Dr. Abdul El-Sayed will welcome former President Barack Obama to Michigan on Saturday, as the Democratic nominee for Senate seeks to address one of his greatest challenges this year: consolidating support among Black voters.
Dr. El-Sayed is not just managing residual frustrations from a heated primary, in which Black voters overwhelmingly backed his opponent. He is also confronting age-old animosities between the state’s Black and Arab communities.
And he knows it.
“For too many Black Detroiters, in particular, their experience with somebody who looks like me is not a good one,” Dr. El-Sayed, a former public health official who would be America’s first Muslim senator, said this week on a podcast hosted by The Root, a media outlet aimed at Black audiences.
“You go into a gas station and you go to a party store, you’re being talked at from behind bulletproof glass,” he said. “You’re a woman, you’re being catcalled. If you’re a kid, you’re being sold a loosie” — a single cigarette — “out the back.”
Dr. El-Sayed’s blunt description of some of the tensions between Arab business owners and Black residents in Detroit and beyond revealed the racial unease simmering just beneath the surface that is shaping the race.
One recent incident drew widespread attention: A car crash in September involving two women, one Arab American and the other Black, led to confrontation, allegations of a hate crime and a viral video. In another incident, a valet owner was accused of writing an anti-Black racial slur and charged with a hate crime.
“These are relationships in the community for years in this city,” said Mary Waters, a prominent Black city councilwoman in Detroit who has pointedly not endorsed Dr. El-Sayed. “It is because of — maybe not anything to do with him personally — but the Middle Eastern community in general.”
In the primary, Dr. El-Sayed decisively lost Black areas of Detroit to Representative Haley Stevens, whose supporters ran a heavy rotation of ads featuring Mr. Obama’s praise of her work on the 2009 auto industry bailout. Ms. Stevens won majority-Black precincts in Detroit by a 34-percentage-point landslide.
Against this backdrop, the Republican nominee, Mike Rogers, who is white, has been trying to break the traditional Democratic stranglehold on Detroit, the most populous majority-Black city in the country.
On one recent day in the city, Mr. Rogers was slinging drinks at Desmond’s Elegant Affairs, a social spot with a largely Black clientele. On another, his wife was handing out $10 gift cards for gas. Last weekend, he opened a campaign office on Livernois Avenue, a key strip of Black-owned businesses in Detroit, where aides hung signs and laid out free Domino’s pizzas for the few dozen attendees.
Dr. El-Sayed dismissed Mr. Rogers’s Black outreach as too little, too late.
“That’s cute,” he said in an interview. “How many people are actually from Detroit?” he asked about the crowd.
He also boasted of his own big crowds in the conservative Upper Peninsula, typically more hostile terrain for a Democrat.
“I am making incursions in his base,” Dr. El-Sayed said.
Beneath the bravado has been a flurry of outreach to Black voters.
In the last week, he appeared on The Root’s podcast; did an event with Jemele Hill, a prominent Black journalist; campaigned on Wednesday with Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, the pastor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s old church, Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta; and spent last Sunday morning visiting two Black churches in Flint with Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, who sat with clergy leaders and Dr. El-Sayed before services.
On Saturday, Mr. Obama, who won Michigan easily in both 2008 and 2012 and cut an ad in support of Dr. El-Sayed this month, is scheduled to campaign with him. Last month Dr. El-Sayed rolled out a policy agenda specifically aimed at Black communities.
“I’m a cynical Black voter, so I didn’t give Abdul anything,” Ms. Pressley said in an interview on her third day campaigning for him. “I’m here because he made a believer out of me.”
Some in Michigan’s Black community still recall the Uncommitted movement during the 2024 Democratic primary, when members of the Arab American community organized a protest vote against former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. over his support for Israel.
The ill will, stemming from Israel’s war in Gaza, spilled onto former Vice President Kamala Harris when she became the nominee in August of that year. In Dearborn, the city with Michigan’s largest share of Arab American voters, she received less than half the votes Mr. Biden had in 2020.
