Abdul El-Sayed entered the race to be the next Democratic senator from Michigan earlier this month, earning an endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and promising to drive universal health care back into the national political discussion.
El-Sayed ran for governor of Michigan in 2018, losing in the Democratic primary against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. A medical doctor, he served as the director of the Department of Health, Human, and Veterans Services for Wayne County from 2023 to 2025 and as a member of the Unity Task Force for Democrats following the 2020 presidential primary. He is the author of “Medicare for All: A Citizen's Guide,” alongside Micah Johnson.
In the race to replace the retiring Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., El-Sayed is currently facing state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and state Rep. Haley Stevens. In a conversation with Salon, he explained why he thinks he's the best candidate to take on American "oligarchy."
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve talked about creating a politics of "buildings." I’d like to ask what your vision for American politics is and what it is that you’d like to see built.
I've been in an ongoing conversation with Michiganders since I jumped into public service, and they're very clear about the pain points in their lives. They're very clear about their frustration that they feel like their lives are simply a money grab for greedy big corporations. They're afraid of the insecurity of losing a job and then losing health care or watching as your employer gives you yet more deductible you have to pay to get the health care you already paid for, garnished out of your wages every two or four weeks. They're worried about PFAs plumes in their ground, poisoning their water, or whether or not their air is poisoned by sulfur dioxide from a smokestack next to them. They're worried about whether or not their kids are ever going to be able to afford a home because the quality of their schools seems like it's been deteriorating over a long period of time.
We are the richest, most powerful country in the world. The fact that those are shared frustrations of the vast majority of our people is, frankly, gobsmacking, and our politics needs to be about solving that. And I think there are three things we need to do if we’re serious about solving it.
Number one, we need to break the way that corporations have had a choke hold on our political system for a very long time, because the power of their money in our politics to dictate who gets elected and then what they do. And that means delivering our democracy up to people so that they have the say, rather than corporations who can pay for 30-second ads to miss and disinform the public.
Second thing is, I think we need to address the way that we’ve been limiting what we are able to do as a function of the interests of those corporations instead of rebuilding government to actually deliver on challenges. I'm somebody who believes that government can be a real part of the solution, and too often what's happened is that you've got a Republican — now MAGA — agenda that has been about deteriorating the power of government so that they can privatize out those services, and somebody can make a lot of money and then return some of that money back into campaign contributions.
I think government works best when government's doing that work in the public interest, and so I think we need to build government out so that it can actually deliver on broad mandates in the form of education, in the form of health care, and in the form of broad, sweeping public services like transit and and fundamental civic infrastructure.
And then the third thing is, I think we need to heal our politics so that we are having a conversation about who best delivers, rather than this kind of negative partisanship that has taken hold that leaves us more cynical, more frustrated, more angry and delivers points to the the party that can better insult the next one.
I think if we can do those three things, I think Americans are going to be happier, we're going to be healthier, we're going to be more secure in the communities in which we live, and we'll be wealthier for it.
I'd also like to ask you about your background in medicine. Specifically, I'm wondering how you make sense of RFK Jr. as a phenomenon and whether or not you think his rise and the real popular support for it is a result of Democrats backing away from health care as an issue. They've often positioned themselves saying, “We fixed health care with the Affordable Care Act, and now all we need to do is protect it.”
I really love that question. Look, I just want to use the pandemic as an example here. For a long time, corporatized medicine has pushed public health out of the conversation, and there was a time when public health was built around taking on big fights against corporate interests that were harming the public.
Go all the way back to meat packing or swill milk at the turn of the 20th century; go to the fight against big tobacco. But for a very long time, I think public health has become technocratic and it has become cowardly, and there are big fights that still need to be won.
You look at the role of ultra-processing in our food, and you take that back to the fact that you have a few very large corporations that manufacture our food in ways that are really built around profit rather than nutrition. You look at the way that Big Tech has fracked our attention space, literally monetizing our eyes in ways that leave us more anxious, more lonely, more angry and further apart from each other. These are big fights that we should be we should be fighting. And unfortunately, I think public health has been an agent, sometimes in its own marginalization.
