On the surface, Kamala Harris and Abdul El-Sayed came together Tuesday around a simple, searing issue: helping new mothers and their babies.
But their Black maternal health and health care costs event in Detroit presented opportunities for two Democrats with different vulnerabilities and different reasons to expand their coalitions.
Could Harris, the former vice president and 2024 presidential nominee, help El-Sayed broaden his support among traditional Democratic constituencies? And could El-Sayed, the populist Senate nominee in a pivotal swing state, help Harris reconnect with progressive voters who have often viewed her warily?
El-Sayed, who emerged from a bruising Democratic primary, has struggled to consolidate support among some of the party’s most reliable voters, including Black Americans and Jewish people. Harris, who has said she is considering another run in 2028, remains a polarizing figure within a party debating whether to give her another chance or turn to new leaders.
On Tuesday, Harris cast El-Sayed as an ally in confronting the inequities that have animated much of her own political career.
“An attack on diversity, equity and inclusion is an attack, by definition, on maternal care, including the need to protect Black women,” Harris told the crowd gathered at Birth Detroit, a Black-led community birth center. “The United States Senate should be a stopgap on the abuses of this administration. And I would suggest to you that the fellow sitting to my right would be one of them when elected.”
For Harris, Michigan offered an especially revealing place to reenter the political spotlight. It will be the fifth contest in Democrats’ 2028 presidential nominating calendar. Harris also narrowly lost Michigan in 2024, when the Biden administration’s handling of the war in Gaza angered some Arab American and Muslim voters.
Harris has played a complicated role in Democrats’ midterm campaign. She has endorsed and raised money for candidates, but several Democrats in difficult races have kept their distance.
In Iowa, Senate nominee Josh Turek rejected the idea of Harris campaigning for him, while gubernatorial nominee Rob Sand offered a similar “no thanks.” In Alaska, Senate nominee Mary Peltola distanced herself after a Harris-linked group used her name in a fundraising appeal, with a spokesperson saying her campaign was not seeking endorsements from politicians outside the state.
Harris’s appearance with El-Sayed was her first time publicly campaigning with a Democratic Senate candidate in a battleground state; she is also planning to campaign with Sen. Jon Ossoff in Georgia next month. She has made relatively few large public appearances since leaving the White House and has largely avoided campaign-style rallies. Her supporters described the Michigan trip as an early reentry into the electoral arena, part of a broader pattern among prospective 2028 contenders using structured events to test policy messages, sharpen attacks and maintain political visibility.
In El-Sayed, Harris was campaigning for a politician who has been embraced by critics of Israel for describing its actions in Gaza as a genocide and calling for an end to U.S. military aid.
Tali deGroot, a vice president at the liberal pro-Israel group J Street, said the split between the two politicians on Israel and Gaza would be sublimated by the pocketbook issues voters are more concerned with, including the Iran war that has elevated gas prices for months.
DeGroot said the joint appearance exemplified Democrats’ willingness to “work through disagreements” in favor of a larger goal: retaking Congress.
El-Sayed, meanwhile, stood to benefit from Harris’s standing among Black voters and other Democrats more closely aligned with the party establishment — constituencies where polling suggests he still has work to do.
A Washington Post-Schar School poll found that 53 percent of likely Michigan voters want Democrats to control the Senate next year, while 48 percent support El-Sayed. The gap is considerably larger among Black voters: 83 percent want Democratic control of the chamber, but 67 percent back El-Sayed. His primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Michigan), drew disproportionate support from Black voters.
Gussie Farris, a longtime Democratic organizer in Grand Rapids who backed Stevens in the primary, said she always intended to support the Democratic nominee in November but had worried that El-Sayed would struggle to attract the independent voters needed in a closely divided state.
Harris’s presence could reassure voters who remain uncertain about him, Farris said, including some of her friends.
“She’s well known and well-respected, and it can’t do anything but help,” Farris said. “She gives validation to who he is and what he’s for, especially among the independents and older adults. If nothing else, her star power is going to draw people so they hear what El-Sayed has to say.”
The political benefits run in both directions.
El-Sayed gives Harris an opportunity to appear alongside a politician whose rise was powered in part by the progressive voters with whom the Biden administration had significant disagreements. El-Sayed supported Michigan’s “uncommitted” campaign during the 2024 Democratic primary, a movement fueled largely by opposition to the administration’s handling of the war in Gaza, before endorsing Harris after Biden withdrew.
He has tried to keep foreign policy from defining his campaign, focusing instead on affordability and Medicare-for-all and other health care issues.
“We’ve built a health care system that is built around the folks who build the infrastructure and their needs, rather than the people who need the care and their needs, or the people who provide the care and their needs,” he said at the Tuesday event, which didn’t delve into foreign policy at all.
Still, it’s unclear whether Harris’s proximity to El-Sayed will ease tensions she’s had with the progressive wing of the party over the Biden administration’s stance toward Israel, said Bilal Hammoud, a progressive strategist and writer from Dearborn, Michigan. He voted uncommitted in the 2024 Democratic primary and for Harris in the general election.
“It’s not PR that Michigan Democrats are concerned with, it’s policy,” he said.
For El-Sayed, appearing with Harris links him to an administration that many of the voters who powered the uncommitted movement spent much of 2024 protesting.
El-Sayed acknowledged the challenge of knitting those factions together during a news conference before the event.
“We’ve got to bring as many folks in as we possibly can to take on the challenges that we face,” he said. “Even where there have been disagreements in the past, the things that unite us as Democrats are so much bigger.”
Michigan voter Faye Nemer, 40, said she voted for Donald Trump in 2024 because of Harris’s role in the previous administration’s approach to Israel’s war in Gaza.
Today, she is mulling voting for El-Sayed because he promised to end U.S. intervention in the Middle East. She remains no fan of Harris, but understands why El-Sayed invited her on the campaign trail.
“As long as he does not align to her foreign policy views, there’s no change in [my] opinion at this time,” Nemer said. “At face value, it appears Abdul is building a coalition with various communities to bridge the political divide.”
Praveena Somasundaram contributed to this report.
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