Abdul El-Sayed

In 2007 as he prepared to go on to medical school, Abdul El-Sayed was selected as the student speaker at the University of Michigan’s graduation ceremony. The address caught the attention of another speaker set to deliver the school’s commencement address, who told El-Sayed he had “a natural gift for speaking” and encouraged him to consider politics over medicine.

That commencement speaker was Bill Clinton. El-Sayed went on to graduate from medical school, but he did not ignore the former president’s advice: In 2026 the progressive Democrat won election to the U.S. Senate from Michigan, becoming the first Muslim elected to the body.

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Early years

Abdul El-Sayed was born in 1984 to Egyptian immigrants Mohamed El-Sayed and Fatten Elkomy. The couple came to the United States so Mohamed El-Sayed could study engineering at Wayne State University, but they divorced when Abdul was a toddler. Abdul, who learned Arabic before he learned English, was raised by his father and stepmother, Jacqueline El-Sayed.

He grew up in the affluent Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, in a household where he was expected to do chores and make excellent grades. A talented athlete, he played on his high school lacrosse, football, and wrestling teams. He was 16 on September 11, 2001, and in the wake of the attacks he faced painful anti-Muslim slurs that would help define his political philosophy.

In 2003 he went off to the University of Michigan, where he studied biology and political science and met Sarah Jukaku, whom he would later marry. After that memorable graduation address, he began medical school at Michigan, doing a stint in Peru working to reduce maternal mortality. He then studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar before finishing his medical degree at Columbia University. In his application for the Rhodes scholarship, El-Sayed cited his Muslim faith as a force in his desire to study medicine:

My religion teaches that if one saves a life, she has saved all of humanity.

But it was during his final years studying medicine that his focus changed. Instead of becoming a practicing physician, El-Sayed took to the classroom as a professor and ultimately as a health policy expert.

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Public service

By 2015 he was back in Michigan serving as Detroit’s health director, a role he served in until resigning in 2017 to challenge Gretchen Whitmer in the Democratic primary for governor. He lost badly. After spending some time teaching, writing, and hosting a podcast, El-Sayed was named Wayne county’s health director in late 2022.

During both his tenures as health director, El-Sayed was credited with implementing a number of innovative programs to help underserved communities, including partnering with a nonprofit to get glasses for children whose families couldn’t afford them and putting Narcan, the lifesaving treatment for opioid overdoses, in vending machines. But he has been accused of inflating his role in some projects and demonstrating a self-confidence that borders on cockiness. In his 2020 memoir Healing Politics he called the Obama presidency “inspiring intentions unfulfilled,” and he has been criticized for writing in 2010 that then-first lady Michelle Obama’s program to combat childhood obesity was “flawed” for “neglecting the structural factors” that lead to obesity.

In 2025 the doctor who had once been encouraged to consider politics was ready to try politics full-time again—this time, in a run for the Senate.

2026 campaign and controversy

When Michigan’s incumbent Democratic Sen. Gary Peters announced in early 2025 that he would not seek reelection, he opened the floodgates to a wide-open Democratic primary in the battleground state of Michigan. The campaign saw El-Sayed, U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow vie for the votes of Democratic Michiganders and the right to run against the Republican candidate, former U.S. representative Mike Rogers, who narrowly lost the 2024 Senate race to Elissa Slotkin.

El-Sayed was the most progressive candidate. When it appeared that Stevens and McMorrow would split the more moderate vote, McMorrow ended her campaign. In the final weeks before the election, the nasty battle between El-Sayed and Stevens played out as a microcosm of a larger debate about the future of the Democratic Party. Stevens had the support of Democratic Party leaders, including Governor Whitmer and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. El-Sayed, seen as a candidate cut from the same cloth as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, drew large and enthusiastic crowds with his calls for establishing Medicare for all, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and reforming campaign finance. Those positions also won him the support of progressive political superstars Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In the closing days of the race, in which Democrats sought to take control of the U.S. Senate, Ocasio-Cortez spent time in Michigan campaigning with and for El-Sayed and made an extraordinary donation of $1 million to his political campaign. But, in a move that stunned Democratic Party leadership, Stevens endorsed Rogers in the last days of the campaign.

While a progressive whose campaign has been tailored to appeal to working-class voters, El-Sayed says he is not a socialist, telling Politico in a 2026 interview:

I believe that we can have healthcare, that we can regulate on the biggest corporations in the world, that we can make it easier for you to make your first million rather than for Elon Musk to make a trillion. And that doesn’t make me a socialist. That just makes me somebody who wants government to work for people.

He also has stirred controversy by calling for an end to all U.S. aid to Israel in the wake of the Israeli response to the attacks of October 7. El-Sayed has termed it a “genocide,” but he is quick to deny that position makes him antisemitic, saying, “My commitment to Jewish safety is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.”

His narrow primary win over Stevens set El-Sayed up for a pivotal race against Rogers in a purple state that voted for Pres. Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024. In choosing El-Sayed after a bitter campaign, Michiganders made history by electing the first Muslim to the Senate.

Learn more about U.S. politics

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A brief history of American political humor