The Scorpion and the Hicklib
The Last Days of Abdul El-Sayed’s Campaign
By Jesse Larkins · November 2, 2026 · 14 min read
The guy in the Abdul jersey couldn’t keep still. He was pacing wildly, popping in and out of his place in line. He kept starting chants.
“Money out of?!” he screamed.
“Politics!” we shouted back.
“Money in your?!”
“Pocket!”
“Medicare for?!”
“All!”
Jersey Guy pumped his fist.
I laughed at him. He spun around and spat an aggressive forced chuckle right in my face, it sounded like a direct caricature of my laugh. Is this guy starting shit?
“Just gotta rile ‘em up!” he told me, after initiating a chant with the crowd waiting in line.
“Absolutely,” I mumbled.
On Saturday, October 3rd, the Midwest Regional Council of Carpenters Banquet Center in Warren, MI, hosted a joint town hall for Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed and Senator Elissa Slotkin as part of El-Sayed’s “Shouldn’t Be This Hard” tour, the perfect name for anything involving men and Senator Elissa Slotkin. It focused on party unity, working-class issues, and presenting Abdul as a homegrown, Mr. Rogers-like figure.
Abdul El-Sayed is the official Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. A Muslim socialist who toured with the usual suspects—Hasan Piker, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Barack Obama. He has the full endorsement of the Democratic Party, but claims, with an obvious wink, not to be a member of the DSA. In general, winking effectively to both Muslims and the far left of the party while standing on their mainstream accolades seems to be the whole game for this new crop of Mamdanis. El-Sayed was a Rhodes Scholar…but also his wife wears a hijab and other super-traditional, honestly creepy-looking garb. El-Sayed is a staunch “capitalist”... but he’s caught on microphone saying he hates Mackinac, one of the least hateable pieces of true Midwestern nostalgia.
On Sunday, Rep. Haley Stevens, a U.S. Representative serving Michigan's 11th district, made major waves by endorsing El-Sayed’s rival, Republican candidate Mike Rogers. Haley’s fiancé, Jason Turkish, a disability rights attorney, accused Abdul of, “escalating rhetoric that makes Jewish people unsafe.” Stevens demanded El-Sayed publicly condemn a political ad from Rebellion PAC depicting an American couple struggling to afford groceries because their money was going to Israel. Though not an official campaign ad, it brought rising tensions between establishment Democrats and Abdul’s wing of the party to a head. The Abdul campaign, in response, issued a statement downplaying Stevens’ concerns as “relitigating a primary that ended three months ago,” and shifting the attention to the goal of “holding Trump accountable.”
Abdul was born in Michigan in 1984 to Egyptian immigrant parents: his father, Mohamed El-Sayed, and his mother, Fatten El-Komy. They divorced when Abdul was three years old, and his father remarried a white American woman named Jacqueline Johnson. Again, earlier in the campaign, Abdul was caught disparaging Mackinac Island, a former fur trading outpost and proud Michigan staple of preserved Americana. Since then, his ads have downplayed his Muslim heritage and feigned an All-American, hunky-dory Mayberry-like upbringing. He posed alongside white elderly couples who could not follow the eyeline of a camera as metaphorical stand-ins for his own parents.
With the election coming to a head, I RSVPed to an Abdul El-Sayed campaign event. The morning of October 3rd, I drove an hour to Flint and found a line that wrapped around the building. Organizers ran out of space and told over a hundred people to go home.
I quickly RSVPed for the next event that same day, which was in Macomb, and drove another hour. This time I was amongst the early-bird crowd of hyper-zealous fans. Mostly crusty hippies. Here I first noticed, in a bright yellow campaign jersey that bore Abdul’s name, a hicklib, i.e., a rural-dwelling American who compensates for their provincialism by being aggressively left wing.
A hawker with homemade campaign buttons sprinted out of his car. I had also noticed him at the last location peddling his unapproved merch.
He took out a poster board with an array of buttons and started making his way down the line. Princess Leia with the Ziggy Stardust lightning bolt across her face and the words “We Are The Resistance” beneath her. “Elect a Clown, Expect a Circus” above a depiction of Donald Trump with a big red clown nose. The characters of Sesame Street were raising a black power fist.
Distill Social, a media group that relies on funding from “a left-leaning dark money nonprofit” called the Michigan Civic Action Fund, was filming the crowd. They have run exclusively positive coverage for El-Sayed in the weeks leading up to the election.
Distill host Gary Sue and his chunky sidekick Norris Howard shoved fuzzy Bluetooth bait flies in the mouths of easy lefty fish. They approached me. I waved them away. The Jersey Guy sprang over.
