DETROIT — The sermon at Kingdom Covenant church seemed to find Dr. Abdul El-Sayed where he sat. Pastor David Johnson had just finished a message about withstanding challenges and remaining hopeful while trying to emerge from the “valley of the shadow of death,” the phrase from Psalm 23, when the candidate rose to speak.
“I couldn’t help but think that, as the one Muslim man who walked in this morning, you were preaching right to me,” El-Sayed told the congregation. “He said, ‘Don’t be a victim of the valley.’ And sisters and brothers, I feel like I’ve been walking in the valley — and you’ve probably been seeing it on TV.”
He had reason to feel besieged. Campaigns and outside groups have poured almost $81 million into Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, according to AdImpact — roughly 80% of it behind Rep. Haley Stevens, much of it spent telling voters who El-Sayed is before he can tell them himself.
Much of that money has flowed through the United Democracy Project, a super PAC aligned with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has spent upwards of $30 million on Stevens’ behalf. Its ads have spotlighted former President Barack Obama’s past praise of her work on his auto recovery task force — even though Obama has stayed out of the race. A more recent spot accused El-Sayed of “attacking the Obamas” and “disrespecting women.”
That attack, more than others, grated on him, El-Sayed told MS NOW.
“My story doesn’t happen without my grandmother, the smartest, wisest person I ever met. I’m married to the smartest person I know, who’s a doctor. My mom was [the] first tenured professor at her university in engineering. I’m raising two daughters that I’m raising to be stronger than any man,” El-Sayed said. “Facing these kinds of lies is hard to take.”
Before roughly 100 churchgoers, many of them hearing him in person for the first time, the progressive candidate set out to correct the record.
“You know what’s disrespectful? Lying to you and telling you that somehow a former president has endorsed a candidate he never endorsed,” he began. “You know what’s disrespectful? Talking about disrespect to women while you want to send our tax dollars to go bomb women and children somewhere else that should be used to provide healthcare and schools for women and children here.”
Where a campaign spends its final weekend says a lot about its priorities — and its anxieties. For Stevens, the closing days looked much like the past month: courting voters in Wayne County, with a particular focus on Black residents of Detroit, the country’s largest majority-Black city. For El-Sayed, it meant covering as much ground as possible in as little time — stops in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo before reaching Detroit on Sunday — to cut through a narrative delivered to voters who have been saturated with ads he could not match on the air. That has required him to outwork Stevens in person: He held nearly twice as many open-press events over the weekend as his more moderate rival.
At Kingdom Covenant, El-Sayed lingered for about 20 minutes after the service, working the room. Interviews with several of the churchgoers who met him suggested the effort was paying off.
“It sounds like he’s trying to give us more facts and information, and not just hearsay and what’s going on in social media,” said Mine Covington, 35. “I could tell that he really cares about the community and his people, and not just politics and popularity.”
“I’ve always known that they lied on him, and I’ve always known that he had our back,” said Sharron Stegal, 73. “He’s outspoken. The words that he says kind of, like, reached out to grab you. And I feel like I can trust [him], and that’s the most important.”
The pro-Stevens ads highlight her role on Obama’s auto recovery task force, but none explicitly claim he endorsed her this cycle. Still, her critics — El-Sayed among them — argue that invoking the former president’s image is misleading. Some voters who heard El-Sayed on Sunday seemed to agree.
“I did hear something being said today that she actually has not been endorsed by President Obama,” said Rose Baker, a 70-year-old Detroiter who remains undecided. “It was surprising, because that’s what the commercial appears to say.”
Jacqualine Wells, 74, of Detroit, said El-Sayed’s remarks gave her “what I needed to hear to make the right decision” — and left her resentful of ads she now considered misleading.
“You listen to people on TV, and, like, they said that he’s abused women,” Wells said. “He gave me confidence that he’s not the person that they said he was. It changed my whole perspective on him. And then with talking to him, he’s just so personable.” She said she now plans to vote for him on Tuesday.
El-Sayed’s warm reception at three predominantly Black Detroit churches on Sunday came as Stevens has been working the community just as intently. On Saturday, she launched canvasses on Detroit’s east side alongside City Councilman Scott Benson and held a meet-and-greet on Livernois Avenue, a historic Black business district on the west side.
Her supporters kept returning to a theme that underscored El-Sayed’s disadvantage: Stevens is a familiar, trusted presence, while her opponent — at least to those who know him only through a TV screen — is not.
“Every community event that we’ve been a part of over the years, she’s been there. She supports Black business owners,” said Sophia Crosby, 47. “We always see her. It’s about who we see doing the action, putting in the work. You can’t just show up at election time and expect our vote.”
And even as El-Sayed scrambled in the final days to introduce himself, the reach of Stevens’ advertising remained on full display.
“I really like her because she’s trying to do improvement[s] here in Detroit. She’s trying to help us out here,” said Odesta Tyus, 79. “We see her on TV, and how Obama was saying ‘she helped keep the auto industry here in Michigan open,’ so we saw that.”
Tyus, whose health insurance flows entirely from her late husband’s 32 years at a Chrysler plant, was asked why she had not considered El-Sayed, the former public health director. She pointed, again, to her television.
“I didn’t consider him because I had heard so much about her, and by him being a new person, I didn’t know anything about him, I hadn’t even seen him before,” she added. “I knew her because Obama, he expressed that she was a good person.”
Kayla McCormick contributed reporting.
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