BS Summary: This article contains 12 faulty reasoning types, including Framing Effect, Halo Effect, and Hindsight Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 7.3% saturation with 307 hits. Analysis detected 1,175 faulty-reasoning hits from 4,197 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 12.4% and a BS Rank of 3% (21,917 of 22,405 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 97.80% of the article peer group.
Democratic Senate primary candidate Abdul El-Sayed at a rally in Lansing, Michigan, July 19, 2026.
PONTIAC, MICHIGAN – On a balmy Sunday afternoon outside of the Pontiac Public Library, I was set to join Abdul El-Sayed and two of his staffers for a 30-minute ride between campaign stops.
As we got into the Ford Explorer, a man approached the car and knocked on the driver’s-side window.
He had a reporter’s notebook and started ripping out pages.
At first, it seemed like he was a journalist trying to get in a final question.
But when El-Sayed asked if he could help him, the man, still ripping pages out, mumbled that he was just sharing some thoughts on messaging.
He handed almost a dozen sheets of paper to El-Sayed’s driver before the SUV drove away.
The man wasn’t, it turns out, a staffer or a journalist.
He was a supporter.
El-Sayed’s staffers were ready to just pocket the notes, but the candidate wanted to read them.
Politicians often “lose touch with how people think about a particular issue and how it shows up to folks so when they give you this they’re teaching you how [the issues] shows up to them,” El-Sayed said, as he flipped through the dozen pages.
That episode is comparatively new to El-Sayed, the unlikely front-runner in the Democratic primary for Senate in Michigan.
For years, he’s been a health care technocrat and aspiring lawmaker, but only recently has he really gained the level of attention that the most prominent Democrats or Republicans get, which comes with representing a political wing of their party.
El-Sayed is a gifted orator who has attracted the affection of progressive Democrats.
This is El-Sayed’s second statewide race.
In both cases, he entered as the heavy underdog, a Bernie Sanders–aligned candidate seeking public office.
This time, as he seeks to replace outgoing Sen.
Gary Peters, El-Sayed has increased his viability from highly improbable to likely Democratic nominee for Senate.
Most public polls and some private polls (including one of the last internal polls from the now-aborted campaign of state Sen.
Mallory McMorrow, according to a Democrat with knowledge of those surveys) show El-Sayed winning the primary.
Most recently, a late-July poll has him up on U.S.
Rep.
Haley Stevens 46-36, with another 14 percent undecided.
Part of this surge is thanks to El-Sayed’s own populist skills: He’s a gifted orator who has managed to attract the affection of progressive Democrats.
Part of it has been Stevens’s struggles to raise money or get comfortable in the spotlight, and McMorrow’s difficulty carving out a lane.
But whatever the reason, with less than a week until Election Day and over 800,000 Michiganders having already voted, establishment and normie Democrats are engaged in a collective mass panic and a frantic effort to keep El-Sayed from winning the nomination with whatever they have in their arsenal.
El-Sayed’s top surrogates have argued his nomination would send a larger message to the rest of the party.
“Everybody is watching this race!”
Rep.
Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), who traveled from Washington state to stump for El-Sayed, said during a rally on Saturday.
El-Sayed’s political trajectory began in 2018 with an ultimately unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign, after serving as a bright-eyed health director for Detroit.
I profiled him for Politico’s magazine during that primary.
We were both young—him 32, me 29—childless, and recent graduates of the same college.
Longtime political strategist for Barack Obama and others David Axelrod, who has praised El-Sayed as a candidate, often argues that politicians learn more by losing.
So I asked El-Sayed what he learned, and what is different now?
“First of all, it’s not about me,” he said.
“In 2018 I didn’t understand enough that.
Second, I just grew up.
I was 32 and had never run for office in my life.
I hadn’t had my kids yet.
Now I have two kids and a mortgage.
The kids are eight and three.
Your kids teach you a lot about patience which I know you know,” alluding to how we both have daughters now.
“And the third is, I don’t need you to agree with me on the critique, I just need you to agree with me on the outcome, on the solution.
That’s what I’m trying to focus on.”
As El-Sayed has matured, as he’s gained more supporters trying to rip pages out of notebooks to help him, as he’s become more visible on the national scene, he’s also had to shed some of the happy-warrior youthfulness that characterized his early years in politics.
He’s opted to run a more serious campaign, and with that comes all the seriousness of being a viable and iconoclastic candidate.
