Funny, irreverent, cocky: Can Abdul El-Sayed win a vital senate seat in abandoned America?
The last of the wasps are dive-bombing through the long line of people waiting outside St Michael’s Catholic Church in the Carriage Town neighbourhood of Flint. Like many parts of the city, the street is a little careworn but the early autumn Saturday is summery and dazzling in its primary colours. Large gatherings of people are unusual here and several cars slow down so their occupants can ask people what’s going on. “Abdul El-Sayed is speaking here,” people from the line call to them and the faces reflect a carousel of interest, or perplexion or indifference as they roll up the windows and zoom off through wide, empty streets. The event captures the odd contradiction of the US midterm senate races in that it is both inescapable on social media and almost invisible on the street. Attendees to El-Sayed’s rally are given the precise address just the day before the rally begins. The venue is small, which means it will be full. The vast majority of people in Flint have no idea it is taking place but within hours, the town hall will be spliced and diced and repackaged on social media. El-Sayed has been wandering Michigan relentlessly with his “It Shouldn’t be This Hard” tour. After Flint, he would head to Saginaw, where Paul Simon famously hitchhiked, and where the trajectory of the city’s fortunes was inextricably linked to the rise and fall of American motorcar production. But Flint residents take rightful pride in the fact that their city is where it all began and argue that Flint is the true motor city. “If you go right down here on Water Street where I live, they have the Durant building,” Michele Kelly explains, and talks me through the evolution of Charles Wisner and the “buzz car” and William Durant and the birth of General Motors. Kelly is 67 and has lived in Flint all her life. She’s fizzing with energy and is terrific fun, opening the conversation with a warning that New York mayor Zohran Mamdani is schooling the political classes on both sides on how to get it done. (function(){function e(){window.addEventListener(`message`,function(e){if(e.data[`datawrapper-height`]!==void 0){var t=document.querySelectorAll(`iframe`);for(var n in e.data[`datawrapper-height`])for(var r=0,i;i=t[r];r++)if(i.contentWindow===e.source){var a=e.data[`datawrapper-height`][n]+`px`;i.style.height=a}}})}e()})(); You think he’s that good, I ask? “There’s no ‘think’ about it,” she clarifies. When El-Sayed takes to the lectern in the church, the crowd waves placards and cheer as the candidate takes them through a now-familiar address that franks his love of Michigan, and his intentions for major reforms if he wins this senate race. His ascension to this moment has involved an epic uphill climb, first against the Democratic Party machine, whose favoured candidate, representative Haley Stevens, had the backing of the elders and the funding, outspending El-Sayed’s campaign by ten to one. That election illuminated the internal party chasm between the traditional ideological block of the party and the insurgent socialist democratic left. (El-Sayed has sought to position himself as a capitalist who believes in taxing the billionaire class and advocating universal healthcare for all Americans, rather than a Democratic Socialist.) He defeated Stevens by just under 14,000 votes – less than 1 per cent of the overall vote. Stevens immediately endorsed El-Sayed and since then, the stars of liberal left, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have campaigned for him even as the party machine has thrown its weight behind him. Kamala Harris appeared at an event in Michigan and on Saturday next, former president Barack Obama will join El-Sayed for a rally in Detroit. The simple equation on El-Sayed’s chances of edging out Republican candidate Mike Rogers – and therefore maintaining a vital senate seat – is that he needs to win over the traditional black, city-based vote. Michigan blows with the wind in presidential cycles but no Republican has won a US senate seat in Michigan since Spence Abraham in 1994. A recent Washington Post-Schar School poll found that of the 83 per cent of black voters who want the Democrats to win control of the senate, 67 per cent would vote for El-Sayed in the Michigan race. Bridging that gap is essential for El-Sayed if he is to win. The reasons for the wariness among black voters are down to a combination of the ubiquitous attack adverts accentuating El-Sayed as a radical candidate, and a simple lack of familiarity: the communities just don’t know him. During the series of questions from supporters in Flint, Michele Kelly asked El-Sayed why the campaign, and the Democratic Party, was not actively campaigning in black neighbourhoods in cities like Flint. “I am 67 years old and I don’t think anybody has directly targeted project people,” she told me afterwards. “I know they haven’t. Knocking on doors. Calling around. I’m not blaming anybody. I say ‘black community’ because that’s how we talk. But it burns me up when they say, ‘the base’. The base of the Democratic Party is the black community. The base of the Republican Party is the white community. Guess who they cover? Them. Guess who the media covers? Them. Guess who gets to go on TV? Them. So, we don’t see no reason ... El-Sayed needs