Abdul El-Sayed wants to be Michigan’s next United States senator. A 40-year-old physician and epidemiologist who once ran the Detroit Health Department and later Wayne County’s health agency, El-Sayed won the August 2026 Democratic primary and will face Republican Mike Rogers on November 3 for the seat being vacated by retiring Democrat Gary Peters. He is articulate, well-credentialed, and a gifted communicator with a popular podcast. He is also, by his own account, running on a platform that sits well to the left of where most Michigan voters stand. The best way to understand that platform is to let El-Sayed speak for himself.
On Drugs: “Spaces Where People Can Use”
On his own podcast, America Dissected, in December 2022, El-Sayed made the case for government-sanctioned, supervised drug-use sites: “The other important part of this, though, is making sure that there are spaces where people can use in an observed manner… in a world where we criminalize drug use, people will hide their drug use. And if they hide, that’s what creates the risk of potentially overdosing in a situation where no one sees you and potentially dying.” Anticipating the obvious objection, he added: “I know folks out there might be thinking, ‘Well, aren’t you empowering people to use drugs?’ Well, what you’re doing is empowering them not to die because of the disease of addiction.”
Supervised consumption sites — facilities where people use illegal drugs under staff observation — remain outside mainstream American law and deeply controversial with voters who see them as condoning use. El-Sayed frames them as harm reduction; many Michiganders will see a candidate comfortable with spending public resources on places to use narcotics rather than on stopping the trade in them.
On Health Care: Abolish Premiums, Copays, and Medical Debt
El-Sayed is unambiguous about single-payer health care. “I literally wrote the book on Medicare for All,” he says on his campaign site, pledging to “extend it to every single American from cradle to grave without premiums, copays, or deductibles” and to make Medicare “automatic, for everyone, and accepted everywhere.” He also calls for erasing all medical debt: “Americans hold more than $225 billion in medical debt. I think it shouldn’t exist… I favor abolishing it for every American immediately.”
Medicare for All, as El-Sayed describes it, would end private health insurance as most Americans know it. It is a sweeping promise with an enormous price tag, and one that voters across the political center have repeatedly declined to embrace.
On Policing: “We Do Need to Defund the Police”
In a 2020 radio interview, reviewed and verified by CNN’s KFile, El-Sayed said plainly: “We do need to defund the police.” In the same period he argued the country should “invest more in these services, and it also means investing less in police,” and spoke of “decarceration” as “really, really critical.” To his credit, his 2026 campaign has softened that posture, now saying he would “fund law enforcement to identify, prosecute, and protect communities from violent criminals.” Voters can decide whether the 2026 language or the 2020 conviction is the truer guide.
On Foreign Policy: No Aid to Allies, Including Israel
El-Sayed has staked out a foreign-policy position far outside the bipartisan mainstream. “I don’t believe that we should be subsidizing foreign militaries, period,” he told The Detroit News in July 2026. “And that means Israel, but it also means Egypt, where my parents immigrated from. It means Jordan, it means Saudi Arabia.” He has also said, as reported by The New York Times, “I don’t believe in ethno-states, and I certainly don’t believe that our country is responsible to sustain ethno-states,” and told Time magazine he would call the war in Gaza “a genocide.” Cutting off a longstanding U.S. ally is a dramatic break from decades of policy supported by both parties — and a position a U.S. senator would be in a position to act on.
The Label He Rejects
Asked directly whether he is a socialist, El-Sayed demurs: “When it comes to the question of socialism, I’m not a socialist. I’m just a capitalist who understands how capitalism works.” It is a careful line. Yet the agenda beneath it — government-run health care replacing private insurance, abolishing all medical debt by fiat, supervised sites for illegal drug use, defunding police, and ending military aid to allies — is one that few of the Michigan voters he hopes to represent would recognize as the center of American politics.
None of this requires rumor or innuendo. El-Sayed is an accomplished man who states his views openly, and this account rests entirely on his own words and verified reporting. But a Senate seat is a grant of trust from an entire state. On the record he has built, Abdul El-Sayed is asking Michigan to send to Washington a set of positions well to the left of the people he would represent. On November 3, Michigan voters will decide whether that is the representation they want — and his own statements give them a clear basis on which to judge.
