Despite what the polls say (and they say it is a dead heat within the margin of error), Abdul El-Sayed is looking for help in Michigan.

Remember, during the primary, El-Sayed was supposedly running away with the nomination. He barely eked out a win. He’s now counting on Democrats to rally around him because he is the nominee – but if that was working, then why did he have Kamala Harris campaigning with him, urging people to just vote for him just because he has the “D” after his name? And if that worked, then why is Barack Obama now coming to Michigan to campaign for him?

Dude. Your internals must SUCK. Lol. He couldn’t shame black men into voting Kamala. I wouldn’t count on it. https://t.co/FQVhb92PZt

— Stacey (@ScotsFyre) October 5, 2026

El-Sayed once tried to tell Michigan voters that he was African because his parents are from Egypt. Apparently, that didn’t go over so well.

Black Michiganders feel abandoned by Abdul El-Sayed:

“He’s taking advantage that we, as black people, are Democratic – and he thinks we’re gonna vote for him anyway, and I’m like, NO!” pic.twitter.com/IZ9zwkZKfb

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 6, 2026

Even Slate – yes, THAT Slate – is admitting that El-Sayed is having problems reaching the black voters of Michigan.

At 3 p.m. on a recent Saturday afternoon, in a conference room inside Fellowship Chapel in Detroit, Abdul El-Sayed looked different from the Senate candidate I had been watching at rallies around Michigan. He dipped his head. His voice seemed softer. This was not a room he commanded.

Almost everyone in the room besides El-Sayed was Black. He quickly tried to make inroads. “Many folks in this room are people I worked with in the city of Detroit,” he said at one point. Then, turning toward one woman he knew from those years: “Ms. Pam, have I changed at all?” he asked her. “No.” “Still talking about the same things, right?” he asked, smiling. “Yes, sir,” she said.

Some in the room already liked El-Sayed. But most had voted for his Democratic primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens. Before El-Sayed spoke, the moderator, Monica G. Anthony, had already indicated part of the reason why: his support for the “uncommitted movement” in 2024, which many Black Democrats believed had weakened Harris on her way to losing Michigan. Some Black Democrats experienced that campaign, which demanded an end to U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, as an attack on a historic candidate they desperately wanted to elect. (Last month, in an apparent effort to help mend the wound, Harris traveled to Michigan to campaign for El-Sayed.)

Now questions still surround his campaign about whether he can win over the Black voters who largely rejected him in the primary. El-Sayed won the primary by a single percentage point. He lost in Detroit by 28 points; Stevens won the city handily.

There was also a more complicated tension with the long and sometimes fraught relationship between Black and Arab communities in metro Detroit. Arab-owned gas stations, liquor stores, and other small businesses have for decades operated in predominantly Black neighborhoods, even as many of their owners lived elsewhere, producing what some Black Detroiters describe as a relationship that can feel extractive in a way that hurts their community. At a press conference in August in Detroit, an older Black man shouted, “He’s an Arab—he don’t care nothing about Black folks.” At a September roundtable with Black elected officials, Michigan state House candidate Kimberly Fisher warned that Black voters in her district brought up his race repeatedly. “Why would I vote for an Arab? Arabs don’t like us. He’s Egyptian, y’all. We don’t care. And when they see you, that’s what they see,” she said. “I’m fearful because I’m seeing more John James signs and Mike Rogers signs in the hood,” referring to El-Sayed’s Republican opponent in the Senate race.

And now old video and biographical information is being uncovered that will certainly not help El-Sayed’s attempt to win over black Democrat voters. Back in 2014, Abdul El-Sayed claimed that he had dual citizenship with the United States and Egypt.

El-Sayed was born in Michigan to Egyptian émigrés. He graduated from Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 2014 and joined Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health the same year. Around that time, El-Sayed published his résumé on an academic networking site. It lists his “citizenships” as “USA, Egypt.” El-Sayed’s résumé was removed from the site he published it to, Academia, after the Washington Free Beacon sent it to the campaign.

When the Washington Free Beacon asked the campaign about this, a spokesperson claimed that it was a mistake due to what he had been told by family members. Except that in 2014, El-Sayed was thirty years old. By that point in his life, he certainly should have known the truth about his own citizenship status… right? Was he attempting to fluff his resume? Or was he telling the truth?

Well, now we have video from 2016, where Abdul El-Sayed has the words coming out of his mouth.

Uh-oh.

El-Sayed made the remark about his dual citizenship onstage at a GlobeMed conference in Detroit, where the far-left Democrat served as the city’s health director at the time.

“I carry dual citizenship, and I grew up spending most of my summers in another country where I understood what it meant not to have the right to self-govern,” said El-Sayed, whose parents emigrated from Egypt to the Detroit area in 1978.

El-Sayed went on to tell a story, one he still tells on the campaign trail a decade later, that he was questioned by Egyptian police during one of those summer visits for publicly cursing Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s president at the time.

In 2014, El-Sayed was working as a public health scholar, and false statements on a résumé, including ones about ethnic identity, are considered a grave offense in academia.

El-Sayed’s campaign did not respond to questions about his 2016 statement. The Democrat has repeatedly attacked his Republican rival, Mike Rogers, for owning a home in Florida.

Born in Michigan in 1984, El-Sayed has said his father, an engineering professor at Eastern Michigan University, left Egypt to pursue his academic studies and because he was a “democracy agitator” who had run afoul of Egyptian authorities.

El-Sayed’s biological mother, who divorced his father when El-Sayed was three years old, settled in Missouri and works in the health care field. She worked for years at a nonprofit group, the Islamic American Relief Agency, that was sanctioned in 2004 for funneling money to al Qaeda.

Here’s the problem for Abdul El-Sayed: he told a lie, and he’s inviting speculation about which lie was the truth. He either lied about having dual citizenship, or he lied about NOT having dual citizenship. Twelve years ago, he said he did, and repeated that same claim ten years ago. Now, when asked, his campaign is trying to pass it off as an “oopsie” that he just believed because a family member told him so. Except, by his own reckoning, he spent a LOT of time in Egypt. Which passport was he using to get in and out of Egypt? The claims of dual citizenship were made when he was very much an adult. El-Sayed either lied then, or he lied now. (And let’s not even get into the property that his wife owns in Dubai.)

Having Barack Obama come to campaign isn’t going to paper over these problems. El-Sayed has spent a lot of time running away from his radical ties and buddy-buddy bro-ship with Hasan Piker. It’s going to be hard for him to outrun his own mouth, even if the media chooses to ignore it for the sake of the “D” after his name.

Featured image: original Victory Girls art by Darleen Click