be cordial. He shared that the last time he was running (which was for Michigan Governor in 2018, in case you weren’t aware), he feels that people were not ready to hear what he truly believes about the situation:
“Donald Trump is not himself the disease of our politics; he is the worst symptom of the disease of our politics.”
He goes on to diagnose that the disease is the system that allows billionaires, corporations, and special interests like AIPAC to buy politicians and sell them in ways that rig the system against us. We end up paying more for the things we need, corporations pay us less than they should for the work we do, and the reward is that we watch as our tax dollars get misappropriated to buy bombs and tanks for other countries rather than schools and healthcare in our own.
An important thing to note, as well as something that will completely differentiate El-Sayed from his now-only opponent, Haley Stevens, is that he does not take money from AIPAC and corporations ( – we won’t regale you with stories from the debate, if that’s even what you want to call it, considering how poorly Stevens represented herself, according to viewers posting live reactions on Threads). A handy website, haleystevens4michigan.com, which is “not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by Haley Stevens or her campaign,” is chronicling all of her funding in an easy-to-read setup. The figures note that Stevens has taken $896K of Corporate PAC money, $395K in AIPAC money, 7% from corporate PACs, and only 9% from smaller donors. The site says it is “an independent project built entirely from public FEC campaign-finance and financial-disclosure filings.”
Politico shared, along with the breaking news of previous candidate Mallory McMorrow suspending her campaign this past Sunday, July 5, that “The biggest factor in the race, one senior campaign official said, has been the onslaught of outside spending — roughly $32 million across five groups — to support Stevens and establish her as the most viable mainstream candidate. The official added that $10 million in paid media had been spent before McMorrow had her first ad on the air.”
After talking about getting corporate money out of politics, he also touched on being pro-union and how unions built the better practices we have today. He also addressed billionaires and the one trillionaire, while noting that there’s nothing they can buy past a certain dollar amount, and that what they’re trying to buy with their financial status is power. We’re sure we’ll hear more about busting up mega-corporations and the Oligarchy when El-Sayed speaks alongside Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez next week in Detroit, Lansing, and Grand Rapids.
El-Sayed took the time to be abundantly clear on his stance on the war and the misuse of taxpayer funds. “I don’t pay for taxes thinking ‘Man, I can’t wait for Israel to get another tank.’ ‘I can’t wait for Egypt to get another set of bombs.’ I pay my taxes thinking, ‘Man, I really hope they rebuild that school across the corner,’ ‘I really hope that they fill that damn pothole I have to drive over every single day.’ So I think unconditional foreign military aid should be banned and made illegal in this country.” The long and short: He wants to help put an end to these unnecessary wars and use that funding for healthcare and more for the American people.
At a later point during his talk, he explained his connections in his community. El-Sayed notes that he was blessed enough to grow up in a 40% Jewish community and how he loves and cherishes that community, its people, and customs. He says, “But Judaism and Jewish people are not the same as AIPAC and Israel… And I say this as someone who is Egyptian-American, and I would hate for somebody to think that my open criticism of the Egyptian Government is tantamount to hating Egyptian people, that would be kinda weird. And I don’t want anyone to hold me accountable as someone who shares the ethnicity of the vast majority of people in Egypt. I don’t want them to hold me accountable for the Egyptian government and the Egyptian military. And so we have to be clear that we can both love Judaism and the Jewish People, and abhor the misappropriation of our tax dollars…”
Speaking of a misappropriation of tax dollars, El-Sayed calls out ICE by name and expresses that the culture cannot be retrained or reformed and must be abolished. “That doesn’t mean that we cannot enforce immigration policy; that means that that should not come in the form of people who shoot people in the back of the head or the face, that should not come at the cost of our constitution itself, and it cannot continue under the next administration, and it will not…”
When El-Sayed’s team opened up the room for questions, one attendee revealed himself to be a 19-year-old student named Jake from New Jersey who’s currently going to school in DC, and he traveled hours to have the chance to meet the candidate and ask questions. (Photos / Ami Nicole ACRONYM)
El-Sayed then turns to the current politicians. He shared that the “establishment” has taken to calling him a “dangerous” candidate. This is even reflected in our press around Michigan, with larger press outlets co-signing his current and former opponents. He then goes on to list many of the programs he helped to put in place, followed by a statement:
“I’m not dangerous if you’re someone who needs government to work for you.”
He followed that up with a joke, “… But if you’re Chuck Schumer, damn right, I’m dangerous!” while cracking a charismatic smile. “If you are someone who wants to stand in the way of government working for people, yes, I’m dangerous, and I think we need that kind of dangerous in government right about now.”
Toward the closing, he shared that growing up, he got to see personally what America can do for somebody. “The crazy thing to me, though, is I also knew that not 20 miles away from me, there were kids whose families had been here for far longer than mine, who never got the opportunities that America gave to me. And the future that we deserve, that we need, that we have to fight for in America, is the America where all of her children get the America that I got. That they’re not denied the rights, the privileges, and the opportunities of America because of the color of their skin, or where they grew up, because of what their parents did for work, because of how they pray, or who they love, or how they identify…”
As someone who’s sat in on multiple political rallies and talks, I could not have prepared myself for what I was about to hear El-Sayed say next, truthfully, because I have never heard anyone running for a political position mention a list of some of the worst things America still hasn’t answered for, this bluntly. “There is a sordid history that we have to reckon with. Child Slavery. The destruction of Native Peoples on this land. The lost reconstruction. Jim Crow. The denial of basic rights to Women, even now. But what makes America, America… The unique thing that this place does better than anyone else is our capacity to correct. Because for as many of the sins of this country that have existed, the unique thing is that people took it upon themselves to look those sins in the eye and say, ‘We can do better.’ America doesn’t correct on its own, though; it’s not self-correcting. America corrects because inside of our DNA, there is a system that allows good people with courage to step up and correct it.”
It’s down to El-Sayed and Stevens, and I think what it truly comes down to is this: Do you want change, or not? One choice will forge a new path, and the other will maintain the status quo. Are you happy with how things are now? If not, I think you have your answer. As you can tell by the title of this article, we have ours.
SEE: ABDUL EL-SAYED SPEAKS TO ACRONYM ZINE ABOUT THE YOUNGER GENERATION AND MAINTAINING HOPE