Bernie Sanders-Endorsed Abdul El-Sayed Sees 'Opportunity' With Young Men

Democratic Michigan U.S. Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed believes Democrats have an “opportunity” to win back young men, while also focusing on speaking to the pain many voters are feeling throughout society.

The former public health official, who has been endorsed by progressive Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, announced his campaign on April 17, joining an increasingly crowded primary field of Democrats aiming to replace Michigan’s outgoing Democratic Senator Gary Peters in 2026. State Senator Mallory McMorrow announced before El-Sayed, and Representative Haley Stevens of Michigan’s 11th District threw her hat into the ring on Tuesday. Former Michigan state House Speaker Joe Tate is also expected to run.

As for El-Sayed and his campaign, he plans to focus on the economic issues and pain many Americans are feeling. Similar to Sanders, he’s taking aim at the billionaires and “oligarchs,” while elevating the issues facing American workers.

“We have to see people’s pain, understand it, and then help them to believe that it can get better and then make it better,” El-Sayed, former director of Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services, told Newsweek this week. “That’s a tough thing to do. But it starts with being able to see that pain.”

Having previously run unsuccessfully to become Michigan’s governor in 2018, El-Sayed, 40, is familiar with voters’ concerns across the Midwestern state. In particular, he sees young men as a key constituency Democrats need to work to win back, after they were seen gravitating toward President Donald Trump and Republicans in the 2024 election.

“They’re disaffected for a lot of reasons. I think we have an epidemic right now of feeling like you don’t belong, and I think that hits young men hardest,” he said.

El-Sayed spoke with Newsweek for an exclusive interview about his campaign via Zoom on Tuesday. The interview transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Newsweek: As you’re starting this new campaign, what is the main reason that you’re running now? And what’s the main message that you’re trying to promote for Michigan voters?

Abdul El-Sayed: It just shouldn’t be this hard to get by in the richest, most powerful country in the world. I started a conversation with Michigan voters a decade ago when I started my career in public service. When you talk to them, they’re talking about feeling like they are stuck on the outer edge of an economy that they’re about to get kicked out of. They’re worried about whether or not they’re able to afford groceries, whether or not their kid’s school is preparing them for a future that they want. Whether or not they can afford health care and not get smacked in the face with a huge debt simply because they went and saw a doctor when they got sick. That has caused so much pain in our state, and the people who’ve exploited that pain to get elected, people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk who came in on his coattails, they’ve just made it worse. They’re exploiting that pain to deliver for people like them: billionaires, oligarchs, corporate CEOs.

They’re doing it in ways that are just brazen. Whether it’s tanking the global economy to pass stock tips to your billionaire buddies—billionaires made $300 billion off of the most recent downturn of the economy while people are watching their 401(k)s turn into dust. You’re watching as they are literally gutting parts of our government that are some of the best things government does, [such as] funding cancer research. There are literally people who are going to die in the future because research didn’t get done that would have cured their cancer. Or it’s the fact that they’re literally gutting things like the VA [Veteran Affairs Department], a solemn promise that we made to our veterans.

When I ran in 2018, I said something that people weren’t quite ready to hear. I said that Donald Trump wasn’t the disease—he was just the worst symptom of the disease. And the disease was a politics that was corrupted by the most powerful in our society: billionaires and oligarchs and corporate CEOs. We’re watching as that symptom has just come back even worse.

We need somebody who can fight back against Trump and Musk, but also who can build out of the ashes they’re gonna leave behind. And I feel like that is the promise that I’ve been making to Michiganders since I started in public service. And it’s a promise that I hope to be able to fulfill as their next senator.

Michigan is kind of an interesting swing state. In 2016, it went for Trump, then in 2020 for Biden, and then in the 2022 midterms, Democrats did incredibly well. And then Trump won in 2024. So what do you think made the difference in 2024? Why did Trump make a comeback in the state?

If you look at his voters, he, of course, won the MAGA heads and he won over a large proportion of country club Republicans. But there’s a group of people that he won over that I think all of us who believe in an America where we can come together and build something that’s greater than the sum of its parts should be really alarmed at, which is young men.

They’re disaffected for a lot of reasons. I think we have an epidemic right now of feeling like you don’t belong, and I think that hits young men hardest. There has been a whole cadre of people who have emerged to try and blame other people for why so many young men feel like they don’t belong in their societies.

