Abdul El-Sayed is running for the Senate in Michigan as a capitalist who understands capitalism, a man who is not technically or practically a socialist, and a candidate who wants more money for police recruitment. That is the version on the stage. The version in the file, from 2017 through this January, is a man who headlined socialist fundraisers, signed a demand to seize auto plants, said the police should be defunded, and said the immigration agency must be abolished. He has not retracted the record. He has renamed it.
From @WSJopinion: Apparently, “following the science” means embracing socialism. So argues Abdul El-Sayed, the left-wing Democrat running for Senate in Michigan, writes Allysia Finley.
https://t.co/jbgHNHUR71— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) October 12, 2026
Ten sentences he would rather you not play back
1. “We do need to defund the police.” In a June 2020 radio interview he said it plain, then defined it. “I believe that we do need to defund the police insofar as defunding the police is disinvesting in the means of incarcerating someone or killing them on the streets, and investing more in the means of educating and empowering, engaging communities.” He added that he wanted to re-fund the tax dollars that buy “war materiel to wage war in our streets.” This year his campaign says he never supported defunding, and that he wants recruitment, retention, and retirement for law enforcement. The tape is the tape.
2. The deleted post. In June 2020 he wrote, and later deleted, that most major cities spend way too much on police departments to police poverty and way too little on schools, health departments, recreation, and housing. “Fixing that is what the #Defund movement is about.” He has since said his goal in those conversations was to help people understand what was being discussed, and that he never called for defunding. The post called for it by name.
3. Empty the jails. In August 2020 he spoke of “any and all efforts to get people out of jails and prisons.” That clip is in the ads now. A man who wanted the doors opened in the summer of the riots is the same man asking Michigan to trust him with the federal criminal code.
4. “It must be abolished.” That is ICE, and it is not ancient. On January 29 of this year he wrote a column under that headline. “The agency is not about immigration or customs enforcement; it is about using the premise of immigration to weaponize an agency of the federal government against our Constitution. It cannot be reformed or retrained. It must be abolished.” A week earlier he posted that he had worked with law enforcement, that ICE is lawlessness in the name of the president’s power, and “So like I said in 2018: Abolish ICE.” He said it in the governor’s race. He said it eight months ago. The moderate version has not retired the sentence.
5. Seize the plants. In 2018 and 2019, after General Motors cut jobs, the Detroit socialists said El-Sayed signed their demand to seize abandoned GM plants and convert them to green public use. They thanked him for the courage to make a Green New Deal real. Seizing a private factory is not a regulatory tweak. It is the thing the word socialist used to mean before the focus groups got to it.
6. “Welcome to the team, comrade.” Between 2017 and 2020 he spoke at six events for the Democratic Socialists of America. In 2019 he headlined their fundraiser, which raised $10,000. Organizers called him a longtime friend of the Detroit chapter. He stood for a photograph with Rashida Tlaib behind a poster of a hand labeled DSA choking a snake labeled capitalism. The chapter had already tagged him comrade. This year he told a paper he is not technically or practically DSA, and he told a network he is not a socialist. The photograph did not get the memo.
7. The Bernie endorsement, in his words. In November 2019 he endorsed Bernie Sanders and listed the program: “Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, Free College, No corporate money in politics—we’re talking about these things because Bernie put them on our collective conscious. Now it’s time to put him in the Oval Office.” He had Sanders’s endorsement in the 2018 governor’s race, and Ocasio-Cortez’s. The list is the platform he is now describing as capitalism properly understood.
8. “Our healthcare system right now is a matter of figuring out how to make money off of different kinds of patients.” That was March 2020. He said the insurers, the hospitals, the drug companies, and the device makers were all on a bottom line, that the system was the wrong one for a pandemic, and “Let this be the moment that we realize that this system is just unsustainable.” The remedy was Medicare for All, the government as the funder, the private insurance industry dismantled. He is still for it. He has learned to call it a way to spend less overall while taxing wealth. The destination has not moved.
9. “I don’t believe in left and right. I believe in the people who are locked out and the people who are doing the locking out.” He has said Medicare for All is not a left idea, that it is an idea for people against the corporations who have dominated the government. The frame is the old one: a class of lockers and a class of locked, and the state as the key. A capitalist who believes in supply and demand does not usually divide the country into those who lock and those who are locked.
10. Israel and Iran, equal dangers. This one is not from the archive. It is from Thursday’s debate. Asked which is the more dangerous threat to the United States, he called the question ridiculous and said both have proved dangerous in their own way. One, he said, is at risk of attacking us. One gets us into wars we have no business fighting. He said he does not want tax dollars buying weapons for other countries, and when pressed on defensive arms for Israel if it is attacked, he said that is a no. He accused Israel of pushing the United States into the Iran war for aims that included the annexation of southern Lebanon. A candidate who cannot say the ally is the ally, three weeks from an election, is not moderating the foreign policy. He is restating it.
Yes, free market capitalism brough the world out of poverty, pulled all classes out of a horrible existence, provided us with leisure time, modern conveniences, etc. El-Sayed wants us to lead the existence of Stalinist Russia and Maoist China. I’ll pass. Always vote against socialism/communism.
— KAMAY (@KeithAMay) October 12, 2026
He told a primary debate he is not a socialist, just a capitalist who understands how capitalism works. He told another interviewer he believes in capitalism and that it has to be regulated. The regulation, on the record, includes abolishing the immigration police, defunding the street police, seizing the idle factory, ending private health insurance, and treating the closest Middle Eastern ally as a co-author of a stupid war. Michigan can decide whether the new label covers the old sentences. The sentences are not in dispute. He said them.
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