Raw America managing editor Carl Gibson sat down with Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed — a physician, epidemiologist and former director of the Detroit Health Department — to discuss the defining issues of the 2026 midterm cycle. El-Sayed is running in a three-way Democratic primary for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat, with Democrats electing their nominee on August 4. Here’s what we covered:
Making universal healthcare a key campaign issue
Selling progressive policies to a swing state that voted for Trump twice
Trump’s $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget, paid for with cuts to social programs
Israel’s war in Gaza, which El-Sayed describes as a “genocide”
El-Sayed’s campaign rally with streamer Hasan Piker
How Democrats can connect with Trump voters without compromising on policy
Raw America is fully independent — we proudly have no billionaires behind the scenes watering down our coverage and telling us what to cover and what to bury. But independent journalism that only answers to our audience requires financial support from readers and viewers in order to survive. Please consider updating your free Raw America subscription to a paying one. None of this would be possible with you.
El-Sayed’s Top Issue: Universal Healthcare
El-Sayed brings impressive credentials to the healthcare debate. He rebuilt Detroit’s Health Department after it was shuttered, led Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human and Veteran Services, and co-authored a book on Medicare for All. As mentioned in the interview, respected medical journal The Lancet found that the Medicare for All legislation sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would not only save 68,000 lives each year, but would save American taxpayers roughly $150 billion annually.
El-Sayed he argues that the biggest obstacle to universal health care isn’t logistical, but rather political cowardice enabled by corporate money.
He pointed to a familiar Washington pattern: consultants armed with polls convince candidates to chase voters where they already are rather than persuade them toward something better. El-Sayed sees that as a fatal mistake, and he invoked an unlikely role model to make the point.
“The best evidence I can point to, as much as I hate to point to him, is Donald Trump,” El-Sayed said. “When he came down that hideous golden escalator, nobody was talking about immigration, but he kept talking about it and talking about it and talking about it to the point where now he’s using immigration to destroy the Constitution itself.”
El-Sayed believes Democrats need to show the same commitment to healthcare that Trump showed to immigration — relentlessly, unapologetically, in every forum. And he says the reason most Democrats don’t is simple: they’re financially compromised.
“Too often, the people who are willing to fight for health care in the first place are taking money from the companies who benefit from the system as it is,” he said. “I don’t take corporate money. I never have, I never will. I’m the only person running for Senate in Michigan who can say that.”
Selling Universal Healthcare in a State That Voted for Trump in 2024
When asked if he could make the case for universal healthcare in a state that twice voted for Donald Trump in the last twelve years, El-Sayed said he’s already doing it. He described a health care town hall held in Houghton, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula — hardly a Democratic stronghold — where 100 people showed up, many of them Trump voters.
“It’s only those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about politics who use this really outdated model of left versus right, Democrat versus Republican,” he said. “Most people don’t think about politics that way, because most people don’t think about politics.”
His pitch to those voters is direct and economically grounded: with every paycheck, before they have any say in the matter, their insurance company takes its cut through premiums — and then, when they actually get sick, they’re hit with a deductible on top of that. Medical debt in America has reached $225 billion, more than the GDP of half the states in the U.S.
He recounted a memorable encounter on the campaign trail with a man who told him bluntly: “I never met a Muslim, and I’ll be honest with you — I don’t like you.” But the man said he was going to vote for El-Sayed anyway.
“He said, ‘I thought you were either dumb or honest. I know what a doctor can make, and you’re out here trying to talk to people like me about giving me health care, and I think you really want me to have healthcare,’” El-Sayed recalled. “I said, ‘Sir, I really want you to have healthcare.’”
Trump Wants $1.5 Trillion from Social Programs to Fund War. El-Sayed Points Out the Hypocrisy
President Trump proposed $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon, and wants to fund it by enacting even steeper budget cuts to programs that provide healthcare, housing, social services, and disaster assistance to Americans.
El-Sayed drew a sharp contrast between how government spending on domestic programs is treated versus military spending and foreign aid.
“Every single time you come up with one of these programs, some smart legislator comes up to you and says, ‘Well, Doctor, how you gonna pay for that?’” he said. “And the crazy thing is, when you’ve got a general who’s drawing up war plans, or you’ve got a treaty that says we’re just gonna write you a check for $3.5 billion — it doesn’t matter if you’re conducting an apartheid or a genocide with it — nobody actually asks, ‘Hey, General, how you gonna pay for that?’”
He said his role as a senator would be to force that question — to be the voice in the chamber demanding accountability for military expenditure with the same rigor applied to spending on schools and healthcare. He also pushed back on the notion that supporting a foreign government is somehow a senator’s job.
“My job is to advocate for Michigan,” he said. “It’s a crazy thing that somehow people think that their job in the U.S. Senate from you-name-the-state is to advocate for a foreign government.”
