Is El-Sayed Actually Running for President?
He's claimed that every job he's had was too small to fix systemic problems, so does he even want to be a senator?
Abdul El-Sayed can never stay in one place for long. So it’s odd that El-Sayed has chosen to run for a U.S. Senate seat, with a six-year term.
In 2015, with great fanfare, El-Sayed was hired as director of Detroit’s health department. It was a big deal that a city recently bankrupt could attract a New York-trained doctor with Michigan roots.
El-Sayed had studied medicine and earned two degrees, but thought that patient care was not for him. He was capable of more than fixing the problem that brought the patient to the hospital in the first place.
“The best you can do at a hospital is stabilize one patient at a time,” El-Sayed told the Detroit Free Press when he was hired. “But you’re not dealing with the bigger-picture problems that are creating the disparities that I’d become so enraptured with.”
Patient care was too small, so he pivoted to public health.
Mike Duggan, then Detroit mayor, praised El-Sayed as the answer to the city’s prayers.
Duggan called El-Sayed “a remarkably accomplished and talented public health administrator.
“He will lead the restructuring of our health department to start addressing overall community health in a holistic way that hasn’t been done in the past,” Duggan told the Freep.
A year-and-a-half later, El-Sayed resigned. He said the problems of society were too systemic to be tackled from a health department of a single city. So he ran for governor in the 2018 Democratic primary.
“We need to rethink government rather than a business that cuts costs at the expense of people, but as an entity that we are all a part of, and that we all contribute to, that provides for us all,” El-Sayed told the Detroit News at the time. “That responsibility has never been more acute to me. I felt like I should leave my role in Detroit to very honestly and seriously consider that.”
He came in second place, winning 30% of the vote.
Gretchen Whitmer won that primary, and then the governor’s race. El-Sayed started writing a book, which he droped in 2020, called “Healing Politics: A Doctor’s Journey into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic.”
Irony of ironies, the man who thought public health was his calling, rather than patient care, was on the sidelines during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In December 2022, El-Sayed re-emerged as a “consultant” to Wayne County en route to becoming Wayne County’s health director.
El-Sayed said at the time: "As we emerge from the pandemic, our department will seek to empower Wayne County residents through a focus on health equity and access, maternal and child health, senior wellbeing, and environmental health while implementing all the pandemic has taught us about keeping our communities safe in times of public health challenge.”
But by April 2025, El-Sayed resigned his post.
"I'm resigning in consideration of exploring a Senate future,” he told the Freep.
Why leave Wayne County? You guessed it: The problems of society were too systemic to fix from Michigan’s largest county. That and Sen. Gary Peters decided against running for re-election months earlier.
With an empty seat, El-Sayed pivoted back to politics. Only as a U.S. senator could El-Sayed fix society’s ills.
El-Sayed has held two high-profile positions and lasted less than three years in both. A six-year U.S. Senate term is an ill fit for a career nomad.
What’s the thing behind the thing? Given El-Sayed’s history, his next move is not hard to spot.
Being a doctor was too small job, so he pivoted to public health.
Public health in Detroit was too small a job, so he pivoted to politics, and lost.
Public health in Wayne County was too small a job, so he pivoted back to politics. We’ll see how that goes in a stacked August primary that Politico describes as a “three-car pileup.”
If El-Sayed wins the primary and wins in November, it’s likely that by 2028, or at least 2032, he would tell the same story. That the U.S. Senate is too small, too deliberative, to make his mark.
That the only way he can fix America is from the Oval Office.
Abdul El-Sayed is not running for the U.S. Senate. He’s looking for a stepping stone that will lead to a run for the presidency. Anywhere else, the job is too small, and the problems too systemic.
