DETROIT — To hear Abdul El-Sayed tell it, the 2024 election left Michigan Democrats with several kinds of pain.
There was the pain of a party divided over Gaza, with some voters feeling betrayed by the Democratic Party’s leadership. The pain of Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump. And the pain of the blame that followed.
With 42 days until the midterms, El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate, is enlisting Harris herself to help the party heal, or at least move on.
“I was very clear that I disagreed with my party when it came to the genocide. I was very clear that I disagreed with my party when it comes to funding a foreign military unconditionally,” El-Sayed told reporters Tuesday at a press conference.
But he acknowledged another kind of pain too.
“There was a lot of pain from folks who said, ‘Look, we should have avoided Donald Trump, we could have avoided Donald Trump. We would be in a better position on everything from gas to groceries to Gaza if Donald Trump was not the president right now,’” he said.
On Tuesday the former vice president will campaign in Michigan for the first time since her 2024 defeat. She is lending her status as one of the party’s most prominent national figures to boost El-Sayed as he works to consolidate support among Black Michiganders in the closing weeks of his Senate race.
The visit will be Harris’ second appearance in a battleground state on behalf of a midterm candidate. It’s the first of a series of scheduled fall general election campaign events by Harris. She will stump for Sen. Jon Ossoff in Georgia at the end of October and return to Nevada to campaign for Aaron Ford, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee.
Harris will first join El-Sayed for a roundtable on maternal and infant mortality. The issue disproportionately affects Black women, and she made it a feature of her 2024 platform. Afterward, she will hold a fireside chat with Black state leaders, including the Rev. