Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has lost key local support just weeks before the general election.
A former staffer, a local first responders union, and an elected Democrat sheriff all said they cannot bring themselves to support the candidate, for reasons ranging from his personality to his political views.
On Wednesday, citing public safety, Saginaw County Sheriff William Federspiel, a Democrat, crossed party lines to endorse Republican Mike Rogers over El-Sayed.
“I look forward to working with Mike at the federal level. We can work in partnership with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Drug Enforcement Administration so that we can put some of these career criminals away for good at the federal level,” Federspiel said at a press conference.
“I endorse Mike,” Federspiel said. “My whole career of 39-plus years has been protecting the citizens of this community that I live in, and here in Saginaw County, there’s nobody better I’d like to see at the United States Senate for Michigan than this guy.”
Prior to that, in mid-September, the Michigan Professional Fire Fighters Union removed its previous endorsement of El-Sayed, calling it a “clerical error.”
“Our intention was to stay out of that race,” President Matt Sahr said in a statement to The Midwesterner, adding that the initial slate of endorsements “got distributed out before it got approved,” and adding that it was the result of a “clerical error.”
However, the outlet noted that it had been told by a union member the backtrack on the endorsement was due more to internal disputes within the union’s membership than to a clerical error.
The organization’s membership includes more than 8,000 active-duty and retired firefighters and emergency medical personnel.
“This was not a clerical error. What we are seeing now is MPFFU leadership trying to sweep this under the rug,” an MPFFU firefighter from southern Michigan told the outlet. “If rank-and-file members had not voiced our concerns, I have no doubt this organization would still be supporting Abdul El-Sayed.”
“While Abdul El-Sayed has not only personally voiced support for these ideas, he has held positions within organizations that support defunding the police and abolishing a considerable portion of our prison system,” the member continued.
The member added that the union’s leadership, which has historically supported Democrat candidates, will have to recognize the importance of working across party lines when it best suits its members.
In 2020, when he served as Detroit’s public health director, El-Sayed said live on Detroit Public Radio that he “believe[s] that we do need to defund the police insofar as defunding the police is disinvesting in the means of incarcerating someone or killing them on the streets.”
“And in investing more in the means of educating and empowering, engaging communities with the means of being able to take on systemic poverty, that we’ve allowed systematic racism to fester in too many communities,” El-Sayed continued.
When pressed about it in a CNN interview, El-Sayed disputed the claim, despite the public recording indicating otherwise.
Jordan Domingue, a former member of El-Sayed’s security team and personal assistant, called the candidate a short-tempered, immature, and “manufactured man” who is unfit for the job he is seeking. Domingue worked for El-Sayed throughout two campaigns.
“Everything I had previously ignored or excused made it obvious to me who he was and that I was on the wrong side,” Domingue wrote in a Sept. 17 post. “His masculinity is a performance, and he has the maturity to match it.”
In his post, Domingue said that El-Sayed will regularly deceive his voters by changing his tune on key issues to gain voters’ trust, calling it “strategic ambiguity,” and accusing the candidate of embellishing his resume.
To date, neither El-Sayed nor his campaign has publicly commented on Dominique’s statement.
El-Sayed’s campaign did not respond to the Daily Signal’s request for comment.
[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]