I think that we have an opportunity to bring them back. I don’t want to raise my two daughters in an America where their brothers think that their lives are worse because people like my daughters do better. As a young man who’s felt somewhat disaffected in our politics for a long time, I’m hoping that I can have a conversation with young men, right? What is strength about? What does it mean to be strong?

To me, I think being strong means that you provide, it means that you protect, it means that you promote. You look at Trump and you look at Musk and they have this very fragile sense of what strength is. Strength is beating up on people who are weaker than you. I don’t think we want to live that way. And I don’t think we have to. My hope is to be able to inspire them back off the brink of this sort of politics of cynicism and hate to a politics of hope and aspiration and investment in oneself and one’s community.

I think if we do that, not only will we have won an election, but more importantly, I think we’ll have done something really important for our society. Because we will have addressed some of what’s worst in this moment and how people are taking pain and compounding it.

I saw your recent comments about [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer and how you wouldn’t necessarily rule out backing him as leader. I’m just curious, how did you actually assess Schumer’s recent decision, which led to so much backlash, to support the GOP funding bill moving forward? And if you were in the Senate, how would you have handled that moment differently?

Let me be clear. I deeply disagree with the idea of supporting the CR [continuing resolution]. I think one of the challenges that we have in our politics is when people get elected, they mistake the leadership part of the job for the procedural part of job. I think obviously when you’re a senator or a congressperson or a governor or a mayor, you think about the things that you uniquely can do because of that role and they become the most obvious things. So being able to vote on a CR is something a senator can uniquely do. But this is a moment for leadership and people elect you because you are part of a broader conversation about who we are and who we wanna be.

I think right now, as we’re watching Trump and Musk and frankly Republicans in Congress, just completely decimate some of the greatest values that we hold dear, this is a time for courage, it’s a time for leadership. Even if the procedural decision-making looks one way, I think it is time to step up and lead. I will support anybody who can help to address the challenges and the pain that Michiganders feel. I’m very clear about the fact that I want an economy that works for working people, meaning where we step up for workers’ rights, meaning where we make this the best single place to build and grow a small business.

I believe in guaranteeing health care through Medicare for All. I literally wrote the book on it. I believe, in protecting our air and water rather than watching our Earth get desecrated by corporations who are trying to make a buck off of them. And I know that that’s what Michiganders believe. So I’m going to vote for any leader who is going to give me a plan to achieve those outcomes for the people who elected me.

The only point that I’m trying to make is this. To me, a vote is a choice between two or more options. And if you don’t know what the other options are, unilaterally saying I’m not gonna support this one just seems to me to be a bit unnuanced. So I’m not defending anyone’s choices. I vehemently disagree with them. I disagreed with them the day they were made. But I am saying that as we think about the next step, we need to make sure that the alternative isn’t worse.

You touched a bit in that answer on the economy and workers. When it comes to tariffs, Governor Whitmer recently got into a bit of hot water because she went to the White House and spoke somewhat favorably about the idea of some tariffs. Of course, Michigan is a big union state. A lot of union leaders are supportive of the tariffs. What is your perspective on that issue?

I’m in Michigan. I was raised here, and I remember when the Buick plant in Flint, where my parents worked, not at the plant, but in the city, when that shut down. I watched as every time we drive in, the state of the city just got worse and worse. Free trade has hollowed out Michigan towns. It robbed so many families of their dreams. It has been a cancer on our economy in Michigan and across this country.

The thing about cancer is that usually you treat it with chemotherapy. And chemotherapy is poison. But it’s poison that you use systematically because it’s more likely to kill the cancer than it is to kill a patient. And to use it very sparingly in specific ways. So when it comes to the idea of tariffs, I think of tariffs as being chemotherapy for the poison of free trade. So I’m not categorically against them. But I do think that when you use chemo, you have to be extremely careful and extremely focused on the outcome that you want.

The tough part is that, you know, when you put chemo in the hands of Donald Trump, characteristically, everything he does is ham-handed, it’s self-serving and it’s chaotic. That’s exactly what he did. So what he basically did is, he said, “OK, I have diagnosed a cancer, so I’m just going to give my patient, the U.S. economy, all the chemo at the same time.” Which any doctor will tell you will just kill your patient. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what he did.

