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Why Is Nancy Pelosi Bashing Abdul El-Sayed Right Before the Election?
With just days until the midterm elections, moderate Democrats are still finding ways to undermine Michigan’s Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi criticized El-Sayed on a recent episode of the _On Brand_ podcast. Host Donny Deutsch claimed El-Sayed had made “concerning” comments opposing the existence of a Jewish state. “That’s antisemitic as far as I’m concerned,” he said.
“No, it’s more than concerning. It’s wrong,” Pelosi said. “It’s wrong, and it isn’t a reflection of the Democrats in the Congress of the United States. This new person in Michigan, we’ll see if he gets elected to the Congress.”
Since launching his campaign, El-Sayed, who is Muslim, has been bombarded by baseless claims of antisemitism. The Democrat has stated that he opposes any state’s right to be organized around an ethnic or religious group, and has been clear that his issue is with the Israeli government, not Jewish people. “An ally that takes your money to push you into wars you shouldn’t be fighting is not an ally,” he said during one interview on ABC News.
But Pelosi appeared more interested in defending Israel than a Democrat on the eve of an important election. (Her spokesperson said Friday that she was urging people to support El-Sayed.)
Representative Haley Stevens, whom El-Sayed defeated in the Democratic primary, also took an eleventh-hour shot at her party’s only hope to keep control of the state’s Senate seat. Stevens issued a statement Friday suggesting that her support for El-Sayed was contingent on whether he condemned a political advertisement that was not even produced by his campaign.
The video was made by Rebellion PAC, a left-wing fundraising group led by Cenk Uygur of _The Young Turks_ —who Stevens wants everyone to know is also “Hasan Piker’s uncle.” The video, which originally aired in February 2024, blamed the rising price of groceries on the United States’ continued support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
“Why does Mike Rogers care so much about what Israelis want, and so little about what you want?” the ad asks, claiming that pro-Israel PACs had poured $228,808 into Rogers’s campaign.
Stevens said she had agreed to appear at an event with El-Sayed and Representative Jim Clyburn, expecting that El-Sayed would formally condemn the ad. “A disclaimer is not condemnation, and everyone in my community knows the difference,” Stevens said in the statement.
But that wasn’t all she was expecting. Stevens called for El-Sayed to apologize for his own statements tying Israel to Michiganders’ affordability crisis, though it wasn’t immediately clear that he actually had made any such claims. She also asked him to take down another campaign advertisement that included a clip of Tucker Carlson, among a montage of right-wing media figures.
Again, with Stevens, we see Democrats placing continued support for Israel before the success of their own party and their own constituents. Is it any wonder that Stevens lost?
