Republicans are not letting Abdul El‑Sayed erase his past.
The GOP has been busy unearthing a series of social media posts from the Senate Democratic nominee in Michigan that it says reveal radical views on policing — and that his own words during the 2020 George Floyd protests make its case.
One of the tweets the Republicans are highlighting has Mr. El‑Sayed writing, “The fact that cops kill Black folks so regularly tells us who society considers part of the ’public’ & from whom they are to be kept safe. Its not just a few bad cops — it’s an entire SYSTEM of white supremacy.”
They also point to another post from that period where Mr. El‑Sayed invoked Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, writing: “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”
Republicans say the now‑deleted posts “paint a pretty disturbing picture” of Mr. El‑Sayed’s views, arguing they show he wasn’t just sympathetic to the “Defund the Police” movement, but also openly entertained stripping resources from police departments, blamed officers for escalating peaceful protests into riots and suggested law enforcement is rooted in racism.
The El‑Sayed campaign was sent a request for comment.
Mr. El‑Sayed is running against former Rep. Mike Rogers to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters in a race that could decide whether Democrats flip control of the Senate.
Mr. El-Sayed defeated Rep. Haley Stevens in a tight primary, overcoming opposition from Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer and roughly $62 million in outside spending on behalf of Ms. Stevens, including $32 million from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s super PAC.
Political handicappers rate the race a toss‑up.
Meanwhile, Mr. El-Sayed, who is seeking to be the first Muslim elected to the Senate, leads Mr. Rogers in most polls.
Republicans are now racing to introduce Mr. El‑Sayed to the general‑election audience as a far‑left radical whose twisted political ideology and soft-on-crime policies would leave communities less safe.
“Abdul El‑Sayed is a dangerous radical who sides with criminals and chaos over law‑abiding families and the brave men and women who keep them safe,” Republican National Committee spokesman Hunter Lovell said. “Michigan cannot afford to put someone with El‑Sayed’s warped worldview anywhere near the United States Senate.”
Vice President J.D. Vance reinforced that message this week during a campaign stop in Sterling Heights, Michigan, warning the audience that Mr. El‑Sayed “pretends to be now a reasonable moderate,” but there is “something about Abdul El-Sayed that is very, very evil and on the rise in the United States of America today.
“When I see Abdul Sayed campaign around the state with somebody who said that America deserved 9/11,” he said, alluding to far‑left streamer Hasan Piker, “what I see is a man who has sympathy and compassion for people who share his religion, but has nothing for people who don’t.”
Mr. El‑Sayed accused Mr. Vance of employing “dog whistle” politics about Islamophobia and trying to shift the conversation away from the Trump administration’s economic failures.
“He believes in a political philosophy that says that some people are somehow more American than others,” Mr. El‑Sayed said on CNN. “Any of us with different color skin who pray different ways can be just as American as J.D. and his papaw.
“But he is not making that argument. He likes to dog whistle about these things, but when you actually call him out on it, he acts like he would never bring anything like that into our political conversations despite he and his boss doing that every single day.”
Mr. Vance’s Michigan stop came after The Washington Free Beacon reported that Mr. El‑Sayed also erased an old tweet in which he compared the attacks of 9/11 to America’s military response in the Middle East.
“Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my faith,” Mr. El‑Sayed wrote in 2021 on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. “Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my country.”
In another post, he shared a quote from a 2021 op‑ed he wrote in the Arab American News, saying that “defending America should never have meant responding to tribalistic grievance with tribalistic grievance.”
He added in the op‑ed that the government response shone its “spotlight harshly on Arabs, South Asians and Africans [and] deliberately left the greatest threat to our security in the shadows — missing the most common source of American terrorism, ’homegrown’ and ’radicalized’ White men.”
In the latest tranche of tweets dug up by the RNC, Mr. El‑Sayed also placed blame for the 2020 George Floyd unrest in Minneapolis on law enforcement itself, writing: “The only folks I see bringing the ’riot’ to peaceful protests are the riot police. It’s even in the name.”
In another post, he urged his followers to “imagine, what would this world be if we had funded public health departments instead of police departments … and we had cut funding for police departments instead of public health departments?”
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