- Abdul El-Sayed has won Michigan’s hotly contested US Senate Democratic primary, toppling establishment favorite Haley Stevens
- El-Sayed worked in public health and academia before running for office, once in 2018 then again this election cycle
- The 41-year-old is running on a three-pronged platform to get money out of politics, money in voters’ pockets and to pass Medicare for all
LANSING — Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s fiercely contested Democratic US Senate primary Wednesday, defeating an establishment favorite to take on Republican Mike Rogers in November.
El-Sayed, a progressive former Wayne County public health official, has never held elected office. But he’s no stranger to politics. He ran for governor in 2018, finishing second to Gretchen Whitmer in the primary.
El-Sayed was the subject of several attack ads in the primary, and he’s sure to face more in the general election. But who is he, beyond a Bernie-Sanders backed proponent of Medicare for All and podcast company owner?
For the uninitiated, here are the facts:
A Michigan native
El-Sayed was born in Rochester Hills on Oct. 31, 1984. He is 41.
A Muslim, his full name is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, which he has jokingly said contains “sounds that come out of parts of people’s throats they don’t know they got.”
Related:
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- Fact checks: Abdul El-Sayed record on misogyny, defund the police, Kamala Harris
- Fact check: Ads take El-Sayed out of context to claim he ‘disrespects women’
- Fact check: Abdul El-Sayed’s record on defund the police; Republican meddling
He grew up in the Detroit area with his father Mohamed – an Egyptian immigrant who came to the US to study at Wayne State University – and stepmother Jacqueline, a native of Wayne County. Both are engineers. His biological mother, Fatten Elkomy, is a psychiatric nurse practitioner in Missouri.
Touting himself “as Michigan as you get,” El-Sayed graduated from Bloomfield Hills High School in 2003 — less than 15 minutes away from Seaholm High School, where his primary opponent Haley Stevens graduated two years earlier. While in school, he was captain of the lacrosse, wrestling and football teams.
He attended the University of Michigan, where he majored in biology and political science, as well as played on the school’s lacrosse team. El-Sayed graduated UM in 2007 with a bachelor’s degree with highest distinction, delivering the commencement speech for that year’s graduating class. The “Michigan difference” is “that we have the audacity to believe that we can change this world and that each of us will,” he said.
El-Sayed went on to receive a full-tuition scholarship to the University of Michigan Medical School. As a second-year resident in 2009, he received a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Oriel College at the University of Oxford. There, he completed a doctorate of philosophy in public health in 2011.
El-Sayed was UM’s first Rhodes Scholar since 2004 according to an archived report from student newspaper, The Michigan Daily.
While at Oxford, El-Sayed continued to play lacrosse, eventually earning a full blue – the highest level of athletic award at the school – as team captain. By 2014, El-Sayed completed his doctor of medicine at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
He met his wife, psychiatrist Sarah Jukaku, at the University of Michigan. They have a daughter.
His career
In 2014, El-Sayed joined the faculty at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health as an assistant professor in the epidemiology department.
The following August, former Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan appointed El-Sayed as health officer and executive director of the Detroit Health Department. He stayed in the role until 2017, when he resigned to run for governor.
El-Sayed later returned to work in the area as the director of Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human and Veteran Services. He served in the role from December 2022 until April 2025, when he again resigned to run for public office, this time for US Senate.
El-Sayed also was known as a podcast host, including the show America Dissected.
There’s been some controversy about El-Sayed’s medical degree. That’s mostly because while he’s referred to himself as a “physician” — including currently on his LinkedIn page, and at various campaign events — he doesn’t actually have a license to practice medicine in Michigan.
The controversy resurfaced in early May, when then-candidate Mallory McMorrow’s campaign took issue with the claim. State Public health code defines the title of physician as “an individual who is licensed or authorized” under Michigan law “to engage in the practice of medicine.”
