El-Sayed urges decisive midterm wins amid election concerns

Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed says his party needs to “win by massive numbers” in November’s midterm elections to make the results “unquestionable,” citing concern that President Donald Trump and his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, could challenge a close outcome.

“Donald Trump has already threatened to do what he did in 2020, which is deny the outcomes of an election,” El-Sayed said in an NBC News “Meet the Press” interview aired Sunday. Asked by NBC News on Saturday whether he would accept the midterm results regardless of the winner, Trump replied: “Of course I will. But we don’t want cheating.”

El-Sayed also pointed to Rogers’s account of his narrow loss to Democrat Elissa Slotkin in Michigan’s 2024 Senate race. “The guy I’m running against, he insinuates that he didn’t actually lose in 2020,” El-Sayed told moderator Kristen Welker, referring to a claim about a van of votes in Detroit. The Guardian reported that Rogers, who initially conceded his 2024 race, later said at events that a van carrying fraudulent ballots cost him the election. Asked whether Trump and Rogers might question a close result this November, El-Sayed said he was concerned they were “not committed to the institution of our democracy.”

Trump’s claims of fraud in Michigan after his 2020 presidential loss were rejected by a judge as “nothing but speculation and conjecture.” NBC News reported that 15 people were charged over an alleged effort to submit a slate of false Trump electors from Michigan, though their cases were later dismissed. According to NBC News, the Trump administration has also demanded that Wayne County, which includes Detroit, turn over all its ballots from the 2024 presidential election.

The Guardian reported that a recent New York Times-Siena University poll put El-Sayed five points ahead of Rogers. The poll also found Democratic Senate candidates leading in Alaska, Ohio and Texas, states Trump won by double digits in 2024.

El-Sayed, a former public health official, said his campaign’s focus on making healthcare more accessible through “Medicare for All” and challenging corporate interests could attract former Trump voters. He told Welker that voters who had supported Trump had approached him to say they would vote for him because he wanted them to have healthcare.

He also addressed his response to a March vehicle-ramming attack on a synagogue near Detroit. El-Sayed condemned the attack at the time but said “hurt people hurt people,” noting that members of the attacker’s family had died days earlier in airstrikes in Lebanon. “If I step on somebody’s grief, of course I regret that,” he told Welker. “My commitment to Jewish safety is the same as my commitment to my own kids.”

NBC News reported that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee criticized those remarks in mailers, while a super PAC, Together for Michigan, began running ads about them. One ad features a woman who says her son was at the synagogue that day and that she plans to vote for Rogers.

Asked about plans to campaign with former President Barack Obama, whom he criticized in a 2012 opinion piece, El-Sayed said his perspective had changed. He called Obama a “mentor,” adding that great mentors “let you grow up.”