‘Destroying the American way of life’: El-Sayed’s political orbit complicates effort to moderate his image
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is seeking to appear more moderate to voters while, at the same time, maintaining ties to individuals who take positions far to the left of anything he publicly endorses.
Since launching his Senate bid in April 2025, El-Sayed has distanced himself from a number of positions he had previously held and scrubbed much of his left-wing pre-campaign content from the internet. He has also repeatedly insisted that he is "not a socialist."
While attempting to convince voters that characterizations of him as a left-wing ideologue are inaccurate, El-Sayed has appeared at campaign events with and accepted endorsements from a range of political allies and supporters with controversial records or views.
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Beyond campaigning with Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who claimed that America "deserved" 9/11, El-Sayed has also linked himself with terror-sympathetic Islamic clerics, individuals accused of antisemitism and several prominent socialists and socialist-aligned activists.
"Abdul has made clear that no one speaks for his campaign besides himself and his campaign spokespeople," El-Sayed campaign spokesman Cole Wozniak told Fox News Digital.
El-Sayed's campaign has attempted to flip the narrative on Republicans, pointing out that Mike Rogers, the GOP nominee facing off against him, has his own set of controversial associations.
Some individuals affiliated with the Rogers campaign, which did not respond to a request for comment, have also cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 election and advocated for banning gay marriage. Nonetheless, Republicans have made El-Sayed's affiliations with controversial figures a focal point of their campaign in Michigan.
"I am not somebody who is a socialist," El-Sayed told CNN in July. "I believe in capitalism, I just believe that capitalism has to be regulated."
Despite this assertion, and multiple others like it, El-Sayed has surrounded himself with socialists during his tenure as a public figure.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont described by some as the avatar of socialism in America, threw his support behind El-Sayed’s ill-fated 2018 gubernatorial run. The Vermont socialist was also among the first to back El-Sayed’s 2026 Senate bid, endorsing him on the same day he launched his campaign.
Sanders isn’t the only socialist backing El-Sayed’s run for Senate. Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Summer Lee and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are all vocal supporters.
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El-Sayed has long aligned himself with the Democratic Socialists of America, only recently distancing himself from the ascendant left-wing organization as he seeks to win a competitive Senate race.
Between 2017 and 2020, the Michigan Democrat spoke at six events held by Democratic Socialists of America chapters, including a 2019 fundraiser where he served as the keynote speaker. Additionally, DSA officials told Politico in July that they were mobilizing resources to help El-Sayed win his Democratic primary election.
"I'm not technically or practically DSA," El-Sayed told the Wall Street Journal in July.
Socialist organizers, however, have called him "a longtime friend of Detroit DSA."
Most recently, news broke that William Lawrence, a Democratic Socialists of America member running for Congress in Michigan who has campaigned alongside El-Sayed, called for "destroying the American way of life" on a podcast hosted by Marxist activists.
"I'm wondering how we can inspire a sense of abundance for people in the United States, while frankly, destroying the American way of life and the negative connotations and material realities that has come to mean," he said on the episode.
A strong showing with Michigan’s Arab American community helped carry El-Sayed to victory in August’s Democratic primary. El-Sayed has been deeply involved with the state’s Muslim community, including relationships with figures who have made controversial statements about Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah.
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In April, Amir Makled, a man running for the University of Michigan's board of regents who celebrated dead members of Hezbollah — a U.S.-designated terrorist organization — as "martyr[s]," introduced El-Sayed at a campaign rally.
Then, in June, El-Sayed headlined the opening of Imam Hassan Qazwini’s Islamic Institute of America, offering him his "hearty congratulations" and calling his mosque "incredible."
Qazwini has a history of making controversial comments. Among these have been his claim that Israel was behind ISIS, calling a slain leader of Hezbollah a hero of the "resistance," and describing Sanders as honorable "even though he is a Jew."
Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign denounced Qazwini as antisemitic. Qazwini has since compelled his congregation to vote for El-Sayed, arguing that doing so is a "moral responsibility" and "religious duty" in a July sermon.
At the opening of Qazwini’s institute, El-Sayed shared the stage with Sheikh Fadhel al-Sahlani, a cleric who praised Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack and downplayed the number of people killed in the Holocaust.
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On Sept. 5, El-Sayed is scheduled to share a different stage at the Islamic Society of North America’s annual convention with Qazwini.
Also slated to be in attendance are Imam Baqir Berry, who prayed that God would grant Islamic holy soldiers in Gaza "a mighty victory;" and Siraj Wahhaj, who was named as a possible co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center terrorism case but was never charged in connection with the attacks.
El-Sayed’s religious views have puzzled some observers. While the Democrat supports easy access to abortion and child sex changes, he has also expressed a desire to live in accordance with Sharia law and describes his faith as important to his outlook on life.
A number of people El-Sayed has appeared with or promoted have ties to the Nation of Islam, a religious organization founded by Black nationalists in the 1930s that is not considered an orthodox Muslim sect by most Islamic leaders.
The Nation of Islam teaches that Black people are the original human beings and that White people were created by an evil Black scientist named Yakub. Their doctrine portrays the White race as inherently corrupt and historically responsible for oppressing Black people, though it also asserts Black racial superiority.
Currently, the Nation of Islam is under the leadership of Louis Farrakhan.
Farrakhan has accused Jews of being "wicked deceivers of the American people" who have "sucked their blood," later suggesting that "people will never be free in this country" until they are liberated from the "tremendous amount of influence" he said Jews exert over the American government. He has also called Jews "termites" and suggested that White people generally are "the skunk of the planet earth" and not fully evolved.
Despite the Nation of Islam’s controversial positions, El-Sayed has maintained ties to individuals affiliated with it.
Marcus Muhammad, a small-town mayor and minister with the Nation of Islam, posted a photograph of himself arm-in-arm with El-Sayed backstage at his election night watch party. The leader of the Detroit chapter of the Nation of Islam, meanwhile, posted a picture of him and El-Sayed shaking hands at a 2025 NAACP event.
El-Sayed also touted the backing of an influential Detroit-area pastor who had previously praised Farrakhan, issuing a press release announcing the endorsement and appearing on his podcast.
"We need someone to give us direction. I believe we have a leader here that can organize us," the pastor said of Farrakhan in 2013. "They want to silence people who tell us the truth, and we know why this is happening and who is doing it, but we need some help with how to overcome it."
Republicans are leaning into El-Sayed’s proximity to extremist figures as part of their strategy in the lead-up to Election Day. The approach has already seen some success, with a few high-profile defections from Jewish Democrats bolstering the party’s midterm hopes.
El-Sayed's camp, however, maintains that Rogers has some skeletons of his own.
"Mike Rogers has filled his campaign team with members who ‘complained about women in politics’ and defended a group chat ‘filled with praise for Hitler, gas chamber jokes, racial slurs, and rape comments,’ and he refused to speak out after one of his senior campaign leaders admitted to dismissing victims’ allegations of childhood sexual abuse," Wozniak, the El-Sayed spokesman, told Fox News Digital. "Mike Rogers is a corrupt politician who’s only focused on enriching himself and serving his special interest donors, and he will be rejected at the ballot box this November."