El-Sayed has previously said his choice to not practice medicine came after treating a patient during medical school and decided he wanted to address systemic issues rather than individual patients.
El-Sayed also later clarified on a podcast that he took his “medical education in a different direction.”
“I did graduate from a school that’s literally called Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons,” El-Sayed said in July. “So, you know, you can go have that argument with Columbia University if you’d like.”
His past elections
In his only prior political run, El-Sayed finished second to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in the 2018 gubernatorial primary. He topped Shri Thanedar, who later won election to the state Legislature and later the US House.
Of the roughly 1.1 million ballots cast in the Democratic primary that year, El-Sayed received 342,179 votes to Whitmer’s 588,436.
While Whitmer swept all of Michigan’s 83 counties that year, El-Sayed was able to put up a fight in the progressive stronghold of Washtenaw County — where he now lives — narrowly losing to the now two-term governor there by two-tenths of a percentage point.
His claims
Over the course of this campaign, El-Sayed has made a number of claims regarding the success of his medical career, the efficacy of other politicians and the past stances he’s held on issues like defunding the police.
Bridge Michigan has extensively fact checked both things he’s said, and things said about El-Sayed, as part of our ongoing effort to cut through the noise during election season.
- Does El-Sayed have a history of disrespecting women?: Attack ads and mailers have claimed El-Sayed does, but many of them leave out crucial context, including statements made both about Whitmer and former First Lady Michelle Obama. Get the facts here.
- Did El-Sayed call for defunding the police?: Yes. He told Detroit Public Radio in a 2020 interview that defunding the police in his view meant “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 with the means of being able to take on systemic poverty.” Get the facts here.
- Did El-Sayed really erase $700 million in medical debt?: No. While El-Sayed has claimed to have “erased” $700 million in medical debt for 300,000 Wayne County residents as health director, the county has only paid off the equivalent of $57.4 million in medical debt for just over 83,200 people. Get the facts here.
- Did El-Sayed lead the ‘uncommitted’ movement?: While he was among the more than 100,000 Michigaders who joined the movement during the 2024 primary to protest the Gaza war, he did not lead it — and later endorsed Kamala Harris’ run for president after then-President Joe Biden dropped out of the race. Get the facts here.
- Is El-Sayed a millionaire?: He doesn’t dispute the characterization, and a recent financial disclosure shows El-Sayed and his wife are likely worth somewhere between $700,000 and $2.1 million. Get the facts here.
His platform
Throughout his time on the campaign trail, El-Sayed has distilled his policies into a three-pronged call to action: “Money out of politics, money in your pocket and Medicare for All.”
While the Medicare for all portion is self-explanatory – El-Sayed quite literally having co-written the book on how to implement a universal, single-payer healthcare system nationwide in 2021 – the other components are a Russian nesting doll of policy ideas.
El-Sayed has been vocal about being “the only candidate running for US Senate in Michigan that has never taken a dime of corporate money—and never will,” when calling to keep money out of politics.
If elected, he said he’d support overturning the US Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United — which ruled the government cannot ban corporations and labor unions from spending unlimited amounts of money on independent political communications — and supports banning outside spending through corporate nonprofits and SuperPACs.
Outside of that, he’s also called for abolishing the filibuster, ending lifetime US Supreme Court appointments, and abolishing US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, which El-Sayed calls “a tool for autocracy” in its current form.
“I believe in a safe, secure border and immigration enforcement–but under a new organizational structure that puts basic human dignity and deference to the rule of law first,” he added.
To the “money in your pocket” call: El-Sayed says he wants public ownership of AI firms and supports raising the marginal tax rate on earnings over $1 million, as well as a billionaire tax on wealth over $1 billion.
He’s also called for comprehensive federal zoning guidelines and legislation to protect communities from the unintended consequences of data centers, as well as requiring Big Tech companies like AirBnB and VRBO to pay special “housing dislocation fees for the housing stock they occupy in local communities.”
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