In Michigan’s brutal Democratic Senate primary, the candidate’s barbed wit sparked attack ads that portray him as disrespectful to women. He says that’s a racist trope.
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ANN ARBOR, Michigan — The attack ads suggesting that Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is sexist have become so pervasive that even his daughter, 8, asked why people say he’s mean to women.
In the most ubiquitous one, El-Sayed’s critiques of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and former first lady Michelle Obama’s signature initiative are presented as evidence he disrespects women.
His explanation to his daughter is that “some really bad people” don’t want him to get elected. His explanation to grown-ups is that he is not contemptuous of women, in particular, but holds disdain for a flawed political system he wants to rebuild. And he makes no apologies for that.
“I have a lot of contempt for the system,” he said in an interview. “I’m not here to play nice.”
A former public health official with the skillful delivery of a podcaster, El-Sayed has built a progressive candidacy that establishment Democrats view as a threat to gaining control of the Senate in November.
They’ve backed his more moderate opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, in Tuesday’s primary, arguing that El-Sayed’s far-left views and acerbic tone will turn off swing voters and hand power to Republican Mike Rogers, a former congressman who narrowly lost a Senate bid two years ago.
The dynamic reflects Democrats’ long-simmering civil war between left-wing populism and establishment figures fearful progressive wins would spoil their carefully built coalitions and cost them winnable races in swing states.
In the final days of the Michigan campaign, a flood of political ads attacking El-Sayed as sexist hit mailboxes as Stevens’s supporters describe a pattern of playing on stereotypes about women, diminishing their intellect and suggesting they cannot think for themselves.
While El-Sayed called Stevens “the least capable candidate in America,” he’s also aimed his razor-sharp wit and ridicule at billionaires, establishment Democrats who need “to molt out,” mainstream media that he says cherry-pick narratives, Republicans, foreign governments, and most especially corporations that pour cash into politics as “legalized bribery.” All, he says, are elements of a political system that deserve scorn for protecting a failed status quo.
El-Sayed, who has Egyptian heritage, would be the country’s first Muslim senator. He and many of his supporters see the allegations of sexism as a persecution built on tropes about Middle Eastern men, part of the reason El-Sayed has cast himself as a David against the Goliath of establishment Democrats and corporate interests.
“It’s easy when you’re running against somebody who looks like me to run the treads of a well-worn stereotype,” El-Sayed said.
The pro-Israel lobby connected to American Israel Public Affairs Committee, known as AIPAC, has spent $30 million opposing El-Sayed, much of that accusing him of disrespecting women. El-Sayed has told AIPAC to “burn their money” trying to defeat him. He calls the war in Gaza a genocide and campaigns on ending military aid to Israel.
The accusations about sexism aren’t confined to attack ads. Women backing Stevens, a three-term congresswoman who worked for the Obama administration, have also called out his language as a potential political liability and said he needs to be held accountable for his own words.
“We have enough attacks on women,” said Kelly Garrett, mayor pro tem of the Detroit suburb of Lathrup Village. “If there’s even an iota of it, it’s not worth it to me.”
Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-Michigan), who has given multiple interviews about what she called “deeply intense sexism” in the race, told The Post that the attack ads aside, not all criticisms of El-Sayed are a fabricated smear campaign.
“Abdul needs to answer for his own words,” said Scholten, a Stevens supporter.
El-Sayed has not walked back the comments that drew the most backlash. He once called the popular Whitmer, who recently endorsed Stevens and beat El-Sayed in the 2018 gubernatorial primary, “bought and paid for” because she took donations from a company her father led. He has said Stevens can’t “string two coherent sentences together.”
“The issue is not intelligence,” he said of Stevens, whom he called “plenty smart.”
“What I think about her is actually quite secondary to what I think about her style of politics, because it’s exactly everything I’m running against,” he said.
Stevens has not directly called him sexist, but she critiques his approach as “unfortunate” and “insulting,” saying that he lodges complaints without articulating plans to solve problems.
El-Sayed has surged in polls. With his “money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare-for-all” populist slogan, a viral online presence and an irreverent embrace of polarizing new media figures, El-Sayed has attracted powerhouses from the ascending political left.
The success drew unprecedented cash for a Michigan primary, with more than $60 million in outside spending attacking him or boosting Stevens. Stevens adopted a contemptuous tone as the election nears. One of her recent X posts called El-Sayed “buddy” and “bro” and accused him of wanting to blame “all of your problems on Jewish Americans.”