He added a personal note: his family immigrated from Egypt, one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid. “I love and revere the Egyptian people just like I love and revere the Jewish people, just like I love and revere people from all over the world. I just don’t pay my taxes so that those people get tanks and bombs.”
El-Sayed Calls Gaza War a Genocide. Here’s Why
El-Sayed didn’t hesitate on using the specific word “genocide” to describe what Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza — a major issue for Michiganders in the 2024 presidential election.
“I went to good public schools and a good public university where they taught me that words have meanings, and that usually you should use the words that describe the meanings,” he said. “When you articulate that you want to cleanse people of a certain ethnicity from a place, then proceed to bomb all their infrastructure and their homes and their schools and their hospitals in contravention to international law, and then try to ship them off to other places — having articulated a particular animus for those people as a function of their ethnicity — that meets [the definition of] genocide.”
He acknowledged the political cost of that position. The American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) called him “the most dangerous candidate for the U.S.-Israel relationship” and is expected to spend $20 million in the Michigan Senate race to defeat him.
“I honestly wish they’d send me a t-shirt. I’d wear it every day,” El-Sayed remarked. “I’m not afraid of AIPAC.”
His broader argument is that foreign policy and domestic policy are inseparable — that money spent on bombs abroad is money not spent on schools and health care at home — and that voters increasingly understand that connection.
“I’m not willing to give up my dignity and my beliefs and my sense of the truth so that I can have an office where they can tell me what I can and can’t do with the office,” he added.
El-Sayed Defends Rally with Hasan Piker — and Says Politics Is About Connecting with Audiences
El-Sayed recently held a packed campaign rally at the University of Michigan with streamer Hasan Piker, who has an audience of millions, primarily among the Gen Z cohort. Piker has made controversial statements in the past — including expressing more sympathy for Hamas than Israel. El-Sayed rejected calls to disavow Piker and questioned the efficacy of political purity tests.
“If we played that game to its logical conclusion, none of us would ever talk to anybody,” he said. “I just thought that we had gotten past the cancel culture ridiculousness of the early 2020s.”
He pointed out that then-Vice President Kamala Harris invited Piker to stream from the Democratic National Convention in 2024. He also noted that on the very same day he rallied with Piker, he appeared on Fox and Friends — a fact that drew none of the same criticism.
“Fox and Friends and I disagree on a lot more than Hasan and I disagree on,” he said. “Should I not go on them?”
El-Sayed said his calculus is simple: go everywhere, talk to everyone, and trust that the message holds up.
“If Fox and Friends give me a platform, Hassan gives me a platform, or you give me a platform, or Rogan gives me a platform, or Bill Maher — who said some absurd things about people who pray like I do — gives me a platform, I’m going to go there. Because my conversation is with the broader public, and I’m going to go anywhere and talk to everyone who gives me the opportunity.”
El-Sayed’s Message to Michigan’s Trump Voters
Because El-Sayed is a Democrat running in a state that voted for a Republican in the most recent presidential election, connecting with Donald Trump voters in red counties is a must for any Democrat hoping to win a general election. El-Sayed said he approaches his conversation with Trump voters from a place of genuine respect. He argued that most people who voted for Trump did so because they felt they had no better option.
He described a telling exchange with a Trump voter over the Second Amendment. The man challenged El-Sayed, expecting standard Democratic pablum. Instead, El-Sayed engaged him directly, walking through what the Second Amendment was actually designed to protect against — government tyranny — and asking whether that logic extended to nuclear weapons.
“He was like, ‘Okay, okay, fair point,’” El-Sayed recounted. “And after the discussion, he pulled out a $100 check and said, ‘I’m going to support you.’ I was like, ‘Wait — why? We disagreed.’ He said, ‘We disagree on this point, but we agree on a lot more than we disagree on, and the fact that you were willing to debate me and share your perspective tells me that when you get to the halls of power, you’re going to say the same things.’”
For El-Sayed, that exchange captures what he thinks is fundamentally broken about how Democrats have approached these voters — and how to fix it.
“I don’t run away from my positions. I don’t trim my positions to go and earn a vote because I have some stereotype about what somebody else believes,” he said. “Take me or leave me. I want you to know what I believe.”
Raw America Is Committed to Bringing You Real Unfiltered News
El-Sayed’s interview with Raw America comes on the heels of recent interviews with newsmakers like former CNN anchor and current Substack host Jim Acosta, former Biden DOJ pardon attorney Liz Oyer, former NATO Ambassador Ivo Daalder and others. We’re committed to bringing you perspectives and viewpoints you won’t find in billionaire-owned media outlets.
This kind of hard-hitting independent news is only made possible through the support of paying subscribers. We don’t answer to the billionaire backers or corporate advertisers who regularly muzzle news networks and tell them what they can and can’t say. We answer to you. If that matters, take a moment and become a paying subscriber to Raw America. We genuinely couldn’t do this without you.