Gary Sue asked, “Excuse me, sir, what do you think of Flock cameras and how they’re encroaching on your rights?”
“Uh, yeah, they’re actually just used to spy on the working class!” Jersey Guy responded.
“Oh, so Flock cameras don’t just scan license plates? It’s actually just a bunch of people creeping on children?”
“Yes I actually believe that they are gathering data for the pedophile elite.”
I later tried to find this interaction on Distill Social’s Instagram but couldn’t find it.
The line started moving. Security consisted of angular, sharp-jawed Latinas and other DEI hires without a clue what was going on—bovine-staring and slack-jawed as if they hadn’t prepared for the event.
The banquet hall was completely filled. Every inch of it was crammed full of working-class boomers and the occasional 20-year-old suburban zoomer dragged there by her parents. Besides the news crew, the “press” consisted of balding, Homer Simpson-looking-ass women scrolling on their phones.
A white guy in a black puffer vest stood in front of the congregation and had us rehearse being excited. He prepped us like a sitcom studio audience. We were to chant Abdul’s name while the news panned across us.
“ABDUL! ABDUL! ABDUL!”
Like an eager theater-kid, Abdul got too excited by the chanting and rushed the process of coming out on stage. After his handlers gave a signal, the entire room rose to their feet. He ran out slapping hands like a member of the Harlem Globetrotters. I expected him to start moonwalking.
U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin followed frumpily behind Abdul. He signaled for the audience to applaud, then squeezed in another round of call-and-response.
His delivery felt forced and overwritten, but such is Michigan.
“I never intended to run for office, my parents gave me an eleven-letter first name!” He paused for a laugh break and then delivered, “With sounds coming out of parts of people’s throats that they didn’t even know they had!”
The Jersey Guy shot out of his seat like he had been waiting for this moment his entire life. With an outstretched arm, in perfectly pronounced Arabic throat letters, shouted Abdul’s full name. It was met with whooping cheers. Abdul was at a loss.
“For those wondering, there are a lot of Arab Americans in Michigan, and he’s not one of them.”
Here the constitutional politeness of the Michigan crowd was in full effect. Most Americans were deferential enough to apologize after mispronouncing a foreign-sounding name, but Jersey Guy had gone the extra mile to learn its exact pronunciation. Hicklibbery in its fullest form.
“If I were to be elected, I’d be the first public health official elected to the United States Senate. I went off to medical school to learn how to heal, only to realize that too much of our system is built to bill rather than to heal.”
El-Sayed earned an MD from Columbia University but didn’t pursue residency, never obtained a Michigan medical license, and was not allowed to treat patients. He described himself as “cosplaying a doctor.”
“We put Narcan in vending machines for free in one hundred different locations.”
Massive applause for Narcan, easier to get than Doritos.
“Do you remember the shit lettuce situation?” He asked the crowd.
“Yes!”
During 2026, Michigan was hit the hardest by a Cyclospora outbreak, with a reported 15,500 cases between May and August, as opposed to the yearly 40-50 cases the state typically saw. There were hundreds of hospitalizations and two deaths. Having a medical background, Abdul lambasted RFK Jr. throughout the outbreak for his downplaying and assurance that the situation was under control.
“Did you know the corporation that grows the shit lettuce gave money to the Trump administration and Mike Rogers? I’m sorry, but if you grow lettuce, and you let someone take a dump on the lettuce, and you feed that to people, and you buy off a politician to look the other way, that is corruption.”
To add insult to injury, in reference to RFK Jr. he added, “I mean, the man works out in jeans. It's just something I find personally offensive. Because there is no way that he doesn’t skip leg day. You’re not squatting in jeans!”
He briefly shifted his focus to opponent Mike Rogers. “We’re up against a guy who is as corrupt, as craven, as cowardly as it gets.”
“Go back to Florida!” Jersey Guy shouted.
“He took his house off the market!” yelled a black lady next to me.
“That’s right,” Abdul smiled. “He had a house in Florida he had on the market for two hundred thousand more than what it’s worth. He finally admitted he’s moving back to it in November because he took it off the market.”
The black woman boiled over in excitement with shouts of, “Praise be!”
“There’s a reason that Donald Trump and JD Vance won’t keep my name out of their mouth.”
“They’re scared!” exclaimed Jersey Guy.
“And at some point I’d like to teach them how to say it properly!”
The room gave him another round of applause. Once again, the ignorance and audacity of white Americans’ mispronunciation of his name is unadulterated dry powder for the Midwestern hicklib.
“They want to tell us that Macomb County is red. But I see voters who are ready to build the future that Michigan deserves!”
