Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed Is “Not a Burn-It-Down Kind” of Candidate
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Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If polling averages are to be believed, Democrats are likely to reap a big windfall in November. President Trump's approval ratings are swamped by the war in Iran and other news. And the GOP seems to be struggling to enact some sort of agenda, even while controlling both houses of Congress. And yet it wouldn't be the Democratic Party without constant infighting. The moderate establishment wing of the party is in constant conflict with its left flank. And now they're contending with the Democratic Socialists as a rising energetic political force, what's been called the Mamdani effect. The debate centers on electability. Both sides are absolutely convinced that they have the formula for returning their party to power.
Abdul El-Sayed is running for one of Michigan's seats in the Senate. He's a former public health officer, and now he's ahead in the polls for the Democratic primary. But that's raising concern among some Democrats who say that he may be too radical for a swing state. Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan's very popular governor, just endorsed his primary opponent, Haley Stevens. Conservatives like the columnist George Will claim that El-Sayed winning the primary would be just dandy for the Republican in the race, Mike Rogers. The stakes are undoubtedly high. Michigan is considered a must-win for Democrats if they want to control the Senate. I spoke with Abdul El-Sayed this past week. Now, I want to start by going back to a moment, a formative moment in 2007, when you were the commencement speaker for your class graduation at the University of Michigan.
And Bill Clinton addressed the class that day, and he approached you afterwards, and he told you that you were not only a terrific speaker, but that you should consider a career in politics.
I'll be honest, I literally laughed in his face. I mean, my name is Abdurrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. I got three names, two of them nobody knows how to pronounce. The first one is 11 letters long. And to learn how to say it, you've got to realize that you got parts of your throat you didn't know you have. And there's not only like one part of it, like the first letter itself is Ayn, right? Most people don't know that they can make that sound, people like me. didn't get to run for office. And that was 2007. So, you know, the first thing he asked me is, why are you going to medical school? Which, you know, when you're a graduating senior who was the top student in your class, people don't usually ask you that question, right?
Like, why are you doing that? In an accusatory way.
As if to sneer at your life choices.
I was like, wait, this, what? I'm like, don't you understand? I'm brown and Muslim. It's what we do. But... I was just grateful for the implicit compliment. But I kind of just told him, I was like, I don't get to run for office. And he kind of thought about it for a minute. Then he kind of chuckled and walked away.
Were you a Bill Clinton fan at that time?
I had really appreciated a lot of the global health work that he had done. And obviously, like, he was the president of my childhood. I was 21 years old in 2007. Like, I had not seen Barack Obama. I had seen him. I mean, I watched him give the 2004 speech. DNC floor speech, but I hadn't seen him like on the national stage. And that was still untested hypothesis. And also as much as I, you know, enjoyed politics, I never saw myself as a participant. I wanted to be a doctor's doctor. Like I thought I wanted to be a surgeon. I thought I wanted to take care of kids with spinal malformations, working in underserved places and probably doing research in the area. And that's what I thought.
So you didn't feel yourself to be a person of the left. You weren't critiquing Clinton and eventually even Obama as neoliberal, as the critique often goes from the left. You were looking at politics as something that you were interested in only in a kind of more narrow way. Is that what you're telling me?
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