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Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed has a problem with a large slice of the state’s Black electorate.
It doesn’t like him.
That matters in a state where the voting population is 14% Black. (About 2% of Michigan voters are of Arab descent. 1.4% are Jewish.)
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In the most recent Washington Post–Schar School poll, Sept. 10–14, only 67% of likely Black Michigan voters supported El-Sayed. A Fox News poll from a month earlier, taken Aug. 6–10, found that 75% of Black Michigan voters said they would vote for El-Sayed. That is a trend in the wrong direction for El-Sayed.
Two years ago, then Vice President Kamala Harris carried the Black vote in Michigan with 87%. So El-Sayed is significantly underperforming the most recent Democratic nominee for president.
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The question is why is El-Sayed so weak with this particular demographic?
El-Sayed has addressed this question very directly, including acknowledging that there is mistrust between parts of Detroit’s Black and Arab communities.
El-Sayed may already have given up on Michigan’s significant Jewish vote coming around, but on Tuesday he campaigned with former Vice President Kamala Harris at an event aimed directly at Black women. It was an awkward “roundtable” that seemed to have been so narrowcasted at Black women as to have returned right out of peak Woke 1.0, which Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio Cortez assured us recently is an era behind us. Harris did not get that memo as her remarks Tuesday indicated.
“The attack on DEI is an attack on maternal care,” Harris opined as an uncomfortable-looking El-Sayed looked on, “including the need to protect Black women in connection with their pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum care.” The word salad chef of 2024 was back.
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Whether or not the day’s appearance by the former VP helped El-Sayed at all with Black voters won’t be known for some time, but given the numbers in the public polling, El-Sayed had to try something to get Michigan’s crucial voting block at least start thinking about going to the polls in November even if that something was Harris who has been notably absent from the critical Senate races until this week.
There is little reason to believe that Harris is the answer to El-Sayed’s core problem.
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In an August 2026 interview with The Grio, El-Sayed was blunt about the Black-Arab-American divide in and around Detroit:
“I think a lot of the mistrust among Black folk in Metro Detroit is well-founded, based on a kind of double standard that too often business owners, particularly in the Arab and, yes, Muslim communities have had when it comes to the way they do business in local communities,” El-Sayed said.
“You see money go in and then money leaves these communities rather than be reinvested in the community,” El-Sayed continued. “It’s a conversation I’ve been having with the Arab and Muslim community for a very long time. We can’t sit here and talk about racism against Arabs and Muslims unless we’re willing to actually look inward and ask how is it that we’re engaging with the Black community in a way that is responsible?”
So El-Sayed knows he has a problem with a key demographic. He has tried other approaches before bringing Harris into the state.
El-Sayed declared he was open to “reparations” when he appeared with Fox News’ Jesse Watters, saying that an “incredible debt that was put upon black folks as a function of slavery, that we have yet to pay.” El-Sayed also told Watters the whole country should be discussing “how do we make people whole.”
The following month, El-Sayed was talking to leaders of the Black church, saying “unpaid debts” are owed to Black communities, debts that have “long since come due.”
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While the topic of “reparations” polls at 77% approval among Black Americans, only 18% of white voters support the concept. So the more El-Sayed pushes “reparations,” the more likely he is to drive off the moderate independents already leery of his radical positions and friendship with Hasan Piker.
Then there is the “Trump effect.” President Trump collected 13% of the Black vote overall two years ago, and close to 20% of Black men. Does talk of DEI and maternal care at the El-Sayed-Harris roundtable Tuesday bring home votes among Black men? Does chatter about unspecified reparations even drive off the near quarter of the Black population that aren’t signed on to the concept?
The long-standing tensions between the Black and Arab-American communities in and around Detroit cannot be resolved in an election cycle that has focused on El-Sayed’s radical break with traditional Democratic campaign themes and profiles.
El-Sayed’s primary opponent, Congresswoman Haley Stevens, took more than two-thirds of black voters in the primary. Republican nominee Mike Rogers knows this traditional Democratic stronghold is at least partially in play. We can’t see Team Roger’s buy on “urban radio” or in other media serving the Black community, but we have seen Rogers making appearances throughout Wayne County and making many appearances with “Democrats for Rogers” groups featuring Black voters.
Everyone knows that El-Sayed and his association with Hasan Piker has driven off the votes of a large number of Jewish Democrats. That the campaign is not connecting with Black voters as it must to give him a shot is the double nightmare for his campaign strategists.
What can he do between now and November 3? It is hard to see a path to keep the moderate independent vote even as El-Sayed trots out traditional panders to the Black vote that don’t even resonate as credible or detailed.
Even as El-Sayed struggles with basic messaging to core constituencies, Republican groups have poured more than $60 million into the Wolverine state. There are some polls showing El-Sayed with a lead over Rogers outside the margin of error. There were also lots of polls showing him winning the primary against Stevens by double digits, with one memorable miss putting him 18% up in a race he won by one point. The polling doesn’t add up given his problems with the Democratic base.
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So stay focused on El-Sayed’s increasingly frenetic campaign and its sudden lurches here and there. There’s a reason radicals aren’t often nominated by major parties. Both Republican and Democratic Parties are built out of coalitions of interest groups. El-Sayed’s primary campaign fractured the traditional Democratic coalition. There is scant hard evidence that he has found a way to glue it back together again and then motivate it to vote between now and November 3.