The promo video opens with halcyon scenes from the 1950s, with the almost exaggerated American accent of the narrator extolling the virtues of a political candidate's "all-American story". It concerns a home-grown boy from south-east Michigan who played high school American football and loved his Camaro car, who was awarded a scholarship to medical school and believes in service to his state.
The upbeat soundtrack accompanying the video then drops off dramatically as the man's name is revealed: Abdul El-Sayed.
“I know, I know – it’s a name built for American politics,” El-Sayed says in the footage.
El-Sayed, 40, is running for the US Senate in his state of Michigan. If he wins, he will become the first Muslim senator in the country.
Sitting on a park bench in Ypsilanti, a college town and a suburb of Detroit, he tells The National he is keenly aware of the Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment that has long affected Muslims and Arabs in America, and he refuses to shy away from acknowledging or confronting it.
“I think my name is actually a profound political asset,” he says. “It gives people something that they have to think about, and it gives me an entryway to have a conversation.”
His full name is actually Abdulrahman, a common name throughout the Arab and Muslim world, though much less so in the US.
“It’s a name with a lot of sounds that come out of parts of people’s throats they don’t know they have,” he says.
He became Abdul in kindergarten, he says, as it is still authentic to who he is but also offers some modicum of relatability, pointing to Paula Abdul and Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
“My name is Abdul El-Sayed. It's very clearly Arab.”
Summers in Egypt
Like many Arab Americans in metro Detroit, El-Sayed spent his childhood summers at his parents’ ancestral home in the Middle East. He took breaks from twice daily American football practice to play in the streets and wander the markets of Alexandria, Egypt, with his cousins.
His grandmother had the biggest impact on his life, he says. She had no formal education, but was a loving person and a great cook who raised eight children. Two died before reaching the age of one.
“Those were an aunt and an uncle I never got to meet,” he says. “Those were a brother and sister my father watched die before he turned five, and I watched what that meant for my family and for so many others.”
He soon realised he was looking at two unexpected simultaneous realities: in the 15 hours he had travelled to Egypt, he had crossed about 10 years' difference in life expectancy. And in a 15-minute drive from Oakland County – the relatively wealthy area where he grew up – to the inner city of Detroit, he would traverse the same life expectancy gap.
That, he says, is when it hit home for him – that medicine and public health are deeply political.
So he became a doctor, then a politician.
He took on a leadership role in Detroit’s health department after the city filed for bankruptcy in 2013, and he had to help rebuild its public health infrastructure.
He also took the initiative on community issues that mattered to him most: he cut childhood lead exposure by launching safety and testing programmes, and provided thousands of Detroit children with free eye tests and glasses. He revamped infant mortality tracking and advocated equity in housing, water, education and food access.
“For me, the work of medicine has always been about the end outcome of medicine, which is people who get to live longer, healthier, more dignified lives,” he says.
“And if you follow that past, the physiology you spend all this time learning, you start to realise that it becomes a function of a pattern created by our politics. And if you're serious about fixing that, then you need to be serious about fixing our politics.”
Terrible disease
The next stop, hopefully, is the US Senate, and he launched his campaign in April. This is not his first foray into politics, however – El-Sayed ran for office for the first time in 2018, for governor of Michigan. He ran as a progressive Democrat and received an endorsement from prominent socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, but lost out to Gretchen Whitmer, a centrist Democrat.
He says he decided to return to politics after President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, Mr Trump's billionaire ally at the time, made massive cuts to the federal government, including to the nation’s top health agencies.
Democrats have to do more to “fight back” and not merely run against Republican policies, El-Sayed says.
He likens Mr Trump’s rise and dominance to a symptom of a "terrible disease” afflicting US politics.
“I've been talking about curing the disease for a really long time, taking on the power of big corporations getting money out of our politics, standing up to the ways that corporations and billionaires and oligarchs have dominated our system, forcing us to do things we don't actually agree with, and taking away our resources in the process,” he says.
“I think more people are just ready to listen.”
The disease of US politics, he explains, is the way in which wealthy corporations and political action committees can essentially buy access to politicians and influence regulations that benefit them but are detrimental to American workers.
Republicans and Democrats, he says, have both participated – and benefited – from this framework.
Leveraging his public health background, he is running on an “affordability” campaign, including universal health care, affordable housing, economic justice, a clean environment and dismantling medical debt.
He says his grassroots campaign is focused on “working people”, regardless of their race or political affiliation – he will not accept money from political action committees.
“I think a lot of folk feel locked out of their politics, because too much of our politics is about trying to lock people out,” he said. “And I'm just trying to include as many people as I possibly can in what America can mean, in what America can include, in what can be authentically American.”
His message has once again won the endorsement of Mr Sanders.
“Bernie is laser-focused on the well-being of working people, both here and abroad,” El-Sayed says. “Getting the endorsement of somebody like Bernie Sanders says that I'm somebody who you can count on to do the things I said I'm going to do.”
On foreign policy, he has spoken out about US support for Israel's military campaign in Gaza.
During former president Joe Biden's administration, he took part in the “uncommitted” movement, the Democratic-led protest campaign calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo on Israel.
He said he is opposed to “blank cheques” to all foreign militaries.
“Every dollar that we spend subsidising the genocide of children in Gaza, bombing their schools and bombing their hospitals, bombing their infrastructure and rendering their homes unliveable and starving them, is $1 that's not spent providing basic resources like hospitals and schools and infrastructure for children here in America,” he said.