I FIRST MET Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed in 2017.
By then, he had already crafted an impressive résumé.
We are both University of Michigan graduates and actually had some mutual friends on campus.
Though we did not know each other personally, I had heard about an impressive student who was involved in the Muslim Students Association and played on the club lacrosse team.
The Michigan Daily did a story about El-Sayed and his wife being married while still in college.
In 2007, El-Sayed delivered the student commencement speech for his graduating class.
Former President Bill Clinton was the guest speaker, and after the speech the former president told El-Sayed he had an oratorical gift.
Why would he go to medical school, Clinton wondered?
“Mr.
President, I don’t know if you saw my name but it’s got 11 letters in it—and that’s just my first name—so I don’t know if that’s going to be possible for me,” El-Sayed recounted saying.
Even during the early years of Barack Obama’s rise in national politics, it’s understandable why El-Sayed would be skeptical of a political career.
Abdul El-Sayed high-fives a supporter during the 2018 gubernatorial campaign.
Instead he studied for two years at the University of Michigan Medical School, then received a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, where he was in the same class with Pete Buttigieg.
(They have kept in touch over the years.)
El-Sayed completed his Ph.D. in public health there and a separate Doctor of Medicine from Columbia University.
But El-Sayed decided on public health rather than a conventional medical practice.
After a year teaching public health at Columbia, he was tapped by Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, then a very powerful figure in Michigan politics, to come home and run the city’s health department.
But he would eventually catch the political bug.
El-Sayed’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign unfolded in a markedly different political landscape.
Democratic candidates across the country were grappling with whether to support abolishing ICE (24 percent of the public supported abolishing ICE in 2018; now, 50 percent of Americans want to get rid of the agency).
Obamacare was under threat, and while Bernie Sanders had run for president on a campaign of Medicare for All, the atmosphere was more about protecting what was in place.
Sanders had established himself as the figurehead of an energized minority of very liberal voters.
But contemporary liberal heavyweights like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hadn’t experienced their upset victories quite yet.
El-Sayed’s association with the Sanders wing of the party marked him as more of a curiosity, as did his lack of experience while trying to become one of the youngest candidates ever elected statewide in a major Midwestern state.
He and his team, many of them Sanders alumni, were young and less ingrained in the various organizations and political quarters of Michigan that a statewide candidate needed to win.
He had little to no name recognition around the state, and a Twitter account with only a few hundred followers (it’s now around 150,000).
In the campaign, El-Sayed displayed some of the raw political chops that make him a serious political candidate today.
His core message was largely the same: a more robust government presence in health care, free college tuition for students below a certain income threshold, and a higher minimum wage, as well as the poisonous presence of dark money in electoral politics.
But he was caught between two approaches, alternately trying to be the next Barack Obama to Democrats who wanted that and the next Bernie Sanders to progressives who wanted that.
If anything, there was too much policy.
“At one point somebody called the campaign the best think tank in America,” Max Glass, El-Sayed’s longtime senior strategist, told me earlier this year.
And his campaign lacked the catchy—and sometimes annoyingly repetitive to those whose job it is to chronicle elections—shorthand phrases on which winning candidates often ride to victory.
Gretchen Whitmer ran on the slogan “Fix the Damn Roads,” engineered after she had already sifted through senior staff.
“[Whitmer] was just hyper-focused on improving the lives of people in the state in ways that were measurable,” Glass told me in the interview earlier this year.
“Whereas our campaign had these big lofty ideas of trying to create a state-level single-payer health care system for Michigan … Gretchen really focused down on ‘what can I do today to make things better?’
I hated it at the time but it was kind of brilliant.”
Whitmer, who had a long record as state Senate minority leader, was simply the more seasoned, better organized, and more disciplined candidate, and while El-Sayed briefly made some hay over Whitmer’s father being the longtime president of Blue Cross of Michigan as he stumped for Medicare for All, in the end Whitmer won every county and 52 percent of the Democratic primary vote, followed by El-Sayed with 30 percent.
“Why did he lose?
Probably money,” one Democratic operative who supported Whitmer in 2018 said, pointing to Whitmer’s money and name ID advantage.
“He lost because he never held office before.”
Today, the operative said, there is “incredible economic angst.”
If there was a rematch?
“Gretchen vs.
Abdul now?