And so you've got a situation where a guy like RFK Jr. can take the fact that we've left the playing field and then, in effect, monetize it off of conspiracies for himself. And there are things about RFK Jr. that I want to note he gets right, and that's his diagnosis of the problem. I think he recognizes that there is a serious opportunity for our country to be healthier that we are missing.
Now you look at COVID-19 as an example, and this is where I was going with this. You have a pandemic in a moment where people are deeply afraid, and all of a sudden they hear from their public health officials about what they cannot do, and then a year later, we're out telling them to take a vaccine that didn't exist a year ago for a disease they don't yet have.
Meanwhile, for decades, you've watched as people have been struggling to pay for things like insulin. And so the logic here is, “Okay, I know I need my insulin to survive, and you all were MIA while I was struggling to be able to afford this critical medication, as the prices went up because corporations were monetizing me because of my disease, and now, all of a sudden, you all show up with a new vaccine that's completely free that didn't exist a year ago for a disease I don't have.”
You can understand now how our failure to show up on the issues that people know they face as undercut trust. And I think in that trust gap, you have somebody like an RFK Jr who tries to explain it all via a grand conspiracy theory about the scientists and everybody being in cahoots. So I worry because of the sort of marginalization and the technocracy of the public health infrastructure over the past several years, and the fact that Democrats haven't been willing to actually take on the big gaping issue in our health care system, which is that too few people have access to quality, affordable health care; that we have $225 billion in medical debt collectively; that hospitals keep buying each other up and raising their prices or shutting down hospitals in rural and some urban communities.
The fact that we haven't been able to take that on has created the space where somebody like an RFK can come and exploit it, naming the problems and then identifying, like, frankly, bat-shit crazy solutions, and we see what the consequences are. And so the thing we have to understand is that if we're not willing to be bold, if we're not willing to face down a lot of the ways that corporations have left us failing to solve real problems because they're interested in funding campaigns to keep us silent, if we're not willing to do that, it creates a trust gap and then you have charlatans who step in.
Frankly, RFK is just one example of a far broader team. I mean, it's exactly what Donald Trump did. He identified and exploited pain that was not being answered by the people who said that they wanted to actually address it, and then he was able to ride that all the way to the White House now twice, and his solutions have been 100% self serving, chaotic and ham handed. And it's the same thing with RFK Jr.
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I wanted to follow up on that. I know you've written a book about Medicare for All. I'm wondering what you think the leading policy should be for Democrats in 2026. I know Tim Walz, for example, has said that universal health care needs to be on the table. I'm wondering whether you think that the marquee policy for Democrats should be Medicare for All in these midterms and the next presidential election, and if not, what it should be.
So I just want to draw the obvious here, right? A guy commits a heinous crime by shooting a health insurance CEO in broad daylight, which is heinous and wrong and terrible, and the broad conversation isn't about condemning the murder, it's about how angry people are at the industry that that he targeted. That should tell you a lot about just how frustrated people are with health insurance.
I wanna be absolutely clear: The murder of anybody is 100% wrong. And the fact that the broad populace brought up a conversation not about how terrible murder is but about how terrible the health care industry is — that should really focus our attention on addressing the underlying glacier of challenges that people face.
I mean, you look at health insurance prices, they have gone up and up and up and up. We pay every two weeks, or every four weeks, and then they've created this cost-sharing mechanism, which means that you pay and then you have this deductible, which means you pay again at the point of care, which literally sends millions of people into debt. I mean, $225 billion medical debt that is greater than the GDP of the majority of U.S. states, like that is an insane thing in the richest, most powerful country in the world.
So the idea that you would run and ignore that foundational problem that everybody faces, it's either they're facing it directly right now, or they're at risk of facing it or their loved ones are at risk of facing it, [it's] like critical and essential to who we are, because we all have bodies that want to be able to heal if they get sick. That’s nuts to me — that it's a question that whether or not this should be on the table. The only reason that we would not lead on health care is because we know that the insurance industry and the hospital industry and the pharmaceutical industry have been writing checks to Democrats for a very long time to buy our silence.
So even when we do talk about health care, we talk about it in these vague terms, because nobody wants to dare piss off the insurance industry, lest they lose out those corporate checks to fund their campaigns. And so yes, we should be leading on health care, foundationally. We should be leading on the idea of guaranteeing health care for everybody.