He describes attacks on his character as evidence of a flailing Democratic establishment fearful of what could follow a decisive progressive win in a crucial swing state.
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“It turns out, I don’t need you to like me,” El-Sayed said at a volunteer rally in Pontiac last week, where he encouraged supporters to be courageous enough to fight for policies to make their lives better.
“I need you to like you,” he said.
His ridicule has been aimed at men, too: He mocked Heath and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for working out in jeans. He called the presumed Republican nominee Rogers “a beta” and taunted the 63-year-old former congressman for posting an AI-enhanced picture that gave Rogers a muscular upper body. He likened primarying 6-foot-8 Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman (D), a critic of Democrats who question Israel, to putting an ogre’s head on a spike.
“Is John Fetterman not an ogre?” Abdul asked in an interview. “What else do you compare him to? I mean, he’s very ogre-like to me.”
Susan J. Demas, a longtime Michigan political journalist, said that while El-Sayed’s scathing critiques apply to men, too, she sees “an edge to his attacks when he’s facing female opponents.”
El-Sayed has also said state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D), who dropped out of the race, lacked charisma and “copies my homework, just poorly.” He criticized her as misunderstanding health care reform, wishing her “Good luck!!” in reading his book on the topic.
Shannon Watts, a McMorrow supporter and founder of the gun violence prevention group Moms Demand Action, said it’s impossible to separate El-Sayed from an online bro-culture that bolsters his candidacy and uses his contempt as license to ridicule Stevens’s voice, mannerisms and appearance.
“It’s a very toxic culture,” Watts said. “I’m not interested in someone who’s contemptuous toward women, even if they’re contemptuous toward everyone.”
Watts endorsed Stevens after McMorrow dropped out, and AIPAC’s SuperPAC has used her words — without her consent, she notes — in ads accusing El-Sayed of disrespecting women. The same ad quotes a 2010 op-ed he wrote that called then Obama’s anti-obesity efforts “ineffectual.”
El-Sayed points out he called it “commendable, if ineffectual” because the root causes of obesity have less to do with exercise and more to do with race and poverty. And he argued that if his opponents could dig up more than a constellation of out-of-context comments, it would have been blasted across Michigan TV, too.
“If they had any evidence of my actual mistreatment of women, you would have heard all about it in ad after ad,” he said. “The best you got is that I wrote an op-ed about the Let’s Move campaign?”
The online mockery of Stevens became a liability recently, when it reached a fever pitch and El-Sayed spoke up on X that “it’s become impossible to ignore.”
“If you support me please stop,” he wrote, before listing a number of policy positions he thought his supporters should use to attack her instead. “We don’t need to be unkind to be honest.”
Months before the political attacks started, El-Sayed’s wife, Sarah Jukaku, had worried people would take something he said the wrong way.
Sitting at her dining room table in February, she talked about the stress of running to be the first Muslim in the Senate.
“There’s such a subtle way of otherizing someone. When you’re like a brown guy or Muslim guy, you know, the easiest thing to tack on to you is sexism, right?” she said. “That’s not how he is,” she said. ”It feels so unfair.”
The pervasive narrative about El-Sayed has seeped deeply into the fabric of the race, with Stevens’s supporters seeing sexism and El-Sayed’s seeing cynical politics at its worst.
At one of El-Sayed’s recent canvassing events in Saginaw, Serenity Hope Salak dismissed the sexism allegations as a selective misunderstanding of his candidacy.
“He doesn’t disparage women,” she said. “He tells people that things aren’t working.”
At a recent rally in Ferndale, Laura Varga, 64, described herself as a feminist who sees El-Sayed’s mission to rid money from politics as pivotal to reversing the country’s decline.
Then she spent four days knocking on 200 doors for him, only to come home to a mailer that cited a discrimination lawsuit against his former employer as evidence he disrespects women. For about 90 minutes, she said, she “spiraled” at the thought she’d boosted a candidate she couldn’t support.
“My values and my vote are the only thing I can control in this race,” she said. “The fearmongering got ahold of me.”
She ultimately looked up the ongoing lawsuit and read for herself that he was not accused of personally mistreating women. She decided the mailer distorted reality, just like the rest of politics.
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Olivia George and Karen Tumulty contributed to this report.