I wouldn’t pick that fight,” the operative said.
EVEN THOUGH HE LOST , El-Sayed came out of the governor’s race much more visible within the national Democratic Party.
He would go on to appear regularly on CNN, write two books, and host a podcast which at one point was housed within the Crooked Media ecosystem, further raising his profile.
El-Sayed remained active in Michigan government over those years, too, serving as health director for Wayne County from 2023 to 2025, allying with Wayne County Executive Warren Evans against Whitmer over a juvenile jail crisis.
During the 2024 campaign, he was an outspoken Sanders supporter and, for a time, a member of the Uncommitted movement before ultimately endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris in the final stages of the general election.
“It’s not like Abdul has been campaigning for a job these last eight years, he hasn’t been,” said Pontiac City Councilman Mikal Goodman, who knocked doors for El-Sayed’s gubernatorial race and is backing him now.
“He’s been mainly doing the job that’s expected of him both in the sense of being a health director, being a doctor who has strong political beliefs about a key issue and he also has been doing his job.
And so I think that over the eight years people have come to see Abdul as ‘oh yeah, he’s with us’ because he’s been around.”
Read: The progressives propelling Abdul El-Sayed forward in Michigan
The 2026 Senate campaign has been much more muscular (literally and figuratively), focused, and sharpened.
Riding with El-Sayed in late July, there were the same lighthearted moments and wide-ranging discussions.
But there was a healthy dose of the phrases El-Sayed hammers relentlessly on the trail, at rallies, and every bit of campaign literature they publish: “money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for All.”
By the time El-Sayed began running for Senate, presidential candidates like Buttigieg and Trump demonstrated how an everywhere-all-the-time approach to social media and podcasting was more effective than highly choreographed events and speeches.
El-Sayed, Glass, and his team opted to emphasize the candidate’s skills and comfort on podcasts, public appearances, and even more adversarial formats like Fox News, to raise his profile.
El-Sayed’s team embraced the candidate’s self-described identity as a “bro with a podcast” and put him on weightlifting podcasts.
Authenticity had become a priority for a swath of voters, as well as a fighting spirit.
El-Sayed and his team leaned into both early on, even as the beginning of the Senate race was shaping up to be a three-way fight with two other, seemingly better-situated candidates.
Michigan has always had a close and historic relationship with unions, something El-Sayed has purposefully cultivated.
He earned the endorsement of the United Auto Workers, whose members found El-Sayed authentic when he pitched himself to them.
“I think it’s just that he’s real,” UAW president Shawn Fain told me in an interview.
“He doesn’t come off as robotic, unfortunately like a lot of politicians do, Republicans or Democrats … He’s real and I think people relate to that.”
In particular, Fain added, members were impressed with El-Sayed’s focus on not taking any corporate PAC money.
“Look, corporate PAC money is a big deal to us and when you’ve got a candidate that’s not taking it and you’ve got a candidate that’s telling you, ‘yes, I take it but it’s OK.
I know a lot of people struggle with that,” Fain said, alluding to El-Sayed’s two initial rivals in the primary, Stevens and McMorrow.
Stevens has depended almost entirely on outside money to prop up her campaign.
The latest quarterly fundraising report showed the congresswoman had raised almost $12 million ( less than El-Sayed or McMorrow) and spent a little more than $9 million.
But outside spending in support of Stevens has surpassed $30 million and provided the lion’s share of advertising for Stevens’s candidacy.
Some estimates have gone as high as $60 million of corporate interests and outside group spending to boost Stevens and stop El-Sayed.
A good way for El-Sayed to exemplify the role of big money in politics was through his opposition to data centers, which this year has become a populist rallying cry extending beyond the liberal wing of the party.
El-Sayed’s campaign took a page from the early days of his late gubernatorial campaign and unloaded a series of intricate proposals for addressing data center construction and energy concerns.
This campaign had figured out a way to direct El-Sayed’s most wonky inclinations, without tripping up his overarching approach.
“People really effing hate data centers,” El-Sayed said at a recent campaign stop.
“The trade-off here is hard to explain to the broader public and we’re doing this in a deeply unregulated era.
There is no regulation that is real.”
Rep.
Haley Stevens speaks during a debate with Abdul El-Sayed, July 27, 2026, in Southfield, Michigan.
