Exclusive / El-Sayed unloads on media, Democratic criticism

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

David Weigel: What did the campaign swing with Hasan Piker, and getting criticized for it, do for your campaign?

Abdul El-Sayed: Look, I’ve been very clear: I’ll go everywhere, talk to everybody. The folks at Third Way have made a whole organization out of taking money from billionaires and corporate folks to launder the same old sh*t ideas that have buried towns like this one, and then they want to do this sort of platform politics that feels more like a bunch of folks wanting to live in a West Wing episode than real life. I think their style of politics is about as old as their ideas, and about as stale. So when they came after me, all they were doing was telling on themselves. And when we doubled down, they realized that I’m not playing games.

When Fox News is booking you and covering you, might that be for the same reason Republican PACs spend to help progressive candidates? That they see you as easier to beat?

It’s amazing to me how deeply they’re misjudging this. I’m like: You have never fought a counterpuncher. The number of times I’m gonna define and redefine Mike Rogers! We’re talking about an anti-charismatic old school politician who doesn’t even know what he believes, except for he wants to make himself rich off of the rest of us. You know what I’m gonna do to that man? By the time I’m done, his best friends are gonna look at him and think what I think, say what I say. I’m gonna define him into eternity. Good, help me beat the crap out of you. Little parts of your vestiges — politically — are gonna be scattered all over the state of Michigan, never to be seen again. You say “Mike Rogers,” it’ll be like: “Remember when Abdul just completely demolished that man’s political future?” By the time I’m done with him, people are going to be calling him Five Dollar Rogers.

Why five dollars?

Because of $5 gas and how he’ll do whatever you want him to do for five bucks.

Is any of that complicated by a super PAC entering the race to help you?

When you look at the players, you’re talking about the National Nurses United, talking about the Working Families Party. These are folks who are trying to push back against AIPAC. The sum total of their spending has bumped Haley Stevens by four points. If you’re AIPAC right now, you’ve got to be sweating. So, it’s only a matter of time until they start going negative, and our allies are trying to push back. I don’t take money from corporations, I never have, I never will, and that is the big difference between me and my opponent.

Haley Stevens is a suit with a large AIPAC bank account, that’s it. I hope maybe they find some way to teach her how to string together two coherent sentences. I guess, at some point, when you sell out for that many corporations and special interests, I guess you forget how to think for yourself.

What’s your conversation with Chuck Schumer if you win the primary?

If the DSCC wants to invest in Michigan, fantastic, and if the DSCC wants to make the same mistake that they made with Mandela Barnes in 2022 then we’re gonna figure out how to run our campaign. If the DSCC is committed to a Senate majority, they are going to have to win it through Michigan, and I will have given them the best shot at doing that.

In your book, you supported a pathway to citizenship for everyone who is here now. Is that still your preference?

If you have heinously broken the law, that’s a different question. But the vast majority of people here are law-abiding, building good lives, have American citizens in their family who rely on them, and we need a pathway to citizenship for the vast majority of folks who are here. There are Americans who rely on them, and the lowest disruption way forward is to create a pathway to staying here while securing our southern border.

How does this play into Medicare for All? An easy line for Republicans would be: You want to give Medicare to illegal immigrants.

I think there’s a bunch of bad faith arguments that people are always going to make about somebody else getting services. I think increasingly people are focused on whether or not they’re getting services. Bad faith arguments are bad faith, and I think good faith can win over them. I do believe that there’s a cynicism that happens in Democratic politics, where we assume that we actually can’t win people over. And it’s funny to me that the very same people who say “you need to have babies” don’t really want to invest in your ability to afford having a baby. And at the same time, they want to shut down immigration! We are on the cusp of losing the ability to grow, so if you don’t want to invest in the social safety net that empowers people to grow their families, and you want to shut down immigration — like, this is incoherent.

So whatever version of Medicare For All you can get, it should cover non-citizens?

If you are paying your taxes in this country, you deserve to get what the tax pays for. I don’t pay my taxes for immigrants. They pay their taxes, so you get Medicare. The exchange you should make with the government is: You pay in, you get out.

One more question from the book: Do you still support some form of reparations for Black Americans and Native Americans?

If you look at the communities that always suffer under economic downturns, these communities always suffer the worst. I think there’s a responsibility for us to ask: How do we start correcting so that people have an equal shot at a good life? You don’t have to go very far to go to a majority black community, or to a Native American reservation, and know that these communities have been systematically kept behind. I don’t understand exactly what the solution looks like, but I think we should be having a conversation as a society. To be honest, I’m more for universal programs that cover everyone.