Medicare for All does exactly that and it also makes our health care system more efficient. It also fights on behalf the public against the sort of tyranny of the healthcare corporations. It puts everybody in America on equal footing when it comes to being a patient and a consumer of health care. It solves a lot of problems, but politically, it's also an obvious solution to an obvious problem, which, if you're a Democrat right now, you really, really want to be about.
I also think, though, that it's an emblem of a broader problem. Like we cannot ignore the fact that our economy has been unstable for the majority of Americans for a very long time. And we point to average metrics to say, “Oh, well, it's performing extremely well.” Yes, when you average out the billionaires with everybody else who's just scraping two dimes together to try and afford their home and their groceries, yeah, it looks fine.
The problem is, when you realize that it's a distribution problem, that you have billionaires doing amazingly well while everybody else is falling behind, you start to realize that affordability is critical, and health insurance is part of that, health care is part of that, but it's part of a broader theme.
The reason that our system is as broken as it is is because we've allowed the same kinds of corporate welfare policies to abound: whether it's in health care; whether it's in groceries; whether it's in food processing; whether it's in Big Tech and telecommunications. No matter where you turn, you've got a few very large corporations that get to set the rules for the rest of us.
They get to figure out how to monetize us on our needs and then everybody ends up poorer for it, except for the folks at the very top of those corporations. And to secure the politics that protect them, they write corporate checks to everybody on both sides of the aisle.
Do you think that the political infrastructure has changed enough since, you know, eight years ago when you ran for governor, or when Bernie Sanders ran for president? Are we at a moment where this could break through?
I believe so, but let's be clear. We sometimes talk about these things as if there's an invisible hand that dictates our politics, right? It's incumbent on people running for public office to drive a conversation that sources the best, the most important issues they're hearing from their constituents, and to speak publicly, openly, honestly and directly about the problems that they're hearing about.
Medicare for All, is it magically going to come back to the top of the conversation unless people are honest, politicians are honest, about what they're hearing from the public, and they're willing to say that openly and honestly? The problem, though, is that too few are willing to actually name the problem, because the problem sits downstream of corporations who are paying in part for those campaigns. And so, you know, I don't take corporate PAC money for a reason, because I want to be free to talk about the real problems I'm hearing about and to name them openly, honestly and directly.
It's funny. When I'm out and about in Michigan, people are like, “It seems like you just say the thing.” I'm like, “Yes, I do say the thing.” And the bigger picture is not that I'm saying the thing, it’s that nobody else is saying the thing. The question is, why are they not saying the thing? They're not saying the thing because they're out knocking on the corporate PACs doors to ask for the money, which keeps them from saying the thing.
If we have the courage to name what people are experiencing, if we have the courage to name real solutions to solve it, I think it can break through. Again, just point to an example of the fact that, like the broad conversation that surfaced after a man killed another man in in cold blood, was about the insurance industry that should tell you something about how pissed off people are about this problem, and I think we have a responsibility, if we're serious about being public servants, to solve it.
The problem is that too many people cosplay as public servants and really they're just servants for private interests. And that is, in part, a corruption of our politics that we need to be good about solving as well.
I have two more questions for you. The first is in regards to something Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., said. She recently advocated that Democrats don't talk about oligarchs and the way that they control the country and back Donald Trump so much. And she also advocated that they once again try to “retake the flag” and called on the party to shed what she characterized as a "weak and woke" public image. I was hoping I could get your response to her description of the situation and her plan to fix it.
I try to be just to focus on what I'm for, and I certainly agree that anybody who's going to corrupt our Constitution, like Donald Trump has and all of the MAGA acolytes that have gone along with it — literally disappearing people for signing on op-eds or peaceably assembly — that is un-American, and so I think we need to retake the flag.
I love my country. I know 100% what my life would have looked like and my parents had not had the opportunity to come here. I love America. I love America so much that I constantly want her to be the best she can be. And so I think what we're doing here is true patriotism.
