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‘I’m Not A Socialist’: Michigan’s Mamdani Leans On The Left’s New Playbook But Rejects The Label
As Michigan Democrats enter the thick of a competitive Senate primary campaign, one candidate is trying to position himself as an outsider who wants to fix a broken system and take on the oligarchy.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is a Bernie Sanders-endorsed former public health director who has been compared to New York City’s recently elected democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani. He wants Medicare for all, believes big corporations are to blame for the problems in government and the economy, and insists that Immigration and Customs Enforcement must be abolished.
But El-Sayed doesn’t want to be labeled a leftist or a democratic socialist.
“I’m a scientist. I’m not a socialist,” El-Sayed told The Daily Wire during a 20-minute phone interview this week. “As a scientist, I’m interested in answering empirical problems. I’m interested in what works to solve a big problem.”
“I don’t know what far-Left means, but I am the change agent, and I think the better way to analyze our politics right now is not Left and Right,” El-Sayed said. “I think those monikers are ill-suited for this time and, frankly, they’re a bit of a callback to a bygone era.”
El-Sayed is a Muslim running to represent a state with one of the highest Muslim populations in the United States. He is also running to represent a purple state that has voted to elect President Donald Trump twice.
Asked how he felt about the increased scrutiny of Muslim immigrants in places like Michigan and Minnesota and the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, El-Sayed told The Daily Wire that he believes ICE should be abolished. He also argued that conservatives should support calls for ICE to be abolished.
“It’s interesting that again we’ve allowed one narcissistic man to completely twist the idea of what being a conservative was supposed to be about,” he said. “Because when I talked to folks across the state — whether they’re self-described Democrats or Republicans or independents or none of the above — they’re always saying, ‘I just want our government to operate in a way that respects and empowers the Constitution.’”
“Conservatives talk about small government, conservatives talk about protecting folks from tyranny. This is literally big government in support of tyranny,” El-Sayed said of Trump’s ICE deployment. “So I just think abolishing is a conservative position, don’t you?”
El-Sayed is clearly no fan of President Trump, and he told The Daily Wire that he believes Trump is the “worst symptom” of a broader “disease.”
“The disease is the system that allows big corporations, billionaires, oligarchs to buy and sell access to politicians that lets them rig the system against us,” he added. “It’s the reason we get paid less for the work we do, and we have to pay more for the things we have to buy.”
If that messaging sounds familiar, it’s because it echoes the rhetoric of far-Left politicians, including New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said last year, “The oligarchs who installed Donald Trump in power have one mission: to make billionaires richer at the expense of the United States of America. It is their agenda to keep wages low and loot our public goods.”
Mamdani also used similar language on his way to winning New York City’s mayoral election last year. Speaking at a rally last October, Mamdani said that the leftist movement propelling his campaign is an “existential threat to billionaires who think their money can buy our democracy.”
“We are an existential threat to a broken status quo that buries the voices of working people beneath corporations,” Mamdani added at the time.
It also aligns with the messaging that democratic socialist Senator Bernie Sanders has used for decades. In his endorsement of El-Sayed last year, Sanders said that Congress “desperately needs right now … members with the guts to stand up to the oligarchs.”
“Abdul certainly would be doing that, so I’m delighted to be supporting him,” Sanders added.
While Mamdani, Sanders, and AOC fully adopted the democratic socialist moniker, El-Sayed told The Daily Wire that he’s a capitalist who believes the “biggest danger to capitalism is monopoly,” not “government regulation.”
“We’re living in an era right now where monopolies and oligopolies are destroying the idea of a market itself,” El-Sayed said. “And so if we want capitalism to work, you actually have to have meaningful government involvement to protect markets from monopoly and oligopoly too big to fail.”
The democratic socialism of Mamdani, Sanders, and AOC propelled them into power in the liberal enclaves of New York and Vermont, but it likely won’t play well in Michigan, a blue-collar manufacturing hub that helped elect Trump in both 2016 and 2024. El-Sayed seems to be putting himself in a position to garner some of the momentum of the far-Left without explicitly identifying with the far-Left’s newfound fascination with socialism.
The Bernie Sanders-endorsed candidate is in a tightly contested race for the seat left open by retiring Sen. Gary Peters. The former health director faces state Senator Mallory McMorrow and U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, with recent polling showing El-Sayed sitting in third place, but not by much. The Daily Wire reached out to the campaigns for McMorrow and Stevens, requesting interviews, but they have not responded.
El-Sayed has sought to separate himself from the other Democrats in the race by highlighting his refusal to accept campaign donations from corporations. He is also the candidate who has been the most critical of U.S. support for Israel, telling The Daily Wire, “Our tax dollars are being used to continue genocide.”
His anti-Israel stance sparked controversy last October when El-Sayed’s campaign sent a fundraising email on the anniversary of the October 7 attack on Israel that made no mention of Hamas’ atrocities and blamed Israel for launching “a ground invasion of Gaza.” After the email was sent on October 7, 2025, El-Sayed’s campaign said it went out by mistake.
Asked by The Daily Wire this week how such a mistake could happen, El-Sayed said the email had been approved to go out, but was supposed to be sent on a different day.
“It went out, and I very quickly reached out to leaders in the Jewish community to apologize for having stepped on their grief,” he said, adding, “The message in the email is something I stand by.”
When asked about his faith, El-Sayed told The Daily Wire that he’s “proud” to be Muslim and also “really proud” of the U.S. Constitution.
“One of the things I love about my constitution is that it protects my right to practice as I choose to practice or not practice at all,” he said. “The idea that anybody should be pointing at one religious group in the name of the Constitution and saying that those people are not fit to be here or not fit to serve seems to me to be inconsistent with what the Constitution actually guarantees.”
El-Sayed condemned conservatives who he said attempt to “twist conservatism to be about a very particular kind of fascism.”
“When people come at me because I’m Muslim, I always laugh,” he added. “I’m like, man, you think you know something about America and you know nothing at all.”
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