My sense is that it wasn’t about actually returning jobs to places like Michigan. It was about creating leverage against corporate CEOs who then come to him groveling, which is exactly what’s happened. But if you were serious about re-shoring, if you’re serious about building the future of manufacturing in places like Michigan, what you would do is you’d bring unions to the table from the jump. You would start investing in the most promising early stage technologies and you would invest in their ability to manufacture. In communities like Michigan with great union jobs and benefits. And then you would let folks know that you were going to tariff against these particular industries in very particular ways on a very particular schedule so everybody understood what was happening and why. And over time, as those industries grew and developed, you would expect that they would be able to compete on the global market. Over time, you would start to dial that down.

I worry that because of what Trump’s done, he’s almost foreclosed on the option of using tariffs in a smart way to build the future industries and manufacturing in places like Michigan like we deserve.

The two big issues in this past election were the economy and immigration. Now, Trump’s approval on the economy has collapsed somewhat. But the one area where polling suggests he’s still above water is on immigration. How do you think Democrats should be messaging on that issue?

We need to secure our border. At the same time, the whole conversation about the border has been weaponized by Trump and his acolytes to demagogue the idea of immigration in the first place. Now, my parents immigrated to this country and I tell you, I know many immigrants. None of them come here to take. They come here to build. They wanna build in this country. We wanna build futures for their kids. They want to build opportunity. They come because they love this place and wanna contribute here.

What we’ve seen under this administration is an attempt to weaponize the idea of immigration around trying to create the semblance of an America where people like me, people like so many others in this place, don’t belong. And you’re seeing that in a way where they’re using the arms of the state to run roughshod, to like literally tear up our Constitution, to disobey court orders, to disappear people because they signed their name to an op-ed. To fearmonger people from coming here.

One of the things America has done really well is it has made itself the destination of choice for the best and brightest all over the world to come here, to learn, to build and to grow amazing industries that we take for granted. I worry that when you look at this place, like my dad, who was a really promising graduate back in the ’70s, he wanted to be a mechanical engineer. He said, ‘You know what? The best single place to do that is in Detroit, Michigan.’ And that’s where he came and he has patents and he’s built businesses and he’s written books and he taught students. I worry that if he was making that same decision in 2025, that he might choose to go somewhere else and we would all be the worse off for it. And so let’s not mistake the need to secure our border with the great benefit that immigration has had for us from the jump.

I worry that Democrats are so afraid of this issue, because we have this awful dependency on this terrible advice that we get from the consulting class that tells us we have to triangulate a position so it’s perfectly inoffensive, but then we have to say it with a lot of enthusiasm. And if you’re not saying anything of meaning with a lot of enthusiasm, you look absolutely ridiculous, which unfortunately is how we often look, and we’re losing votes because of it. I think we have a responsibility to step up and articulate a very clear, affirmative approach to what we believe the world ought to look like.

I believe America is at its best when people from all over the world want to come here. Where, yes, we secure our borders and we protect those borders. But at the same time, we recognize that immigration has been a net benefit to our country and that we deserve in this country to continue to be that place. Where everybody can come and try to build something for themselves and for our country. And that’s better for us. And we have to be willing to say that rather than try and run away from the issue.

Bernie Sanders has been a longtime supporter of yours, and he endorsed you right out of the gate in this campaign as well. I assume you must have had some conversations with him before launching the campaign. I’m curious, did he give you some advice? What did he tell you about running for this seat?

Bernie is somebody who has been full-throatedly working for the well-being of working people in our country for decades and decades, since before I was born. His commitment to the working class, his commitment to the kinds of values of fairness that I think all of us believe in is sacrosanct. Even at 83 years old, there is nobody who is more full-throated on these issues than he is. So I’m really grateful for his support, and that I was able to earn his trust.

So much of what I’ve wanted to do in my work is about serving at the leading edge of government, the place where the rubber, so to speak, hits the road. And I’ve tried to take a lot of the values that Senator Sanders articulates and turn them into programs, whether it’s erasing $700 million in medical debt, it’s putting Narcan all over the place, or giving people access to air quality data so they can stand up to the polluters who are affecting the air that their kids breathe every day. I was grateful that he saw that work and decided to come behind this campaign.