Senator Elissa Slotkin, known most recently for saying she wants to scare young people away from working for Republicans for fear of litigation, reiterated those principles in the flesh. She began talking down to us like we were children.
“Abdul and I, we don't agree on everything, and that's okay, right? Isn't that okay?”
Waves of boomers nodded along like they were watching an instructional video. She was hinting at his accusations of antisemitism, which of course, for a true Michigander, would be impolite to bring up. The unspoken subtext of the whole charade, in fact, seems to be the Israel Question with Slotkin, Jewish, jumping excitedly to the side of the Dem party’s hottest new Muslim, leaving less cool Jew-lovers like Haley Stevens in the dust.
“We agree on the things that are really important, which is putting a check and balance on this man in the White House and on the people who salute him.”
Slotkin had introduced the Protect Our Polls Act back in June of 2026, legislation designed as a safeguard against what they saw as Trump’s election fraud. The act would have required explicit congressional approval, advance notice, and justification before any deployment of armed personnel to polling places.
“Being your Senator for over 18 months, sitting in those rooms, that debate of moderate versus progressive is not the real debate. The real debate among Democrats right now is fight versus flight. Do you believe that, in order to have the country we believe in, you have to fight for it, or do you believe that ‘Politics is a long game? It’s cyclical. If you just wait, people will come back to us, and it’ll all be okay?”
“No!” shouted the audience.
“I know it sounds crazy. But that is what people have told me. And all I can tell you is that in that divide between fight versus flight, I am on team fight.”
They opened the floor to public comment.
A burly union rep with thinning hair thanked Abdul for coming out before hitting him with, “What are your plans for investing in public safety?”
During the Summer of Floyd, Abdul had served as a board member of the activist group Michigan United. It held an anti-police brutality rally that drew nearly two thousand demonstrators. An all-out confrontation between police and protesters resulted in vandalized police cruisers, dozens of arrests, and one death.
El-Sayed has since scrubbed his social media posts supporting “defund the police” and claims he never called for it.
“I talk to law enforcement a lot. And what they want is a dignified retirement and good benefits. They’ll also tell you that the runs they don't like to go on are the ones that involve somebody in a mental health crisis. So why is the answer always the same? Maybe we should be sending mental health crisis responders to defuse a potentially dangerous, violent situation before it starts.”
Again, the Michigan audience cheered for this polite and diplomatic solution.
A young boy took the mic. His mom encouraged him to speak as his voice cracked and stuttered.
“What’s, uh, happening with the Department of Education, how it could, uh, in the foreseeable future become a puppet for the MAGA agenda; what are you going to do to not let that happen?”
Thunderous, bring-the-house-down applause followed. Abdul had to compose himself from the pure clippability of the moment.
“That was such a good question! You deserve a really good public school. You deserve to go to a school that is safe, clean, dry, and warm. And they don’t wanna invest in that. You deserve to know when you graduate that you can have any job you can choose from. Not have to take out loans to go to whatever university you want to go to.”
Sniffles and “awws” reverberated.
“I want to bring back the Department of Education, and every time they want to spend our tax money to buy more bombs or buy more weapons or do more war — I think they should have to invest in school too.”
The boy was about to sit but Abdul had one more rockstar moment left in him.
“You’re eleven years old right?”
“I’m ten.”
“You’re really smart. In about eight years I need you to come and intern in my office. I look forward to voting for you when you run for U.S. Senate.”
The venue shook. Everyone in my near vicinity whooped and yelped like wild animals.
“Now I know I’ve talked a lot about keeping money out of politics, but we need your support. Whatever you can chip in.”
He went on to claim that he never took a dime of corporate PAC money despite having allegedly taken nearly $130,000 in contributions from CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Abdul’s handlers took to the wings of the stage, gave him a series of hand signals, and he said his goodbyes to us. As he was being escorted out, the audience lunged for their opportunity to shake his hand, so I ran over and captured a candid.
Whatever radical sympathies he harbors, Abdul understands Michigan. He understands its tradition of accommodation and hospitality, and knows how to use it to his advantage. When questioned about his allegiance to the Muslim Brotherhood, he frames the interaction not as inaccurate, but as a rude breach of the social code. He accuses the questioner of profiling him, despite a 2012 letter he signed in support of Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, urging Morsi to ‘purge the media and police.’”
Abdul presents a friendly next-door-neighbor facade in order to pass off his radical ideas onto the unsuspecting Michigander, who can only respond to this encroachment with niceties. It’s the Scorpion and the Frog. Michiganders ignore the red flags in the back of their mind because they seem more like private indiscretions than consequential beliefs.
On the way out I stopped at the hawker’s merchandise table. I bought a Ziggy Stardust Princess Leia flag.