“Those two things are connected, and we have to appreciate it and acknowledge that connection.”
His campaign received additional attention after the success of New York City mayor candidate Zohran Mamdani, who ran on a similar progressive campaign and also received the backing of Mr Sanders.
“I'm running here in Michigan but I learnt a lot from what he was able to do,” he says of Mr Mamdani. “He ran on a relentless affordability message, and I think people are sick and tired of being priced out of their lives.”
He credits Mr Mamdani for inspiring young people, a demographic historically reluctant to participate in elections, to get out and vote.
“I think that our politics would be so much better if young people felt inspired to actually vote,” he says.
Purple Michigan
Michigan is a tightly contested state, swinging three times in the last four elections: Democratic in 2008-12, Republican in 2016, Democratic again in 2020 and back to Republican in 2024.
It is often referred to as a purple state, a blend of each of the two party colours – blue for Democrats, red for Republicans.
Michigan has diverse demographics that include white rural and urban Americans, black Americans and a small Hispanic community. It is also home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans, mostly in Wayne County.
Arab Americans have historically been reliably Democratic but, particularly in last year’s election, they have drifted towards third-party candidates, as well as the Republicans, driven by frustrations over the Biden administration’s stance on Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon, as well as cultural and gender issues.
Many working-class white Americans have also shifted towards the Republican cause.
In Dearborn, Michigan, a city where the majority of residents are Arab Americans, more than 42 per cent voted for Mr Trump in 2024, in a historic shift from the Democrats. In 2020, Mr Biden won by nearly 69 per cent.
El-Sayed says this shows the Democratic Party had let down not only Arab Americans, but many others, too.
“We have a choice about whether or not we want to fix the party or abandon the party, and I just think it would be a failure strategically to abandon the party when the majority of the party actually agrees with you,” he says.
“The issue is not where voters are, the issue is where party elites are, so if you don't like what party elites are saying, then beat them in elections, which is entirely what I intend to do.”
Republicans currently control the US Senate with a 53–47 majority. Democrats want to hold Michigan and Republicans would like to take it.
The seat for which El-Sayed is vying became open after long-time Democratic Senator Gary Peters announced his retirement.
At the moment, it’s a crowded primary and many polls are within the margin of error. The top Democratic contender is Haley Stevens, a centrist Democrat. El-Sayed is in close second.
Mr Trump endorsed Mike Rogers, a Republican who narrowly lost to Representative Elissa Slotkin in last year’s election, and announced he would run again.
The Democratic primary election is scheduled for August 4, 2026, while the Senate elections will take place on November 3, 2026.
‘You have to run’
Since launching his campaign, El-Sayed has been travelling across the state, meeting people and speaking at town halls.
After one recent event, he says a man came up to him and told him that when El-Sayed ran for governor in 2018, "I hated you because you're Muslim”.
“I was like: 'I'm still Muslim,'” he recalls. “'Oh, I know,' the man responded. 'But I actually listened to what you had to say this time, and you're the only person who's actually talking about problems that I live with every day. And so I'm going to support you.'”
El-Sayed says that was a particularly meaningful interaction.
“It just might be that, because my name is Abdul, you're going to remember that guy named Abdul actually cared a lot more about your situation and your housing and your health care and the food you ate than somebody else with a different name,” he says.
“I just think that's powerful. And so I don't run away from my name.”
He says he rejects the duality of progressive versus conservative voters in US politics, saying instead that all “working people” share a reality and the same grievances that should unite them.
Those same people were the ones he was trained to take care of as a physician and later provide for as a health commissioner.
“If you're relentlessly focused on trying to improve the lives of working people, then I think you can win elections,” he says.
He says Mr Trump was able to make headway with working-class Americans by reading their pain and weaponising it.
“He’s very good at that,” he says. But in reality, Mr Trump has succeeded in making life harder for working people, he says, citing the gutting of healthcare access for lower-income people and tax cuts for the wealthy.
The first time El-Sayed ran for office, he remembers his father telling him: “You’re gonna get killed,” reflecting on a fear of the “Trump moment".
“This time when I told him I was interested in running for Senate, he said: ‘You have to run,’” he says, adding that there is now even more urgency to confront Mr Trump.
Grandma Judy
After his parents divorced, El-Sayed was raised primarily by his father and his stepmother, Jacqueline, a white American.
It’s an experience that shaped and enriched his understanding of American life and politics. It also allowed him to participate in another culture.
But it also brought an unexpected but beautiful “gift”, he says, which is having to constantly explain himself, even to his own family.
“I think the nice thing about being named Abdul and being an Arab American and being Muslim is that I don't take for granted that people fully and 100 per cent understand me,” he says.
Being little understood has offered him the opportunity to practise sharing ideas and values. And in sharing things about himself, he also earns the opportunity to learn about others.
Just like his Egyptian grandmother, his American grandmother, Judy, a deacon at her Presbyterian church, played an influential role in his life.
El-Sayed refers to his family's Thanksgiving, an anecdote he often brings up in town hall meetings and an important metaphor in his campaign messaging.
He sets the scene: there’s turkey on the table and the Detroit Lions football team is losing on television. Then there’s his diverse family with different opinions and backgrounds, talking and sharing these moments.
His story evokes a certain unity in his Michigan working-class family over the challenges of the present and a common vision of the future.
“I think of myself as being 100 per cent American and also being 100 per cent ethnically Arab,” he says. “And those two things are not mutually exclusive.”