What the senator told me that I’ll never forget, he said, ‘Listen, young people …’ this is a guy who’s 83 years old, ‘… young people have the greatest stake in our democracy because they’re gonna live the longest time. And you really have to keep close to what young people tell you.’

One of the things I know keeps him up at night is this challenge with young men, why there has been this cynicism and this turn against the values of hope that we can actually use a government of the people for the people and by the people to deliver for people. He and I have had a lot of conversations about what it means to have an honest conversation with young men in particular in this country. And as a father of two daughters, right? I think it’s just so important that we get that conversation right.

Then the other thing he told me is, ‘Don’t lose sight of the big picture.’ I think public service is about the public and too often we get caught up in these things that we think make it so complicated. I’ve studied complicated things. I went to medical school. This one’s not that complicated. If you do the work of listening to people and then articulating in very clear points, policy that could solve their problems, that’s kinda it. And then go out and tell folks that. Listen and talk, listen, think and talk. And it starts with listening.

Right now, it definitely seems like the energy on the left is with Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at these rallies they’re holding across the country. At the same time, we’ve seen that energy around Sanders in 2016, and then again in 2020, but it seems that the moderate wing of the party, or the establishment as some say, wins anyway. Do you think that this moment is different, and if so, how?

I think there’s an open question about what this party should stand for. I don’t really love labels because, again, I trained as a scientist and one of the first things they teach you is that you should use words that mean the same thing to people saying them as people hearing them. I think these labels, they’ve been twisted and turned in 15 different ways. I’m a student of history, and I remember when the Democratic Party, right, in the time of FDR [former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt], in a time of LBJ [former President Lyndon B. Johnson], was about some very basic things. It was about delivering for working people in ways that made sense and were clear. It was about empowering working people, it was about empowering local forms of capitalism, meaning empowering small business and helping it scale and helping distribute wealth back to its local community. It was about guaranteeing health to people and health care in ways that the government can do in the richest, most powerful country in the world. It was about protecting air and water.

Since then, the party has grown quite a bit because of pressure from folks like Martin Luther King Jr. to remind us those promises had to extend to everybody. Too often, they left people of color behind. I just think that if we’re serious about our values, those seem to me to be commonsense values. Those are what we should focus on. We’ve got opportunities to win the future here and it’s not gonna happen because we have poll-tested numbers that win a small proportion of Republicans who realize that Donald Trump is like patently insane. We’re gonna win because we are listening to people, we’re speaking truth to their pain, and we are taking on the power of the most powerful in a way that is taking our government back in delivering for working people.

I don’t know where that sits on the ideological frame and how that’s gonna work within intraparty politics, but that’s what I’m gonna be about for the next 15 months.

I’m sure there are going to be some folks within the Democratic Party who say, ‘Look, a Bernie Sanders-backed candidate can’t win in a swing state like Michigan, especially after Trump just won there.’ What would be your response to that criticism?

I think it’s a different time, and I remember when they said a guy named Barack Hussein Obama couldn’t win. I remember they said that a guy called Donald Trump couldn’t. So I just don’t trust the pundits to call the shots.

Also, to say the thing that sometimes people are too polite to say, obviously my name is Abdul, and that is, we’ll just say, not the best name for politics on a ballot. I got a lot of faith in my fellow Michiganders and I got a lot faith in the fellow Michiganders because I’ve been named Abdul in Michigan my whole life. I was named Abdul when I was elected captain of my high school football team and awarded a coaches leadership award by my coaches for my leadership of people who didn’t look like me or have names like mine. I was named Abdul when I walked into patients’ rooms in medical school and asked what’s wrong and how can I help. I’m named Abdul and I rebuilt Detroit’s health department and delivered a debt cancellation of upward of $700 million to folks across Wayne County. I’ve spent my whole career and most of my life in this state, born and raised, and Michiganders are good people. And they see past a name and they see past these labels.

They’re asking, number one, “Do you care about me?” And number two, “What are you going to do to try and help me?” I trained as a doctor, and those are the two questions that people ask of their doctors. So, I’ve learned a lot about how to see through people’s pain, to help work with them to get past the cynicism of that pain. You gotta get people to hope and to believe that the things that we can do together can address the pain and make it better.

