Twenty years ago, as America fought in the Middle East, a junior Democratic senator from the Midwest, a forty-something man with a Muslim name, decided he was going to run for president. Against the odds, Barack Hussein Obama of Illinois, who’d dabbled in Marxist academia and whose father was born in Kenya, went on to become the first non-white commander-in-chief.
Two decades on, as America fights another war in the Middle East, an even more unconventional Midwestern Democrat is rapidly advancing. Dr Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, whose father was born in Egypt, is currently the favourite to win his senate race in Michigan in November – even as Republican campaigners spend millions of dollars branding him a terrorist sympathiser.
El-Sayed resents ‘the next Obama’ label, which has been attached to him ever since 2017 when, as a smooth-talking and charismatic 32-year-old, he made an audacious but unsuccessful bid to be Michigan’s governor.
‘I get compared to Obama because my name is funny and I’m brown,’ he has said. ‘There are a lot of things I disagree with President Obama on – in terms of both domestic and, certainly, international politics. I’m not him, and I have no intention of being him.’
Which makes sense. Today’s young progressives tend to regard Obama as a fuddy old centrist who betrayed their ideals. To ‘inspire hope’ and wind up Middle America now, the new generation needs someone far more provocative than Barack, who was a Secret Muslim Communist only in the fevered imaginings of Tea Party Republicans. El-Sayed, by contrast, is proudly Muslim and at least quasi-Marxist, even if he insists otherwise.
It’s true that he is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), unlike other rising stars in his party. He wants ‘Medicare for all’ and the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but he stresses his faith in the American dream. ‘I’m not socialist,’ he says. ‘I’m just a capitalist who understands how capitalism works.’
Still, he has spoken at numerous DSA events and cultivated a relationship with Hasan Piker, the far-left internet star who has praised Mao and said America ‘deserved 9/11’. An amusing YouTube video from last year shows Piker and El-Sayed working out together in a gym. ‘There’s nothing that feels as good as getting a good chest pump,’ says Hasan, in his white Gaza T-shirt, as El-Sayed, an epidemiologist, grunts away beside him on a weights machine. ‘Your titties are just popping… You can’t be letting a Republican out-lift you.’ Who says the left can’t compete with the manosphere?
As the pair move on to the lat-pulldown station, the 5ft 7in senate hopeful reveals that he likes ‘to think I have the personality of a 6ft 5in man… My mom would be like, “So would you rather be taller or smarter?” and I’d be like, “I’d give up ten IQ points if I could have five inches.”’
El-Sayed, who captained the Oxford University lacrosse team while completing his doctorate in public health there in 2011, takes pride in his athleticism. A recent campaign video showed him throwing an American football while denouncing the hellacious cost of tickets to see the Detroit Lions. He appears to be modelling his campaign on that of Zohran Mamdani, a more open socialist, who combined cornball social media stunts with a relentless focus on cost of living issues in order to win the New York mayoralty.
Of course, Michigan, a swing state which twice voted for Donald Trump, is a long way from New York. It is now the key battle-ground in November’s midterms. If El-Sayed were to lose to the Republican candidate Mike Rogers, the Democrats would have to turn five Republican-held senate seats blue to win back a majority in the upper chamber of Congress. He may now have the edge, according to most surveys, but Republican consultants point out that in the Democratic primary, the polls suggested El-Sayed was miles ahead of his adversary Haley Stevens. Yet he only beat her by one percentage point.
Stevens, a political moderate, led an extremely well-funded campaign which accused El-Sayed of having a ‘long history of disrespecting women’. The allegation seemed to have almost no supporting evidence. In an article for the Guardian, he’d dared to call Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity drive ‘ineffectual’. He’d further issued a few harsh criticisms of certain female political opponents and there was some absurdly vague claim from a former employee. In a leaked Zoom recording, El-Sayed could also be heard saying ‘you put one ogre on a pike, and then everyone else gets the message’. That was widely interpreted as sexist language about Stevens, though El-Sayed insisted he was really talking about the Democratic senator John Fetterman.
‘I get compared to him because my name is funny and I’m brown – but we disagree on many things’
Mike Rogers, and the Republican groups supporting him, have even more resources than Stevens and are already heavily outspending El-Sayed in advertising. The attack line is already well-established: the Democratic candidate, a fierce critic of Israel, is ‘too radical for Michigan’, and there is no shortage of ammunition.
In a response to an attack on a synagogue in Michigan in March, for instance, El-Sayed connected what the FBI called a ‘Hezbollah-inspired act of terrorism’ to the suffering of Palestinians. ‘Hurt people hurt people,’ he said, a comment for which he later apologised. It’s also emerged that, as a student at the University of Michigan in 2007, El-Sayed took part in a protest against three former Islamists who had renounced terrorism and converted to Christianity.
El-Sayed’s campaign insist their candidate denounces terrorism ‘unequivocally’. Yet his efforts to distance himself from extremism are not helped by the fact that his half-sister, the University of Chicago professor Eman Abdelhadi, was arrested last year for spitting on an Illinois State Trooper during an ICE protest. She also marked the first anniversary of the October 7 attacks by posting a Thought for the Day-style ‘blessing’ video in which she reflected on the meaning of the words ‘Allahu Akbar’.
Republicans could hardly have dreamed of a more suitable opposition candidate than El-Sayed to validate their midterm message that the Democratic party has succumbed to left-wing lunacy. At the same time, however, the Iran war rumbles on. Inflation is back following a spike in the price of oil. And an increasingly unpopular President spends much of his time obsessing over a ridiculous ‘triumphal Trump arch’ packed with drones and snipers.
In such a climate, could a shockingly radical gym-bunny called Abdul win in Michigan? The answer may well be, as it was for Obama: yes, he can.
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