Barack Obama flew into Detroit to rally for Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed — a man who won't condemn a Hezbollah-inspired attack on a Michigan synagogue and who flipped on defunding the police the moment it became politically inconvenient — and Michigan voters are supposed to just fall in line.
With ten days until the midterms, the Democratic establishment is throwing everything at this seat. Obama told the Detroit crowd that the race "feels just a little bit different," invoking his own history as proof that a man with an "eleven letter first name" can win high office. El-Sayed obliged, telling rally-goers he never thought he could run until he saw "Barack Hussein Obama" become president. The Guardian framed the event as a feel-good story about "change in the air" and voters "sick and tired of being sick and tired." What The Guardian buried: every substantive question about who El-Sayed actually answers to.
Republican nominee Mike Rogers, former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, laid out the case Breitbart has been tracking for months. Rogers pointed to a 2012 letter El-Sayed signed supporting Mohamed Morsi's takeover in Egypt — a letter that didn't just back the Muslim Brotherhood's man but, according to Rogers, called on them to "purge the police and purge the press." Rogers noted that the Muslim Brotherhood celebrated exactly one primary win in August — El-Sayed's. At least six other signatories of that 2012 letter have pumped more than $25,000 into El-Sayed's campaign, and Rogers alleged that "people who have openly supported Hamas" and "people who financially support Hezbollah" are bankrolling the effort.
Then there's the family connection. Rogers told Breitbart that CAIR — the Council on American-Islamic Relations — "is a group that is headed up by his father-in-law, at least was at one time, has funneled about $400,000 into his campaign." Rogers called CAIR "openly supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood."
On national security, the record is worse. Rogers said El-Sayed "cannot condemn a Hezbollah-inspired terrorist attack on a synagogue here in Michigan, where they tried to kill 130 schoolchildren." El-Sayed also "puts Iran on the same footing as Israel" and "wouldn't even condemn the Iranian Republican Guard." Rogers' bottom line: "This guy could not even get a security clearance, just from what I told you."
El-Sayed's own policy record is just as slippery. In 2020, he said "defund the police." By 2025, he denied ever saying it. Now he's back to saying fund police recruitment and retirement — a full tour of every position on the issue. When Fox News asked Rep. Debbie Dingell about the flip-flop, she didn't defend it. She just said Rogers "flip-flopped, too" on Trump — as if two wrongs make a Senate seat.
The question for Michigan isn't whether Obama can still work a crowd. It's whether a candidate who can't bring himself to condemn a terror attack on a synagogue in his own state, who took Brotherhood-linked money, and who reverses himself whenever the polls shift belongs anywhere near the Foreign Relations Committee — or any committee at all.
