Nick Morris said about Abdul El-Sayed, in Elections Daily on October 30, 2026.
Reviewing the Michigan Senate race in a final battleground overview.
Abdul El-Sayed
Things People Say About Abdul El-Sayed
Abdul El-Sayed was director of Wayne County's Department of Health, Human and Veteran Services in Michigan from 2023 to 2025. He ran for governor in 2018 and was the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan in 2026.
What People Say About Them
Matt Lewis said about Abdul El-Sayed, in Matt Lewis & the News(letter) on October 30, 2026.
Arguing that moderate Democrats are the story of the 2026 midterms.
Jonathan Cohn said about Abdul El-Sayed, in The Bulwark on August 2, 2026.
From Jonathan Cohn's Bulwark newsletter before Michigan's August Democratic primary, comparing Abdul El-Sayed with Bernie Sanders, who negotiated a bipartisan veterans bill with John McCain.
Jonathan Cohn said about Abdul El-Sayed, in The Bulwark on August 2, 2026.
From Jonathan Cohn's Bulwark newsletter, published before Michigan's August Democratic Senate primary, assessing what Abdul El-Sayed would be like as a senator compared with primary rival Haley Stevens.
Where to Find Them
Abdul El-Sayed writes The.Ink , writes The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali , writes The Debrief with Debra Shushan , writes The New Republic , writes The DAM Digest , writes The Jim Acosta Show , writes Marie Newman Studio Substack , writes Daily Detroit and writes Mesoscale News with Rebekah Jones . They have also been a guest on The Beinart Notebook (2 times) , Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer (2 times) , The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway , More Perfect Union , Drilled , Zeteo , Non-Toxic Newsletter , A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein , Why Should I Trust You? , Prof G Media , The Ezra Klein Show , Mehdi Unfiltered , Lincoln Square , What Did He Say?! , What's The Plan? with Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin , What A Day , Bulwark Takes , The Indicator (Planet Money) , The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart , The Bulwark , halfrican by Vic Mensa , Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov , jasmi.news | @jasmine , America, Actually with Astead Herndon and The Counterprogramming Club .
Recently: “How to Build a Midterm Landslide w/ Abdul El-Sayed” on What's The Plan? with Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin (October 2026); “Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan, & the Midterms | Maya May & Dr. Rob Davidson LIVE” on Lincoln Square (October 2026); “Can Abdul El-Sayed Win Michigan's MAGA Voters?” on What A Day (October 2026); “Abdul El-Sayed: When Money Talks, The People Pay” on halfrican by Vic Mensa (October 2026); “Abdul El-Sayed’s Viral Takedown of GOP Heckler Shows How to Fight MAGA” on The New Republic (October 2026); “Abdul El-Sayed Wants to Pick Up Where Obama Left Off” on Bulwark Takes (October 2026).
What They Said
Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, speaks with Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos on The Moment, recorded live in Holland, Michigan, about a week before the November election. He was answering a question on immigration.
The Moment with Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos
Around 23:35 into the episode
Speaker 7
The problem though, is that too often people in my party What we pay attention to is consultants who run these polls who say, oh, this is popular, this is unpopular.
Speaker 6
If it's unpopular, you shouldn't talk about it.
Speaker 7
I don't think the job of a politician is just to say what's popular. I think the job is to make popular what is right. And I think the courage to show up in places where something is unpopular and make the argument about why it should be popular.
Speaker 6
Is the thing that I can offer.
Speaker 7
And as one United States Senator, what I'll tell you is this, My job is not just to go and have a conversation with 99 other senators. It's to have a conversation with the public such that the public is talking to those 99 other senators and saying, you know, that guy's making some sense.
Speaker 4
But if you promise immigration reform, I mean, we've been promising immigration reform since 1996. So you're going to be just like another politician promising something that, how are you going to deliver that? That's the question.
Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
From an interview with Abdul El-Sayed on August 1, 2026, published in Jonathan Cohn's Bulwark newsletter ahead of Michigan's Democratic Senate primary. Cohn asked whether he would take his case to other states and districts, including those held by fellow Democrats.
Asked by Ezra Klein on The Ezra Klein Show why past efforts at single-payer health care collapsed, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, says the opposition to expect comes from industry.
The Ezra Klein Show
Around 59:21 into the episode
Abdul El-Sayed
…some of the pushback. No, you tell people you're going to solve some of their problem and you get all the pushback. So how come you lose the fight? Well, because you didn't create that much excitement about actually doing the thing you wanted to do and you got all the pushback from the industry. I
Ezra Klein
…it is. It gets really, really hard. So you do get the Republican opposition, but the fear of just seeing the whole thing collapse in on itself because people fear having too much taken away from them, abolishing private health insurance and that kind of thing, like that comes from somewhere.
Abdul El-Sayed
Let me push back. It's not the Republican opposition I'm worried about. It's the industry opposition. Industry spends huge amounts of money to push back on all of this. They spend it in electioneering, they spend it in lobbying, and they spend it on ads, right? Miss and disinformation via ads. So I think there are three things that we really need to be learning from those wars, right? With all due respect to the people who fought them before. Number one, the war doesn't start the day you decide to do health reform. The war starts the day you start thinking about doing healthcare reform. And you have to have a broad national conversation early. Number…
Ezra Klein
He really failed at that on healthcare. When
Abdul El-Sayed
it comes to healthcare, but also, again, it wasn't the thing he was running on. It was like, we got here, let's do healthcare. Rather than let's have a big national conversation about healthcare and build a head of steam around the politics of this, knowing full well that they are going to hit with…
Speaker 3
Find more you like in the president's plan.
Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, answers Ezra Klein's question on The Ezra Klein Show about whether Medicare for All should be a floor and a ceiling for coverage or only a floor.
The Ezra Klein Show
Around 48:43 into the episode
Abdul El-Sayed
Sure.
Ezra Klein
…health insurance in Canada, right? There are other countries like France that have a baseline public insurer and then supplemental insurance on top of that. So when you think about the ideal healthcare system, do you think about a floor and a ceiling? Do you think about a floor and not a ceiling?
Abdul El-Sayed
…about it as a floor. And to get at the question explicitly, imagine it to be like public schools. No matter where you live, you have a public school system that is there for your kid. You pay taxes into that system. That system is always going to be there for you. You may enroll your kid, you may not enroll your kid. That is still there for you, right? You are guaranteed a public education. Medicare for all is that guarantee. Everyone's enrolled, everyone pays in. If you would like to have a private insurer above that, you're welcome to do that. But our goal is to build a floor so high that most folks would be like, why would I? This covers everything I possibly could need. The other important differentiator here is that when we're talking about Medicare for All, we're not talking about health care. We're talking about health insurance. One of the things that people don't appreciate about our current system is that the current system actually chokes off innovation in the healthcare provision side. So just to put in…
Ezra Klein
One of the things I think I'm seeing here is something I'm sort of seeing more broadly in the Democratic Party right now, which is, I remember watching this form in 2006, 2007, before the Affordable Care Act, where you had a lot of parts of the party beginning to converge on roughly what was the…
Abdul El-Sayed
So let me say the fastest way to get to Everest would probably be to drop out of an airplane onto the top of Mount Everest. So I don't want to give up on the idea that we might have momentum into the first day of 2029 with a new president who's like, I'm ready to go on this. The nature of the…
Ezra Klein
are in Medicare Advantage plans.
Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.