What’s become apparent to El-Sayed’s supporters and Michiganders in general is that this Senate campaign is much more focused, even if that means sacrificing some of the hopeful levity El-Sayed tried to run on last time for a graver maturity.
“As someone who’s a speechwriter you can sense when someone has a very distilled pitch for themselves and the issues were very clear and it still has a health care lean to it but he had a fuller agenda that encompassed government reform and corruption and obviously foreign policy,” said Ben Rhodes, the former Obama speechwriter who co-hosted a fundraiser for El-Sayed’s Senate race.
“You can sense he’s just locked in.
He knows his own race.
He knows who he needs to persuade, who he needs to mobilize.”
A FAVORITE LINE IN EL-SAYED’S stump speech points to how Michigan is a complex state.
It often eschews the flashier candidates for the more subdued backbenchers.
Think former senators like Philip Hart or Carl Levin or Debbie Stabenow, or outgoing Sen.
Gary Peters (whom El-Sayed and Stevens are competing to succeed).
It’s not lost on El-Sayed that Whitmer came off as less exciting during the 2018 gubernatorial race.
The last Republican governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, leveraged his background as a certified public accountant into a successful campaign slogan: “One Tough Nerd.”
At the same time, El-Sayed points out that Michigan barely went for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary before picking Donald Trump in the general election.
Trump came within 200,000 votes in 2020 of winning the state three times.
Michigan tends to be consistent in its inconsistency.
It is part of the cluster of Rust Belt states that have become must-win for any presidential candidate.
The state has industrial wastelands, but also real wealth in some of the richest suburbs in America.
It has both rural and heavily urban and suburban pockets.
Michigan also has one of the largest Jewish and one of the largest Muslim populations in the country, which makes things particularly tense when events in the Middle East drift into the national American discourse.
Inside the state, though, Democrats say the political tectonic plates have shifted under voters’ feet.
Democrats largely shifted left even as some moderates have continued to dabble in Trumpism.
Rashida Tlaib’s victory in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District in Detroit was an early bellwether.
“The state has definitely become more liberal as far as the Democrats are concerned,” Barry Goodman, an elected officer-at-large for the Michigan Democratic Party, told me.
El-Sayed’s national visibility as a Senate candidate really took off when he was endorsed by liberal Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.
El-Sayed’s rivals, particularly McMorrow, pounced on the endorsement and tied the candidate to some of Piker’s most extreme language on foreign policy.
But El-Sayed himself didn’t recoil from Piker’s support and instead went on to campaign with him.
McMorrow sunk so badly after the exchange that she ended up dropping out of the primary .
The episode revealed an important aspect of the Democratic primary electorate in Michigan or elsewhere.
“The Hasan Piker situation was very interesting in that yes, he’s very popular with younger voters and I think people were excited to see somebody who’s willing to do the work of reaching those voters,” Glass told me in an interview.
“For us it was like, ‘let’s show people we’re the only campaign willing to actually really go and have real conversations with some of these influencers that are having an impact with young voters.’”
Throughout the race but particularly after McMorrow exited, the primary has featured infighting and bitter attacks.
The first time El-Sayed’s viability and really the intensity of his support was on display was at the state Democratic Party convention, where supporters drowned out Stevens’s speech with boos and jeers.
El-Sayed soon after urged his supporters to resist the urge to embrace personal attacks.
Those calls have ultimately failed to really materialize.
Occasionally, El-Sayed has unintentionally made things slightly more difficult for himself, like when he accused Stevens of sometimes struggling to string sentences together, a comment that Stevens and her allies have used to argue that El-Sayed is a rank sexist.
The campaign has only grown more negative as Stevens’s discomfort and rank awkwardness with retail politics have gone viral online and her most outspoken supporters (usually some of the more centrist national Democratic figures) have amplified flimsy accusations of sexism, alleged financial chicanery, and disingenuous attacks about the candidate’s education and medical degrees.
Rep.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Senate primary candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and Sen.
Bernie Sanders (I-VT) join hands following a campaign rally in Detroit, July 18, 2026.
El-Sayed and his team were expecting all of that plus a pile-on by establishment Democrats, especially in a cycle where Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen.
Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), the current chair of Democrats’ Senate campaign arm, opted to try and boost their preferred candidates in primaries.
But it’s hard to understate the degree of desperation El-Sayed’s opponents within the Michigan political community feel about his possible nomination.