Detroit, yes. But in order to pull an election win off, he needs smaller cities. Like Flint. Which is a black city. “This room here did not reflect Flint. At all. Flint is 80 per cent black. White Americans who live in Flint – well, they live in Davison, Burton, Grand Blanc. Most of Flint city itself is black. I thought he did the best he could today. I have been out here trying to encourage family members to pay attention to politics forever. ” The census statistics on Flint reflect a city still reeling from the rapid contraction of automotive jobs in the city in the 1980s: a median income of $34,000; 34 per cent of residents living below the poverty line; owner-occupier housing at 53 per cent; just 14 per cent with a bachelor’s degree or higher. It is a startlingly empty place. But any stranger taking a 20-minute walk through its downtown and the main thoroughfare of Saginaw Street will be struck by buildings that hold stories about its former grandeur. The Durant hotel, an exercise in opulence when it opened in 1919, was the social hub for the 50 years of its existence. Frank Sinatra and Glenn Miller booked in there during the years when Flint was automatic on the tour schedule. It fell into disrepair following its closure and now operates as an apartment complex. The Capitol Theatre, designed in the 1920s to emulate the grand Italian opera house style, has been refurbished. A food emporium is housed in what was the printing press of the Flint Journal. Flint Park is a green area now but in the 1920s, it had its own adventure park. On Saginaw Street there are statues to automobile giants, including Billy Durant, the founder of General Motors before he was squeezed out by the financiers and died, in penury, as the operator of a struggling bowling alley in Flint. A vast, fenced-off wasteland represents the site of the Buick City along Hamilton avenue, where 28,000 workers clocked in at its peak. Just a thousand jobs remained when the plant closed in 1999. Its premises featured prominently in Roger & Me, the sardonic, evocative documentary by Flint native Michael Moore chronicling the sad closing years of the factory. Michele Kelly graduated from high school in 1977 so she caught the town in its last wave of manufacturing prosperity. “Yeah, everyone was getting jobs, straight from school. As their parents did. Everyone had new cars, stores everywhere. By the time the next generation came along, General Motors was gone and ten years later, it looked like the Third World. It pisses me off because I remember what it could have been like.” Flint, then, stands a perfect symbol of Donald Trump’s election promise to somehow reverse the epic monumental decline of the car manufacturing industry. But despite his promises of a resurrection, Flint – and Genesee County – voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. It should be promising territory for El-Sayed. At 41, he comes equipped with a formidable range of accomplishments: a professor of epidemiology and Rhodes scholar who worked at the Detroit health department before running for governor of Michigan in 2018, when he lost to Gretchen Whitmer. He has developed an easy, streetwise media articulacy and turns up for campaigns in regulation jeans and casual tops. Mike Rogers, his Republican opponent, is a survivor of his party’s transformation: a former state senator turned US congressman, he ran against Democrat Elisa Slotkin for Michigan’s other senate seat two years ago and fell short by just 20,000 votes. When Gary Peters, who had held this seat for the Democrats for a full decade, announced his retirement, Trump was in office just eight days. But among his flurry of phone calls was a request to Rogers that he should run again. “Remember Mike Rogers is running for US senate because Donald Trump called him and asked him to. He won’t really break with him on tariffs, on war, because his only pathway to war is through him,” El-Sayed said on television last weekend. “Now, why does he want that power so bad? Not because he wants to serve as US senator – he doesn’t have any ideas. He wants that power because the last time he had power he was able to retire and make $14 million as an adviser for the very same corporations he had been regulating as a US congressman. He watched the president make 2.2 billion dollars off the presidency and said: you know what, I gotta get while the getting’s good. And you know who gets got? We do. And all he’s got is to point to me and say ... some scary words and it will work. It’s not going to win. Michiganders are too big for that.” That may be wishful thinking on his part. All polls depict a race on a knife edge: an early October Insider Advantage poll featuring 1,200 voters surveyed had El-Sayed at 48 per cent to Rogers on 46 per cent, with 5 per cent undecided. In their highly acrimonious televised debates, Rogers has repeatedly sought to link El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist group and emphasised his ties to controversial left-wing influencer Hasan Piker. Attack ads on Michigan localised networks introduce him by his full name – Abdulrahman Mohammad El-Sayed before declaring him “the most radical senate candidate in America”. “When his ally said America deserved 9/11, El-Sayed refused to disavow his remarks,” one advert narrates, referencing Piker, before declaring El-Sayed “too radical, too dangerous, wrong for Michigan”. Over the course of an hour in St Michael’s Church, El-Sayed roams the room, microphone in hand, trying to debunk the myths and stereotypes. He castigated Rogers for corporate-linked wealth and for owning two yachts. “Who needs two yachts?” he asks in mock bafflement. He referred to Rogers as a “non-playing character” and referenced Donald Trump’s accented pronunciation of his name. “Donald Trump can’t seem to take my name out of his mouth. It’s funny because he doesn’t even know how to say it. I mean, to be creepy about Abdul?” In delivery, he is funny, irreverent and slightly cocky; the northern flipside of the coin to James Talarico’s studied humility. “This is my first time seeing him live,” Melissa Dugan tells me when the rally ends. “But I did vote for him at the last opportunity I had. Abdul says everything that I am looking for.” Dugan and her husband run a small business where they live, in Linden, a 20-minute drive from Flint. With one daughter having just graduated from the University of Michigan and their youngest girl currently studying in Michigan State, the last number of years have been a stretch for the family. In addition to running the business, her husband works in real estate while Melissa has a part-time job. Their daughter’s college financial aid was reduced by 30 per cent this year. “It has made it difficult for us to keep her enrolled. She’s on the dean’s list: she is thriving so we are doing everything we can. We haven’t had health insurance since 2025. Because we can’t afford it. As small business owners we don’t have a company that gives us benefits. “So, we have to go through the market place and our health was going to cost $8,000 for the year and it didn’t cover anything and had deductibles. So, we self-insure, which means that if something terrible happens, we hope we can afford it. But I can barely afford my groceries and gas.” That national cost-of-living crisis, and the sneaking sense that billionaire business interests have subtly hijacked the system has formed a crucial part of El-Sayed’s campaign mission. He has built a formidable funding model despite rejecting corporate and political action committee donations, and one of his vows is to try to wrestle the American electoral system away from the clutches of mega-donor influence. “It is absolutely insane,” Dugan says of the US health insurance system. “I am all for a socialist government, I am all for Medicare for all. It is ridiculous that as one of the wealthiest countries in the world we don’t have health cover for citizens. “This current administration – maybe this sounds extreme – but I really feel part of their goal is just to eliminate much of the lower and middle class. And they will do that by killing us – by making the cost of living so high that we can’t afford to eat or buy medicine.” We speak for a while about Flint. The city was still in a drift state after the vanishing of General Motors when it was hit with the water crisis in 2014, caused by the cost-saving measure to switch the drinking supply to the Flint river as a source, which was quickly and lastingly contaminated by lead pipes. That civic disaster lasted a full five years, ending just before the pandemic. The tragedy of Flint is that the people who arrived to make lives and a city there did everything right. They believed, passionately and with confidence, in its future: the proof is there in the surviving architecture and the residential streets that bloomed when Flint’s population climbed as far as 196,000 in the 1960 census. It is home to about 81,000 people now. On Saturday afternoon, in gorgeous sunlight, Saginaw Street was completely deserted apart from a lone busker playing guitar and two seniors having a chat on a bench. There are photographs of the same street in Flint’s roaring years: lit up and populated like Sunset Strip and brooking no doubts about its place in the country. Michael Moore’s film drew both lavish praise and considerable pushback for a portrait of a decline that critics felt manipulated the chronology of events to suit the storyline. But almost four decades later, the arc of time has validated its broad truth. A once-thriving automotive city was devastated by the reimagining and globalisation of the US industry and the people who still live there have to deal with the aftershocks. There’s something brutal and saddening about its story. “Flint is a great town with great people,” Melissa Dugan says. “What happened here was none of the citizens’ fault. The system is the problem. And we need huge changes.” Abdul El-Sayed isn’t the first political aspirant to visit Flint in a campaign year. For decades now, Flint residents have been used to candidates breezing through and issuing passionate words. But El-Sayed is adamant that if he is elected as the first Muslim to sit in the US senate, he will carry Vehicle City with him. “Flint is the canary in the coal mine,” he said, speaking in the church porch to local television crews after the rally was over. “You look at the failure of our state government to protect just the basics when it came to water. And Flint was also the place that showed the world what a union could do in terms of a sit-down strike. So, when you think about what Michigan is, Flint ... and Detroit ... they are at the heart of it.”