I think right now, what Trump and his acolytes in Congress have done, is tell us that it’s only ever going to get worse, and that they at least understand that there’s pain. So it frees them up to do whatever they want that just makes the pain worse. I think the lift for us is a lot harder. We have to see people’s pain, understand it, and then help them to believe that it can get better and then make it better. That’s a tough thing to do. But it starts with being able to see that pain.

I worry that too often, the Democratic message is, ‘No, actually things are perfectly good. If you take the average of income across this country, our economy was great.’ Well, unfortunately, it just wasn’t working for the majority of people. There’s a lot of good statistical reasons as to why. So you’ve got to be honest with people about, ‘No, this is a painful situation. I see your pain. But what can we do to make it better?’ Rather than what will you let them do to make it worse.

You were part of the ‘Uncommitted’ movement in this past election. Could you just speak a bit to why you thought that was a particularly important thing to do? And how do you think the issue of the ongoing Gaza war resonates with Michigan voters, broadly speaking across the state?

I endorsed Kamala Harris in the general election. I want to be absolutely clear about that. And I spent most of election season trying to convince as many people as possible that whatever you thought of Harris, she was so much better than Donald Trump.

‘Uncommitted’ was about a choice in the Democratic primary, which of course was no choice at all. I think people were asking us to unilaterally support a guy who clearly did not have what it took, to run for president again. That decision became obvious during the debate. I think a lot of the folks in the ‘Uncommitted’ movement saw that early when it came to the disastrous handling of what was happening in Gaza.

Now, you asked me very specifically about Gaza, but let me just be clear. I’m not asking people to have an opinion about what’s happening over there. I’m asking people to look at their kids’ school and ask whether or not it makes sense to send tens of billions of dollars abroad to a foreign military in a very rich country so that they can bomb other kids’ schools, when we could be spending that money on your kids’ school. I think when you think about it that way, it’s an obvious thing that we shouldn’t be in the business of funding foreign militaries anywhere, whether it’s Gaza or Egypt or Saudi Arabia.

We’ve got a lot of issues to take on here at home, and I think we’ve got a responsibility to take them on. At the same time, I want to think bigger picture about foreign policy. We talk about a rules-based international order and the principal violator of those rules too often ends up being us. We spent a lot of time after World War II trying to create multinational organizations that would create and uplift and enforce those rules of that rules-based international order. And when we follow those rules, as in Ukraine against a despot who is trying to take over another country or in Serbia, for example, back in the ’90s, we do well. When we violate that rules-based international order, as in Iraq, as Vietnam before that, that’s when we make terrible decisions.

I’m just asking us to be sensible about how we want the world to be. I think we need to be leaders in the world, but leaders lead toward a particular set of values. I believe you say, ‘Here’s what our values are, we support democracy, we are willing to work with our allies when the purpose is just,’ and then you obey your own rules.

If you were to win the Democratic Party’s nomination, you’d actually only be the second-ever Muslim to be nominated for a major party. The first was Dr. Mehmet Oz in 2022 by Republicans in Pennsylvania. And if you won, you would be the first Muslim senator. Do you think much about the potentially historic nature of this campaign in that respect?

I’m not running to be the first anything. I’m running to the best senator for the state of Michigan and to deliver for working people.

Do you have anything else that you think is important to share before we let you go?

I just want to double-click here on this point on pain. I just think we are so used to things getting worse. It’s so tough when your message is that things can be better. I really want this campaign to invite people to believe that it actually can be, and it should be, and that we deserve better. It does not have to be this hard. There are choices that we’ve allowed the richest, most powerful actors in the country to make for us. Corporations, billionaires, oligarchs—so that they get richer and it just gets harder for us, we get monetized at every turn. You get monetized when you want to go see a doctor, you get monetized when you reach into your phone and a trillion dollar corporation spends billions of dollars to make sure that you can’t look up from it. We get monetized by the collusion of oligarchs when we go and shop at grocery stores and our prices are just that much higher.

It doesn’t have to be that way. We have to believe that it can be better, not just that it’s always going to get worse. And I hope that this campaign can be one of healing and one of hope, and I hope that folks will get involved.