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Abdul El-Sayed answers questions by attendee at the Shouldn’t Be This Hard Town Hall Tour at the Wayne County Community District North West Campus Thursday afternoon. -
Abdul El-Sayed speaks to attendees at the Shouldn’t Be This Hard Town Hall Tour at the Wayne County Community District North West Campus Thursday afternoon.
Hundreds of Detroit residents gathered at the Health Science Center in Detroit Wednesday evening for the first stop of Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s “Shouldn’t Be This Hard” town hall tour. The tour is part of El-Sayed’s push to court voters ahead of the Nov. 3 general election against former U.S. Representative Mike Rogers.
The event comes roughly eight weeks before Election Day and just a day after President Donald J. Trump’s speech in Dallas mentioned El-Sayed. Unlike the primary-season rallies that pitted El-Sayed against fellow Democrats U.S. Representative Haley Stevens and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, D-Royal Oak, Wednesday’s town hall focused on drawing a direct contrast between El-Sayed and Rogers on healthcare, food safety, artificial intelligence and the cost of living.
El-Sayed acknowledged Trump’s attacks against him during his Dallas speech, arguing the country’s political dysfunction runs deeper than any one man in the Oval Office.
“Donald Trump is not himself the disease of our politics,” El-Sayed said. “Donald Trump’s just the worst symptom of the disease of our politics. The disease is the system that allows big corporations and millionaires and special interests to buy and sell politicians in ways that leave them rigging the system against us.”
After his introduction speech, El-Sayed invited attendees to ask questions about his campaign and policy issues. Attendee Caron Houston, a Detroit resident, told El-Sayed she identifies as an independent after growing disillusioned with what she described as the Democratic Party’s unwillingness to act boldly.
“I consider myself a recovering Democrat, primarily because of — I’m going to say it — the cowardice of some other Democrats,” Houston said. “If the Dems win back the House and the Senate, will the progressives and (Democratic Socialists of America) be able to create a critical mass to push through the policies you have been running on?”
El-Sayed responded, asserting legislative follow-through is as much a matter of political courage as it is strategy.
“I think sometimes we’re afraid of our own shadow,” El-Sayed said. “We assume that all people aren’t going to like it. ‘We shouldn’t be talking about immigration.’ Yes, we should. What are you afraid of? What are we afraid of? And people will see that on you. They’ll see when you have the courage of your convictions to stand in and say, ‘I believe in certain things, I think you should, too.’”
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, attendee Michelle George, a Detroit resident and advanced nurse practitioner who previously worked at the Detroit Health Department, said she wants to see El-Sayed continue to prioritize rebuilding the country’s food safety infrastructure if elected.
“Food safety is very critical because every minute something is popping up, and the pathogen doesn’t know if you’re a Democrat or Republican,” George said. “We got the highest cases of cyclospora in the country, and we had two deaths. So I would like to see him, in terms of focusing on as a senator, just bringing transparency back with the (Centers for Disease Control).”
When she stood and shared her sentiment, El-Sayed agreed federal cuts amount to more than government waste. He said cuts to the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention likely exacerbated the recent cyclospora outbreak.
“The CDC, who’s supposed to be able to keep an eye on all of this, didn’t have the capacity to do it,” El-Sayed said. “When I get to the U.S. Senate, I’m going to be the first U.S. senator who’s ever been a public health official. So we’ve got to be able to architect all of the services back from where they cut them.”
In an interview with The Daily, El-Sayed said his campaign’s traction with young voters has only grown since the primary against Stevens, and reaching them requires giving voters a direct stake in the race.
“We took on Goliath in the primary,” El-Sayed said. “We’re taking on Goliath again in the general, and this is the kind of campaign that young people have told us that they believe in and want to be a part of. Our job is to give them the tools to have those conversations among each other and to turn this into a kind of opportunity to make sure that their voices are heard in our politics.”
El-Sayed closed the town hall by urging attendees to treat the final weeks of the race as a shared act of civic participation, rather than a contest to be won or lost.
“We believe in an America that has yet to be greater, and we believe that the work of that is not about telling some people that they don’t belong here,” El-Sayed said. “It’s not about picking and choosing winners. It’s not about letting corporations run buff wild on our economy; it’s about empowering everybody. Democracy is about two questions: Who are we, and who do we want to be?”
Daily Staff Reporter Zahra Kagal can be reached at zkagal@umich.edu.
