As already posted here, the Minnesota Dem primary is between a conservative AIPAC supported candidate and a progressive, Peggy Flanagan, a Native American
Abdul El-Sayed may be buoyed by a younger, anti-establishment coalition as he runs against an establishment candidate
El-Sayed, running in Michigan to be the Democratic candidate for US Senate this November, is trying to strike a delicate balance between policy wonk and performer – capable of detailing the mechanics of the proposed Medicare for All system of universal healthcare one minute and delivering a punchline the next.
At a moment when American politics has become conspicuously humorless, he is an unusual political persona. And in a matter of days, on 4 August, Michigan Democrats will decide whether he’s their type to send him to the United States Senate.
El-Sayed faces the more moderate representative Haley Stevens, who has the backing of the Democratic party establishment. The duo are virtually neck-and-neck at the polls – raising the prospect of the party’s grassroots voters again defying the wishes of its leaders.
While a string of socialist victories across Democratic primaries in recent months has boosted the left of the party, El-Sayed rejects the label. He just wants capitalism that works.
El-Sayed, 41, has tried, and failed, to win office before: in 2018, he lost the Democratic gubernatorial race in Michigan. Has the younger, anti-establishment coalition he now represents grown larger than the one that rejected him eight years ago? El-Sayed believes it has.
“I think people are sick and tired of the establishments on both sides of that, and I think we are having success because we’re speaking to that frustration,” he said. “And politics doesn’t have to suck, and you can build a politics that doesn’t suck.”
That quote seems to summarize a view of his establishment opponent's brand. Given how Schumer, Gillibrand and Cheyenne Hunt shook a me-too to derail Platner in Maine, it appears they don't have one to shake at El Sayed. Which is fortunate. Surely you'd expect they've searched for one.
Following an image of El Sayed rallying with Bernie and AOC, Guardian, writes:
Next month’s Michigan primary will test whether that coalition is now large enough to nominate one of its own as a Democratic candidate for Washington.
El-Sayed insists he didn’t plan to run in this year’s US midterm elections. Heading into 2025, he said, “I thought I was going to keep doing what I was doing” – running Wayne county’s public health department, trying to keep key programs and health centers afloat as Donald Trump’s administration wielded the axe.
“The straw that broke the camel’s back was when they froze federal funds,” El-Sayed recalled in an interview. “I’m sitting here trying to figure out how to flow programs like [nutrition support initiative] Wic and federally qualified health centers and vaccines, and meanwhile we’re watching our tax dollars get sent abroad to drop bombs on other people’s kids.”
Throughout his campaign, El-Sayed has frequently tied the Israel-Gaza war, which he unflinchingly calls a genocide, and other conflicts involving the US to affordability at home. “Every time you want to put glasses on kids, people ask you: ‘Doctor, how are you going to pay for that?’” he said. “Nobody asks the general how he’s going to pay for the next war.”
Repeating, he is not the AIPAC favored candidate, that said, back to the text:
The roots of this worldview long predate this campaign, and run through Egypt, where El-Sayed spent childhood summers with his father’s family.
He describes the country as both “glorious”, because of the fullness of family and social life, and “painful”, because of the strict political order surrounding it, and the role that decades of US military support helped play in sustaining it.
[...]
El-Sayed credits his grandmother, whom he calls the smartest person he ever knew, for teaching him that, while talent is distributed widely, opportunity is not.
“I’m playing with house money, man,” he said. “Put all the chips back on the table and try and do something new. I was supposed to be a cab driver in Egypt. That’s not my life.”
Instead, as a student, he was a starting defenseman on the University of Michigan lacrosse team, vice-president of its Muslim Students Association and, in 2007, the university’s first Rhodes scholar in years. He studied at Oxford, attended Columbia medical school and eventually entered public health, rather than private practice.
“He was always the smartest guy, the awesome guy who can work the room,” said Mohamad Issa, a head and neck cancer surgeon in Ohio who knew El-Sayed during his college years. “The first person there. The last person to leave.”
Issa remembers approaching El-Sayed after a game of basketball as a nervous freshman, having earned disappointing grades in his first science classes. He had been told by an adviser that medicine might not be for him.
El-Sayed, then a student athlete, spent months mentoring him, offering study strategies that Issa says transformed his academic career. Two decades later, Issa says, he still teaches those same techniques to students he mentors today.
“He’s a bro,” Issa said. “That’s all you gotta know.”
After years of research and being an instructor, El-Sayed led Detroit’s health department after the city’s bankruptcy, then took over Wayne county’s, where he helped cancel roughly $700m in medical debt affecting 300,000 Michiganders.
“He almost has an idealistic pressure in his mind about wanting to live fully, in a way that is admirable,” said Dr Sandro Galea, dean of public health at Washington University, who has known El-Sayed for more than 20 years. “It comes from a sense of wanting to do right by people, wanting to help in a better world for people.”
Clearly, again, he is not AIPAC's horse in the race. Shunning a "socialist" label, Guardian reports El Sayed's thinking:
His critique of the economy is not that markets can never work, but that concentrated corporate power has prevented them from working as advertised. “If the markets actually worked the way they’re supposed to, you might have some efficient movement of money,” he said. “The problem is, we don’t live in capitalism, we live in oligopoly.”