Peters and Whitmer, his former foe, both opted to buck tradition and previous vows to stay neutral in the race and endorsed Stevens.
That’s partially driven by the larger fear that nominating El-Sayed would blow the Senate seat and risk a Republican takeover.
There has been polling showing Stevens as more competitive against former Congressman Mike Rogers.
Democrats are also still smarting from nominating a wild-card progressive candidate in the Maine Senate race only to see him collapse amid scandal, something the establishment has played up.
But while there have been a few polls showing Stevens in the lead, the majority of public polling—some of which is questionable—has shown El-Sayed leading the pack.
Stevens also has a reputation as a favored member of Congress among Black voters.
The polling favorable to her shows her winning big among Black voters, and she spent much of the final days of the campaign trying to juice Black turnout in Detroit in her favor.
El-Sayed’s team did not expect the sheer depth of money the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was willing to spend to boost Stevens and attack him over his calls to limit aid to Israel over its handling of the war in Gaza.
The campaign has turned that spending into a rallying cry, framing him as a David figure fighting a Goliath of outside spending, something that’s resonated with voters in a cycle where the Democratic electorate is rabidly against outside interests and dark-money spending.
“We’ve built a guerrilla campaign,” El-Sayed said to a group of former McMorrow supporters last Sunday, pointing out that the only way he’s been able to withstand the outside money spent against him is because of the early efforts his campaign has made to build grassroots support.
El-Sayed is used to dogged retail politicking.
Glass stressed though that how he’s gone about it in the Senate race reflects how he’s approached this campaign.
“I think this time around he’s more focused on listening to folks.
He’s done 450 events all across Michigan.
He’s been to 110 cities,” Glass told me.
“Nobody has traveled this state as much as we have and listened to near as many people.
And I think he’s really trying to speak toward the emotional challenge that so many of us are facing in terms of what it means when you can’t afford to make ends meet.
Where do you put that anger?”
EL-SAYED HAS HAD TO CRAFT a concise and simple answer on Israel and Gaza, even as he’s been relentlessly pressed by his opponents and in interviews with national press over whether he is pro-Israel or not.
El-Sayed has avoided boiling his response down to something one-dimensional.
Instead, he’s come to say the premise is wrong and that, instead, the question is really about where voters want to send their tax dollars: abroad or to domestic priorities.
“We frame this question in the interest of one foreign government, and I think any question asked to an American policymaker ought to be asked with respect to the frame of the public that that person serves, which is Michigan.
So I just reject the frame of the question.
I reject the idea that I should be asked about the interests of a foreign government when my interest should be in people in the state of Michigan,” El-Sayed told me during our ride-along.
He’s also made a point of stressing his respect for the Jewish faith while also arguing that the Palestinian people also deserve dignity and respect.
El-Sayed has had to make it a habit of taking questions about Israel and Gaza and answering with a segue to domestic topics.
At a rally with over 100 supporters on Saturday outside of Detroit, El-Sayed alluded to how often questions from national press have the premise that he or his position on Israel might be “dangerous.”
“I always wonder, like, why would you call someone like me dangerous?
It’s not like people who look like me have ever been called dangerous,” El-Sayed said as he wound up a part of his stump speech.
“I’ll just say this: Go ask a child who needed a pair of glasses in Detroit if I’m dangerous.
Go ask the folks who could not breathe because the smoke never stops spewing out sulfur dioxide.
If I’m dangerous, go ask the parents of kids who are going to schools that were leaded.
If I’m dangerous, go ask the people flooded in medical debt if I’m dangerous.
I think what they’ll tell you is, he’s the best friend you might have if you want government to work for you.”
Bringing in the other side of his pitch, on special interests controlling politics, El-Sayed wound up the crowd further.
“But I tell you what, if you’re AIPAC, I’m pretty damn dangerous.
If you’re a Big Pharma, I’m dangerous.
If you’re Big Tech and want to put a data center in your backyard, I’m dangerous.
If you’re a big bank that wants to collude against us, I am dangerous.
If you’re a monopolist who wants to raise prices?
I’m dangerous.
If you’re Chuck Schumer, I’m pretty damn dangerous.
And I think it’s about damn time we had Democrats who are willing to be dangerous for all the people rigging our politics against us.”
The post Abdul El-Sayed Lost in 2018.
It Set Him Up for 2026. appeared first on The American Prospect .
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.