Don’t Get Too Attached to Senator El-Sayed
If he really is the star he thinks he is, he won't sit around the Senate for long
Well wasn’t that fun, kids?
Abdul El-Sayed will now join Elissa Slotkin in the U.S. Senate.
Here at Michigan Enjoyer, we’ve focused on the truth about El-Sayed for quite some time. We revealed his claimed dual citizenship, his family’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and his sudden ascension into Michigan’s political elite through former Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan’s then mistress. This was long before the coastal media outlets booked their tickets to DTW and got I-94 and I-96 mixed up, mind you.
We also reported on El-Sayed’s terrible record leading the health departments in the city of Detroit and Wayne County, where he couldn’t even guarantee proper healthcare for juvenile inmates. But now he claims that with his single vote in the Senate, he will be able to guarantee it for all Americans.
That reporting mattered, given that he ran several points behind Jocelyn Benson, who won the governor’s race by basically never appearing in public, despite her own incompetence while serving as Secretary of State.
And while El-Sayed may be our senator now, he might not be for long. He’s never held down the same job for more than a few years, and I suspect the seat of his pants will get a little itchy sitting in that august deliberative body for six years.
Given the energy he spent building his national media persona (he gave an interview to Wired Magazine, of all places, and has become something of a Fox News contributor in the run-up), his aims seem much higher than doing the best by us Michiganders.
With the 2028 Democratic field wide open, I’m sure he fantasizes about an Obama-esque rocketing out of the boredom of Senate hearings to the Oval Office, where he would set the world to rights by freeing Palestine, dissolving the state of Israel, and offering Americans even more free stuff we can’t possibly pay for.
Our September poll, conducted by some of the finest in the polling business, predicted a bloodbath for Republicans. President Donald Trump is simply too unpopular with independent voters for any of the Republican candidates to have stood a chance this cycle. Blame gas prices, blame his antics, blame broken promises, but the same state that elected Trump to a second term by more than a point has soured on him, to put it mildly.
So now the Republicans have run John James twice and Mike Rogers twice, and have lost four consecutive Senate races. Each would have been solid candidates in the 2000s and even the 2010s, but this is a different age. The idea that Rogers could win this time wasn’t unreasonable, given that he lost to Slotkin by only 20,000 votes. But this election was all about the man behind the resolute desk, not about policies or charisma or basketball prowess or even hope for the future.
Call it bad timing, strong headwinds, whatever, but can a run of bad luck really last 32 years? It might just be general malaise or simple incompetence by the consultant class.
It may take a legendary talent with a decent tailwind to break Michigan’s Republican Senate curse, but y’know what? Even if 20,000 voters swung for Rogers in 2024, this year we’d probably have just had El-Sayed vs. some other schmuck who didn’t stand a chance.
It’s cold comfort, I realize, but maybe the thing we can hang our hats on is that if El-Sayed really is the star he thinks he is, we may get a second Michigander living in the White House, even if he isn’t fit to tie the shoes of that great man, Gerald Ford.
