Ask most Democratic office-seekers to explain their party’s disconnect with young men, and you might get an earful about “toxic masculinity” — or, more likely, the crudest sort of pandering to what they imagine a Joe Rogan fan wants to hear. Ask Michigan senatorial contender Abdul El-Sayed, however, and you’ll get a sophisticated account of male alienation, grounded in political economy and a painful personal story.
“I got a good friend where our entire relationship has been comprised of talking about athletes of the past,” El-Sayed tells me in a wide-ranging phone interview. “You just spitball: name an athlete from the past and their best moment, or whether LeBron James or Michael Jordan is the GOAT” (greatest of all time). He adds parenthetically: “It’s Jordan, by the way.”
ESPN used to be at the center of the friendship. But more recently, El-Sayed and his buddy can’t watch it, because the network “has become one gigantic billboard for sports betting, and he has problematic gambling. It’s was such an important of his identity, and it’s gone from him. We don’t talk about that.”
The $100 billion sports-betting “industry” raises bankruptcy rates by a third within four years of a state legalizing the practice, according to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles. That’s about 30,000 additional bankruptcies per year nationally. Yet for El-Sayed, the deeper crisis is how gambling firms, and other corporate peddlers of vice, “monetize men’s dopamine circuits.”
A gym rat and former star athlete, El-Sayed says he doesn’t know “any young man between the ages of 14 and 40 who doesn’t have some kind of problematic relationship with one of the following: sports betting, gaming, porn, cannabis.” Each “leaves people feeling small and kind of broken.” Meanwhile, elite discourse blames men “for this sort of ‘toxic masculinity,’ ” while the likes of Andrew Tate promote a misogynistic caricature of what it means to be a man. “All of these working together have led to this massive MAGA-pilling of young men.”
In response, El-Sayed thinks, Democrats should return to what their party was founded to do: empowering ordinary people relative to the market forces profiting off their misery. In this case, El-Sayed argues, that means regulating vice advertising that attempts to ensnare Americans at ever younger ages. His own daughter Emmalee (age 7), he says, has started to notice a marijuana dispensary called Cookies on the way to hockey practice in Ann Arbor, where the El-Sayeds live.
El-Sayed recalls, “I had to explain to her that they don’t sell cookies. How do I explain to [her] that they’re trying to market a product that isn’t meant for children, but [is] explicitly marketed to children?”
Post-puberty young men are even worse off, in thrall to those who would addict them (Pornhub), and to those who farm online engagement by shifting the blame (Tate). As El-Sayed puts it, “When you’ve been sapped of all your energy because you’ve just looked at porn for the third time today, because it’s literally everywhere, and then somebody comes and tells you that ‘the reason you feel so bad is because of women,’ you’re talking about people in a very vulnerable place.”
The progressive alternative, El-Sayed contends, should be a combination of self-help and collective action: “You can tell young men, ‘OK, put on your pants, go to class, show up better in your life, hit the gym, all of it.’ But also: ‘Let’s talk about why you feel this way. It’s not about the women in your life. It’s about these huge corporations that have tried to separate you from your dollar in ways that make you feel bad.’ ”
It’s this relentless economic populism — combined with a blunt, here-I-am rhetorical style, especially on Gaza — that has made El-Sayed one of the most talked-about candidates amid the progressive ferment roiling the Democratic Party. Indeed, he comes closest to being the true heir to the aging Bernie Sanders progressives have spent years looking for.
The only question is whether El-Sayed is more like the 2016 Sanders (a heterodox rebel) or the 2020 Sanders (more conventional, more willing to play ball with the party mainstream). The shorter answer is: El-Sayed has elements of both. But on the whole, he’s more Bernie 2016 than Bernie 2020.
Abdul El-Sayed was born in 1984 in Rochester Hills, Mich., to Egyptian parents who’d moved to the area so his father could study engineering at Wayne State University. His parents later separated, and he grew up, as he told a radio interviewer in 2021, with a “Daughter of the American Revolution” stepmother and his immigrant father — the kind of only-in-America blended family that belies fantasies of racial purification animating the online Right.
“On the whole, he’s more Bernie 2016 than Bernie 2020.”
He finished his undergraduate degree and the first two years of medical school at the University of Michigan before being awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where he earned a public-health doctorate. Back Stateside, he completed his medical degree at Columbia but skipped residency to pursue a career in public-health research. In 2015, at age 30, he returned to Detroit to serve as the city’s health director before running for governor three years later.
His gubernatorial bid failed, but along the way, he garnered endorsements from the likes of Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Meanwhile, he co-authored a book making the case for Medicare for All that doubled as a decent history of American health care and insurance.
Then came 2024. Michigan proved to be an especially challenging battleground for Democrats — in ways that touched on El-Sayed’s biography. Not only did the Biden-Harris campaign fail to motivate the state’s Muslim-American community, the country’s largest, but Donald Trump even won major endorsements from a number of imams and mayors. When the dust settled, Trump had clinched a majority of ballots in Dearborn, Mich., the country’s most heavily Muslim city.
How does El-Sayed explain the loss? In a word, Gaza. “Unfortunately,” he tells me, “President Biden was on the wrong side of that. His ‘hug-Bibi’ strategy put us in a situation where our values and our aims were not consistently applied as Democrats. . . . Folks got sick and tired of their tax dollars being spent to watch children being murdered who looked like their own children.”
While noting that he endorsed Kamala Harris, El-Sayed isn’t shy about where he thinks principle and politics should lead Democrats when it comes to the Middle East. For starters, he wants more Dems to get comfortable with the G-word: “I call this a ‘genocide’ in large part because that’s a technical term for a horror that’s being inflicted on people. I don’t know another word for killing 60,000-plus people, at least 18,500 of them children. Rendering their homes unlivable. Trying to push them into other countries because they happen to speak the same language.”
