On the menu today: After watching former Maine Senate nominee Graham Platner’s campaign go about as horribly as it possibly could have, some Democrats may well be having second thoughts about the latest table-pounding radical to come down the pike. Up until recently, Abdul El-Sayed looked like the safer bet in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary; the winner takes on Mike Rogers in what may well be the GOP’s best shot at picking up a currently Democratic Senate seat. Get to know El-Sayed, who, despite a dramatically different life story than Platner, has some strange parallels to the recently withdrawn Nazi-tattooed candidate.

The Radical in Michigan

It might surprise you to learn that former Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner was not, technically, a Democratic Socialists of America party candidate. (Easy joke: Platner was more of a National Socialist type.) DSA members may have been rooting hard for Platner, but he was never formally a member of their cadre.

No, the candidate who’s really thrilling DSA hearts, and who they’re really pulling for, is Abdul El-Sayed, one of two leading Democrats competing for the nomination to succeed retiring Senator Gary Peters in Michigan’s U.S. Senate race, with the primary set for August 4, 2026.

His rival is Democratic Representative Haley Stevens, who has a lifetime 1 percent out of a 100 rating from Heritage Action. Needless to say, Stevens is described as a “centrist” and “moderate.” (A Democratic lawmaker’s reputation for “moderation” in mainstream media coverage is entirely reflective of his or her persona and tone of voice and has nothing to do with their positions or voting record.)

Still, El-Sayed is indeed the more radical of the two remaining options for Democrats in this primary.

El-Sayed insists that like Platner, he is not a Democratic Socialist; it’s apparently just a giant coincidence that the Democratic Socialists of America has “already shifted organizers, volunteers and resources toward battleground Michigan.” He’s been endorsed by socialist Bernie Sanders and current and former DSA members of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, and Summer Lee, as well as Representative Ilhan Omar, who is not a formal member of the DSA but a recipient of a DSA “statement in solidarity.”

The first thing you should know about El-Sayed is that he and his campaign refer to him as “Dr. Abdul El-Sayed” even though he’s never been granted a medical license and he’s barely seen any patients in his career.

Politico in May:

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed for years has publicly said he’s a physician — but there’s overwhelming evidence that he’s had no experience as a licensed medical doctor. . . .

According to a review of Michigan and New York state medical records, he’s never been granted a medical license in those states. El-Sayed’s hands-on experience treating patients appears to be a short clinical rotation called a sub-internship at a small hospital in Manhattan for four weeks at the end of medical school, he told a podcast in 2022, where he said his “job was to be the, like, worst doctor on the team” and he was “cosplaying a doctor.” . . .

“He has earned the right to be called ‘doctor’ twice over,” El-Sayed spokesperson Roxie Richner said in a statement. Richner didn’t respond to questions about his use of the word “physician.” El-Sayed has said in the past that he decided not to practice medicine after treating a patient during medical school and decided he wanted to address systemic issues, instead of individual patients.

It turns out that El-Sayed is a physician the way that Graham Platner was an “oyster farmer” — he’s done it a couple of times, but he doesn’t make a living at it.

El-Sayed is the kind of candidate who thrilled his DSA brethren by calling for defunding the police, but who now says he never said it, and asks why the media is so “fixated” on his past statements.

El-Sayed’s recent interview with CNN’s Manu Raju did not go so well on this point:

Raju: Now, you’ve said recently you never, never called for defunding the police, but our K File team here in CNN found interviews in the past where you did repeatedly back in 2020, including in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing. I want you to listen to your comments here.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
El-Sayed: 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. What if we were to invest in social services? What if we were to invest in public schools? What if we were to invest in public libraries? What would the world look like there?

And I think that has to be the way we go. And that means both investing more in these services and it also means investing less in police.
(END VIDEO CLIP)

Raju: So why did you say you never call for defunding the police when it sounded like you did in the past?

El-Sayed: You know, what’s interesting about that comment is I go as far as defining what I mean by that. Do you disagree with investing in libraries and public services and social services?

You fixate on the word “defund,” but what I’m talking about is war material that we made too much of during the war in Iraq. And then because we had too much of it, we had to find somewhere to sell it. So we sold it to a whole bunch of local police departments. I believe in investing in retention and retirement for law enforcement. I’ve done work with law enforcement during my time in Wayne County.

By contrast, El-Sayed isn’t running away from his past statements calling for abolishing ICE. “ICE is a paramilitary force deployed against and our Constitutional order for the service of one would-be dictator. How many more people do they need to shoot?” He throws in some pro forma comments that “we must secure our border and work towards comprehensive immigration reform” but never really goes into any detail about how he wants to enforce immigration laws once he has abolished the federal agency that enforces immigration laws.

In April, El-Sayed campaigned alongside the left-wing streamer Hasan Piker at a University of Michigan event. (More on Piker here.) Asked about Piker’s “America deserved 9/11” comment, El-Sayed said that Piker’s comments had been taken “out of context.” (Take a moment to try to imagine a context in which “America deserved 9/11” is not morally reprehensible.)

The centerpiece of El-Sayed’s domestic agenda is that hardy perennial subject Medicare for All, which is a version of single-payer — your health care would be provided by the government, with no monthly premiums and no deductibles. Every cost would be covered by the government.

Never mind that Vermont Democrats tried to enact this — in a state where Republicans can hold their meetings in a phone booth — back in 2014. But back then, Democratic Governor Peter Shumlin and team ran the numbers over and over again and kept coming up with the same result: Paying for the system they wanted to build meant they needed about $2.5 billion in additional revenue in the first year. The state’s total tax revenue at that time was . . . $2.7 billion. They scrapped the plan, concluding that doubling the state’s tax revenue overnight was unrealistic.

It’s the same story in Michigan. Back in 2018, running for governor, El-Sayed promised that he would enact single-payer statewide. He refused to ever give a price tag on what his plan would cost. (Remember, this is the topic he has spent his life’s work on and presumably knows more about than any other issue.)

In 2025, the Michigan state government spent $37 billion on health and human services. The total economic impact of the health-care sector in the state of Michigan a few years earlier, in 2023, was estimated at $106 billion. That’s about $79 billion a year in wages, salaries, and benefits and an additional $23.6 billion a year in tax revenue.

Assuming (unrealistically) that health-care costs didn’t increase from 2023, if the state of Michigan enacted single-payer, the state government would have to find roughly $69 billion to cover the costs that would no longer be covered by private health insurance. Michigan has about 10 million people. That comes out to an additional $6,900 for every man, woman, and child in the state. A family of four would need to pay an additional $27,600, in addition to whatever they’re paying in state taxes currently.

In other news, El-Sayed’s wife is a psychiatrist who does not accept Medicare, or any insurance at all; patients are required to pay out of pocket. If the candidate really does believe that those who oppose Medicare are the adversary, this brings new meaning to “sleeping with the enemy.”

Anti-Israel rhetoric is now almost standard in a Democratic primary, and this is El-Sayed’s bread and butter. He’s contended that the only reason the U.S. is fighting Iran is because of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and that the U.S. war is “genocidal.” When a deranged antisemite attacked Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Mich., El-Sayed responded, “It’s just critical for us to understand that hurt people do hurt people, and the circumstances happening 6,000 miles away can affect the lives that we live here.” The FBI characterized the attack as “a Hezbollah-inspired act of terrorism.”

In March, El-Sayed told his supporters, “I also want to remind you guys that there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today. So, like, I just don’t want to comment on [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei at all.”

In his recent debate with Stevens, El-Sayed mentioned Israel, AIPAC, or the war against Iran in his answers about artificial intelligence, the national debt, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

This morning, a new Detroit News/WDIV-TV survey shows Stevens ahead of El-Sayed, 48 percent to 41 percent. Most previous polling had El-Sayed ahead.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, fresh off admitting that Graham Platner fooled her, warned at the end of June while writing about the Michigan Democratic Senate primary that “moderate” and “electable” are not synonyms. Eh, even if that’s the case, it doesn’t make “immoderate” and “electable” synonyms, either.

ADDENDUM: As our Corinne Cowan observes, when CNBC decides to create a list of the “best states to live in” and chooses criteria like the “inclusiveness” of state laws, prominence of local unions, and “reproductive rights,” they might as well just call it the “best states for progressives to live in.” When CNBC ranks Tennessee the worst state to live in . . . someone, at some point, should have asked why it’s persistently one of the fastest-growing states. If it’s such a terrible place . . . why is everyone moving there?