Ms. Harris campaigned with Dr. El-Sayed last month in Detroit.
But Ms. Waters, the Detroit councilwoman, said that for some Black voters, no surrogate would prove powerful enough to overcome grievances rooted in personal experiences at gas stations and grocery stores.
“Even if she walked down the street with Abdul El-Sayed holding his hand, they would still not vote for him,” Ms. Waters said of Ms. Harris, adding that some Black voters were even drawing on the language of the Uncommitted movement: “People are saying they’re going to ‘leave it blank.’”
Dr. El-Sayed will almost certainly win the Black vote comfortably, but for Democrats to prevail in Michigan, they typically need Black voters to come to the polls in high numbers and to vote overwhelmingly Democratic.
“Rogers has been out in the neighborhoods, and that’s smart,” said Adrian Hemond, a Democrat of mixed race who runs a bipartisan consulting firm in Michigan. “He’s not going to win them, but if he can get in the high teens, low 20s, percentage-wise, with Black men, that’ll go a long way.”
At a Rogers campaign event at a winery in more rural Oakland County, a clutch of Black women surrounded Mr. Rogers and gave him hugs after a speech.
“You guys are the best ever,” Mr. Rogers told them.
“His community, the Arabic community — for so long they have disrespected the Black community,” one of the women, Cynthia Haines of Flint, said about Dr. El-Sayed in an interview. She was excited to vote for Mr. Rogers.
A super PAC called Together for Michigan has created a “Democrats for Rogers” campaign and is running an ad featuring Black voters and leaders.
Melanie Rutherford, 47, a Democrat and former councilwoman in Pontiac, was paid $30,000 last month by the group. Ms. Rutherford, who is Black, was among those at Mr. Rogers’s Detroit office opening, laying her hands on him at one point and leading the room in prayer.
In an interview, Ms. Rutherford called herself a “Haley Stevens fanatic” in the primary, saying she had never voted Republican. But she said she was alienated by the choice of Dr. El-Sayed over Ms. Stevens, who had done a lot for her city, and predicted that Black-Arab tensions would be a factor in November.
“Every liquor store is owned by Arabs — ain’t nothing wrong with that,” she said. “It’s not about the ownership. It’s about the respect.”
Darrell Roper, a 76-year-old Black retiree who lives in Genesee, acknowledged those tensions as he met Dr. El-Sayed in the lobby of Metropolitan Baptist Church in Flint on Sunday. But he said he was eager to support the Democrat to curb President Trump.
“If he helps his people,” Mr. Roper said of Dr. El-Sayed, whose parents are Egyptian immigrants, “it’s going to help us.”
Mr. Rogers is hoping to exploit the opening.
“I’ll tell you one thing — they know that there’s one guy that can help heal that. That’s us,” Mr. Rogers said in an interview at his Detroit office opening. “He cannot heal that.”
But he’s trying everything he can. This month, at a campaign event at a dive bar in Grand Rapids, Dr. El-Sayed took a question from a disillusioned Black voter named JD Chapman Jr.
“What makes you different,” said Mr. Chapman, 46, “and how do we know that we can trust what you say?”
Dr. El-Sayed began, as he often does, by describing the possibility of his own political rise as a direct function of the Black civil rights movement.
“My story in America doesn’t happen without the advocacy and the organizing of Black folks,” he told Mr. Chapman. He cited the immigration law, which came along with better-known civil rights bills of the 1960s, that allowed his father to immigrate here. “So I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Black folk.”
He spoke about tackling racial and health disparities in Detroit and Wayne County as a public health official, about giving away eyeglasses, about putting Narcan in vending machines.
Mr. Chapman was not impressed.
He said in an interview that he did not find Dr. El-Sayed trustworthy or his answers concrete enough. He had voted for Ms. Stevens in the primary but was “very, very seriously considering” not voting for Senate in the general election.
“I’m not sold,” he said.
Evan Reynolds contributed reporting.
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