Obama to attend Abdul El-Sayed rally in crucial Michigan Senate race | Democrats

Barack Obama will travel to Detroit this month to rally with Abdul El-Sayed, a show of establishment support for a progressive insurgent from Michigan in one of the nation’s most important Senate races.

The former US president will appear with El-Sayed and gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson on October 24, the state Democratic Party announced Monday. The rally takes place on the first day of the in-person early voting period and 10 days before Election Day.

“Get ready,” El-Sayed wrote on social media confirming his appearance.

The event is an important endorsement for a candidate who survived tens of millions of dollars in an out-of-state advertising blitz to beat Rep. Haley Stevens by less than a percentage point in August, making the race a national proxy battle for party leadership.

El-Sayed, a physician and former Wayne County health director, ran on Medicare for All and refusing to take money from Pac companies, and was supported by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He has placed opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel and criticism of its conduct in Gaza at the heart of his campaign, and has called Israel’s actions there genocide.

As a result, AIPAC and its allies spent a record $30 million trying to stop him, and in total, Stevens and his allies spent nearly nine times more than El-Sayed’s team on advertising, according to AdImpact.

Stevens, a moderate, was supported by Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, outgoing Sen. Gary Peters and the party establishment.

Obama’s presence matters most in Detroit, where black residents make up more than three-quarters of the population and where he is still very popular. Stevens won Wayne County, which includes the city, with about 51 percent of the Democratic primary vote, compared to El-Sayed’s 45 percent. Some ads supporting her used old footage of Obama praising her, which critics called misleading because he did not support the race.

Kamala Harris, the first Black and South Asian vice president, campaigned with El-Sayed last month, and Obama called her after the primaries.

El-Sayed is running for the seat vacated by incumbent Democrat Peters, against former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, and this election is one of few that will determine control of the Senate next year. Rogers was the Republican nominee in 2024 and lost that race to Elissa Slotkin, despite Donald Trump winning the state. A Marist poll conducted at the end of September among registered voters gave El-Sayed a lead of 51% to 44%.

Yet El-Sayed, who has renounced corporate donations and made his opposition to big money in politics a theme of his campaign, traveled to New York for a fundraiser at which top “all-star” donors were invited to give $57,800, split between his campaign, the Michigan Democratic Party and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, attended by Ocasio-Cortez and the city’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, reported the New York Times.

Obama has kept a relatively low profile this cycle, but is preparing broader action. He has recorded about two dozen ads for Democratic candidates for governor and senator, which will be released in the coming weeks, with more stops to be announced.

Earlier this year, he campaigned in Texas with Senate candidate James Talarico and gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa, and was featured in an ad for Josh Turek, the Iowa Senate candidate. This week, he will headline a fundraiser in Washington for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, his first with the group this cycle.