El-Sayed points to universal healthcare. Private insurers make money from people when they are younger and healthier, he says, before handing them to the government at 65, when their care becomes more expensive. A rational system would spread those costs across a lifetime, according to him, rather than privatize the profitable years and socialize the costly ones.
For El-Sayed, the question is ultimately the same one he absorbed in Egypt, at school, in his research and from his grandmother: who is permitted to benefit from the institutions around them – and who is expected merely to endure them?
With that message, he has gained ground inside the Democratic electorate, with rallies attended by hundreds of eager Michiganders from across the political spectrum, though
the party establishment has been considerably slower to follow.
Chuck Schumer, the US Senate minority leader, and retiring senator Gary Peters have backed Stevens, reflecting the party leadership’s preference for the more conventional candidate. El-Sayed, meanwhile, has assembled a different coalition, winning recent endorsements from the likes of progressive representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders.
The divide reflects a broader disagreement inside the party over what will help it win.
Grossman, [a pundit] at Michigan State University, does not believe the concern driving figures at the top of the Democratic party to oppose El-Sayed is primarily ideological. It is, he said, more about what a victory by someone to Stevens’s left would signal nationally.
That national signal being that the people can have a voice which Schumer and Gillibrand cannot bend and control, a signal that pair would sooner shun immediately than look at and reflect upon It's power, and money management of U.S. politics at stake, and Schumer et al. don't want to give up what Pelosi eventually gave up because she was older than sin. More from Guardian:
“The concern from Washington is more about the long-term image of the Democratic party and whether someone closer to El-Sayed’s politics would make it harder to hold the seat in future elections,” said Grossman. “I don’t think Abdul will suffer a major penalty for ideology in this election.”
El-Sayed has faced unusually determined resistance.
Not everyone inside the party embraces his offering. Lon Johnson, a former chair of the Michigan Democratic party who supports Stevens, argued El-Sayed’s politics could ultimately cost Democrats one of their best opportunities to retake control of the US Senate. “There is real concern that Abdul would not be able to beat [Republican Mike] Rogers and then potentially lose us a majority possibility in the Senate,” Johnson said.
Outside groups, led by the pro-Israel lobbying network Aipac and its affiliated political funds and committees, have poured roughly $30m into the race on behalf of Stevens, making Michigan one of the most expensive Democratic primaries in the country.
While El-Sayed continues to speak out about Israel’s destruction of Gaza, ads have leaned heavily on domestic issues, highlighting Stevens’s experience working with the Obama administration’s auto rescue in 2008.
Yeah. Obama bailed out Wall Street and GM and let Main Street face big time forclosures, so what, yea for that? Hardly. Latest news about GM, they have been selling Buicks made in China, and given tariff things from Trump, they will move part of that game to the U.S. That linked USAToday thing:
GM intends to sell the Buick Envision vehicles assembled at Fairfax to the North American market, the company confirmed. This means production in China may continue for sales to other, non-U.S. markets.
This is the latest change for GM after regulatory shifts and slower-than-expected consumer demand of electric vehicles roiled its production plans during President Trump's second term.
In the meantime, production of the Buick Envision in China has not been disrupted, and GM will continue to ship the Envision to the U.S. from China. GM said additional product and timing details of the new Buick will be shared closer to launch. GM sold 41,924 Buick Envisions in 2025.
So, yeah, Obama bailed out GM and as a thank you GM in turn used Chinese labor, not U.S. autoworkers, until the tariff war changed their mind That is representative of the thinking of the establishment Dem Party in DC, and change would be welcome.
Try search = gm saic joint venture's future -- That will show a story of history from Obama's bailout to now. Learn or already know facts.
The Obama bailout of the corporation, not the workforce but the firm, is on the rocks.
GM is still a Schumer-like firm, a failure, but happily entrenced and making rich folks richer until a hammer may fall. Using the U.S. auto industry as an example of anything suggested as good for the masses from establishment Dems runs into ownership greed being serviced in DC.
Try search = ford family control of voting stock and prospering however the market goes
Tesla is doing okay, Elon managing it in non-traditional ways, while the others arguably show us a stinking example of has been. And when an Establishment Dem trots out "Obama GM bailout" to engage autoworkers, are the unions that clued out?
Unlikely.
Don't expect clean thinking rather than slanted spin propaganda from establishment Dems like Schumer and Gillibrand. It's not in the DNA. Which is why an evolution is afoot. Gross economic inequality favoring the class war the rich are waging on everyone else is being called into question. There are better candidates than others. That's fortunate.
But it is an evolution. The inertia mass of incumbent Democrats will hold the line until enough progressives get win after win, so there is hope, while the establishment seems to not mind playing trans-issue crap with the GOP while both embrace a status quo loving money. Concentrated money, donorship elite paying dues to those running both Parties.
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It grew into a rant. I could say, "Sorry about that." But no. I am not at all sorry. People every so often need a good rant.