Commentary, Politics

The Check He Didn’t Cash

Posted on by Bill McCarthy

Abdul El-Sayed has a line he likes. He does not take corporate money. He does not call corporations. He will not sit down with a corporate lobbyist. The ad in the primary said he was the only man in the race with no corporate PAC money, and the yard signs say money out of politics. The books on his own committee, through the middle of July, look like the line. About $14.5 million in receipts, and $14.4 million of it from individuals. Then there is the other book. The super PAC aligned with the Senate Democratic leader has committed $30 million to elect him in Michigan. That committee takes corporate money. He did not cash the check. He is the reason it was written.

What he raised, and what is being spent on him

The candidate committee is the part he controls, and on that part the pledge holds. No party money in the total. No loans. Individual contributions, about 99 percent of the haul from January 2025 through July 15. He can say, and has said, that he does not dial a corporation and ask it to write his campaign a check. Federal law would not let a corporation do that directly in any case. The pledge is a promise not to take the PAC check the law already fences off from the committee, and to skip the trade-association events his opponents attend.

The race is not being run on the committee. In September, after he won the primary, the Schumer-aligned super PAC put another $10 million into Michigan and brought its commitment to $30 million. A super PAC cannot give him the money. It can buy every minute of television between here and Election Day in his name, and it can take checks a campaign cannot touch. Unlimited checks. Corporate checks. Union checks. Checks from a billionaire’s political committee. Asked on October 5 where that $30 million comes from, he said the interests behind it will not come collecting, because he has been clear he will not do a corporation’s bidding, and because some of those same interests spent against him in the primary. Clarity is not a receipt. A committee that can take the corporate dollar is spending $30 million to make him a senator. Whether he dialed the treasurer is a detail.

His own itemized donors are not a porch-to-porch story either. About 36 percent of that money is from Michigan. California is the largest outside source, at $1.22 million. Roughly $8.5 million came in checks of $500 or more, and more than $5.2 million in checks of $2,000 or more. A super PAC on his side of the ledger, Fighting for Michigan, took $300,000 from his father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, in three checks of $100,000. In the primary he said he was refusing super PAC money. One was formed to spend for him anyway. After the primary, the big one arrived with $30 million and he did not send it back. There is no form for sending it back.

The family that has been in the file since 2012

The Soros tie is not a rumor about a wire transfer. It is a fellowship and a living room.

In 2012 El-Sayed was a finalist for the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, the scholarship founded by George Soros’s brother and his wife. Jeffrey Soros, Paul’s son, interviewed him. On September 28, Jeffrey Soros and his wife hosted a fundraiser for the candidate in West Hollywood. Guests could give as much as $57,800 to the Abdul for Michigan Victory Fund. Standing next to him, Jeffrey Soros said he had known him since 2012, and that the family fellowship was how the career got off the ground. That is fourteen years, not a chance photograph.

The money trail from the wider family runs through a committee, not through the campaign account. Democracy PAC, funded by George Soros and the entities he set up, had given more than $40 million to Democratic-aligned groups by the end of June. Nine million of it went to the same Senate super PAC that has committed $30 million to Michigan. The filings do not earmark that $9 million for this race. The super PAC and its nonprofit arm had raised $326 million through June, so the gift is under 3 percent of the pot. It does not have to be earmarked to be in the pot. El-Sayed’s answer, given this week, is that an individual who wants to give is different from a corporation he called. Jeffrey Soros is an individual. The committee his uncle funds, which wrote the $9 million check to the committee spending $30 million on the race, is not a neighbor with a checkbook.

Whether the pledge is honest

Honest about the narrow thing, yes. His campaign account is not taking corporate PAC checks. He can put that on a sign and survive an audit of the committee.

Honest about the sentence he actually says, no. The sentence is that he is getting money out of politics, that corporations should not buy politicians, and that he is the candidate who is not funded that way. The largest sum in his column is $30 million from a super PAC built to take the money he says he will not touch. He met with the leader the PAC answers to, in Washington, before the extra $10 million was announced. He took the stage in a Soros living room and let the host tell the donors that the family had launched him. He has drawn a line between a check to his committee and a check to the committee that exists to elect him. A voter cannot spend the line. The advertisements the voter sees will be paid for out of the pot he says he wants emptied, by donors he says should not be in the room, for a candidate who says he did not ask.

He did not have to ask. They already had the address.

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