It is doing that thing that is so American, which is correcting, like the thing that America does better than any other place, that we constantly try to get better. And I think it's an amazingly American thing. And I think that we need to dress ourselves up in red, white and blue, because that's what America is. And I think sometimes when we criticize, rather than just saying what's wrong, we need to be all about saying what can be better, and demonstrating our belief. That is such an American ideal of recognizing what can be fixed and fixing it and then being better because of that.
At the same time, on the question of what we call Donald Trump and his acolytes, all of us got to go and call this what we believe it to be, and you see what resonates, right?
I try not to wade into a lot of these disagreements within the party, my job is to go out, listen to voters across my state and then articulate what I'm hearing from them in ways that capture their frustrations and seek to bring more people together to try and take them on and that’s what we’re going to be doing. I think oligarchy is a perfectly acceptable word to do that. I think calling Donald Trump, somebody who wants to be a king, is a perfectly acceptable way to do that.
I think, regardless of what words we use, we've got to be about naming just what is so broken and wrong about this administration, and probably more importantly, what we fight for to solve it. And I think you know, it's one thing to fight back against Trump and Trumpism and Musk and all of the cowards in Congress that have gone along with their agenda; it's another to tell people, here's what the alternative can be. And I'm really focused on doing that.
One more question, and this is specifically about campaigning in Michigan. Democrats did a number on their brand in the state, particularly with the Kamala Harris campaign in regards to her cleaving to the Biden administration's policy in Gaza. Many people have criticized the campaign for sending surrogates like Bill Clinton and Richie Torres to the state, and there has been some evidence that if she had broken with the Biden administration on just this one issue, it could have been the difference. I'm wondering what your approach is to campaigning in the state in light of this and repairing the brand, given the damage that has happened over the past year and a half there.
I can't tell you how damaging the failure to just campaign on common sense was. I endorsed Kamala Harris in July. I spent the next three months having very difficult conversations with two groups of people.
The first was the Harris campaign, trying to get them to see that there was so much pain in our communities in regard to the disastrous policy when it comes to Gaza. Every president in American history before this guy has agreed that we need a two-state solution. And what that means is that you believe in the possibility of the state of Palestine. Yet we were arming, aiding and abetting the very people who want to foreclose on that possibility. That was a disaster in terms of just public policy.
But what's even more disastrous is that people watch as their kids' schools are crumbling, and we're sending billions of dollars abroad to drop bombs on other kids and their schools. It just makes no sense. And Michiganders are particularly focused on the issue, because so many people see it on both sides.
They look at their kid's school, and then they look at their distant cousin's school, and both of them are crumbling... How about we don't send those tax dollars abroad to destroy other kids in their schools? Instead, we spend them here.
That should seem to be conventional wisdom, right? And for a long time, our party understood that. I remember voting for Barack Obama, who's the second president I ever voted for, because he was the guy who understood that war was fundamentally wrong in terms of American adventures, and that we were best when we obeyed the rules of the rules based international order that we helped to create after World War II.
I don't know what happened in the last 17 years where we became the party of war rather than the party of peace, but a lot of my conversations with the party were about trying to get them to see that that is a winning position, and then that means breaking with the disastrous Biden policy when it came to Gaza.
And at the same time, I was having really hard conversations with folks across my state about the fact that Donald Trump would simply be worse. About the fact that Donald Trump would try to foreclose on our democratic rights to advocacy, as he has, about the fact that Donald Trump would be worse for people in our state, but you'd also be worse for people living under war in Gaza. And both of those things have come to pass, and I remain deeply frustrated with all that transpired over the next three months... I think a lot of Michiganders could have been won over.
But I'll tell you, as I've crisscrossed my state, I'm running to be senator from Michigan, and in Michigan we believe that our kids deserve good schools, that we should have health care, and that sending our money to a foreign military to drop bombs on other people's kids probably isn't the best use of our money, considering all the challenges we should be solving here at home. I've been having that conversation with Michiganders. They agree with me, poll after poll shows that, and so I'm looking to have that conversation now.
I know that there are a lot of folks who are looking to accept money from MAGA characters to try and rig our primary here so that MAGA doesn't have to run against somebody who's willing to say those conventional wisdoms out loud. And I just hope that every Democrat running in this primary is willing to step up and say that we should not be taking MAGA money to beat up on other Democrats and that we should be trying to win Democrats on the merits, rather than with Republican money.
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