El-Sayed’s immediate solution to the Gaza crisis is to cut off all funding to the Israeli military (and, he quickly adds, to all foreign militaries): “I think we would do well to spend our money here to feed our children who are going without food, to build our kids’ schools, to empower our people to have health care, to build our infrastructure, rather than decimating and devastating people abroad.”
Unfavorable views of Israel are now overwhelming among Democrats, a majority of Independents, and a growing share of younger Republicans (though, as a whole, the GOP remains stalwartly pro-Israel). Yet the mainstream leadership of the Democratic Party isn’t ready to follow its base, notwithstanding a recent vote in the Senate that saw an astonishing half of the Democratic caucus call for withholding offensive weapons from the Jewish state.
Case in point: Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s transportation secretary and a likely 2028 presidential aspirant, faced broad ridicule for a podcast appearance in which he pontificated at length on Gaza without taking any clear stances. (When I ask El-Sayed to comment on this —Buttigieg is from neighboring Indiana, after all — he demurs: “I’m not a pundit.”)
But besides cutting off arms to the IDF, what’s his long-term plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Does he envision a two-state solution? “Every president before Donald Trump, since the founding of the State of Israel, has agreed that we want a two-state solution. That has been their stated aim. There is an Israel — there is not a Palestine. And yet our taxpayer dollars continue to be spent to aid, arm, and abet the very people who want to foreclose on the possibility of Palestine.”
Squint hard enough, and you might detect a grudging acknowledgment of official US policy there — two states for two peoples. Then again, El-Sayed’s cynicism is well-founded, in that leaders in Jerusalem increasingly reject Palestinian self-determination, most recently with an overwhelming vote in the Knesset in favor of annexing the West Bank.
Given the widening gap between Israel’s leaders and political culture, on one hand, and younger Americans of all political persuasions, on the other, even centrist Democrats are likely to shift in El-Sayed’s direction, even if not all the way. What makes him a potentially transformative leader for the party, however, isn’t his vociferousness on Israel per se, but his hospitals-here-not-bombs-there attitude. It echoes Sanders’s 2016 campaign — and could win back moderate or marginal GOP voters: not MAGA die-hards, but working- and lower-middle-class Americans who pulled twice for Obama before switching to Trump over the past decade.
“His bottom line is that border enforcement can’t and mustn’t be thought of as a means for boosting labor’s market power.”
El-Sayed is open about trying to reach disaffected Trumpians. “The fundamental divide,” he says, “is between people who have felt locked out of our system for a very long time and people who’ve been trying to lock them out. I want to work for the people who’ve been locked out. . . . How they’ve voted in the past, where they stand on social issues — I’ve got my opinions about those things, but I think we’re better as a society when people who’ve been locked out get a fair shake.”
If El-Sayed is indeed the closest thing progressives have to Bernie 2.0, his success will turn on his ability to navigate the tension between class-based economic populism and the identity-and-grievance jockeying that has shaped the party since the mid-2010s.
In 2015-16, Sanders denounced “open borders” and ran an unabashedly class-first message. In response, the party’s neoliberal center derided his followers as “bros” and often accused them (preposterously) of racism and sexism. Hillary Clinton asked: “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow … would that end racism? Would that end sexism?” Four years later, amid “peak woke,” Sanders fell in line on immigration and lost his edge.
Where is El-Sayed on all this in 2025? At first, he bristles at the question and its left-right, class-versus-identity framing: “I’m a little bit too much of a scientist to take on premise a lot of the implied lenses that you’re using to make sense out of our political moment.” Yeah, OK. Obama, too, had wearied of red and blue, right and left by the time he gave his career-defining speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
On immigration — an issue that massively contributed to Trump’s re-election last year, and which has dramatically altered politics across the developed world — El-Sayed sounds more conventionally progressive notes. While disavowing “open borders,” he mostly fumes against the cruelty of the newly supercharged Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Masked, anonymous ICE agents, he says, “are literally tearing mothers from babies and babies away from mothers. Tell me how this is something that benefits all of us. I just don’t see it, I’m sorry.”
Fair enough. But this doesn’t overcome the deeper economic argument against the free movement of labor: that it allows capital to engage in wage arbitrage, especially at the lower rungs of the labor market. It was just this that impelled the labor movement, and many trade-union and civil-rights icons, to back restrictionism until relatively recently. And it’s why the Bernie of old denounced porous national frontiers as a “Koch Brothers policy.”
El-Sayed disagrees: “The answer to going after the DoorDash economy, is to go after fucking DoorDash.” Meaning: pro-worker and pro-consumer legislation and regulation. So would that include national E-Verify, holding employers responsible for the immigration status of employees? Not quite. His bottom line is that border enforcement can’t and mustn’t be thought of as a means for boosting labor’s market power.
Immigration aside, El-Sayed’s vision resembles Bernie 2016 to a great extent. Class and economic power are at the heart of it: “I’m interested in trying to achieve an America where everyone has their best shot at a dignified life,” he says, “and I understand that the central challenge to doing that has been the power of extremely wealthy people to corrupt our politics, to shape an economy that funnels more and more money to the very top, against and despite everybody else who does all the work.”
He goes on to call for Medicare for All, higher union density in the private economy, robust antitrust enforcement, and the removal of corporate influence from politics. Add his communitarian concern about widespread male addiction and alienation, and his agenda could prove extremely popular in years to come. Doubly so if the Trumpians continue to deliver a George W. Bush program — Medicaid cuts, Mideast war — under the banner of America First.
