The Michigan Democratic Senate nominee quietly made at least 100 YouTube videos private after winning his primary. The internet, as always, was not cooperating with that plan. The National Republican Senatorial Committee found the videos anyway and started releasing the contents — and what El-Sayed was saying on camera when he thought he was building an audience rather than a candidate record is genuinely revealing.
Start with the fireworks. El-Sayed produced an entire video asking Americans whether they could “PLEASE” find another way to celebrate the Fourth of July — listing four reasons why fireworks “suck,” including Detroit’s post-fireworks air quality, the chemicals involved, their effect on veterans with PTSD, and risks to children and pets.
This is the man running for U.S. Senate in Michigan, where fireworks and the Fourth of July are not controversial positions in the way El-Sayed apparently imagined them to be. He is also the man who told interviewers that Mackinac Island — one of Michigan’s most iconic destinations, site of the governor’s summer residence — is a place he has always hated and can’t figure out why he keeps having to go there. His campaign’s explanation for the fireworks video — “he celebrates the Fourth of July with fireworks like the next Michigander” — would be more persuasive if he hadn’t made an entire video about why fireworks are terrible.
The Second Amendment deletion is the more politically damaging one. In a since-removed clip, El-Sayed floated replacing the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms with a constitutional right to health care.
This deserves a moment of constitutional clarification that El-Sayed clearly never received. A “right” to health care is not a right in any meaningful constitutional sense — it is a claim against other people’s labor and resources, which the government then enforces through taxation and compulsion. The Second Amendment is a right in the actual sense: a protection against government interference with something you already possess. You cannot replace one with the other without fundamentally changing what “rights” means in the American constitutional tradition.
El-Sayed also argued in deleted videos that the southern border was not among Americans’ five biggest concerns — a position so disconnected from the polling reality of the past four years that even CNN found the deleted video controversy worth covering, noting his years as a prolific podcaster and social-media commentator had left behind an extensive record that Republicans could use to portray him as “ideologically left-wing and culturally out of step with swing-state voters.”
When CNN is writing your general election autopsy before the general election has started, you have a problem.
RealClearPolitics polling averages for the Michigan Senate race now show Republican Mike Rogers pulling ahead. The more of Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted archive surfaces, the clearer why he deleted it becomes — and the clearer why Michigan voters are making the right call.
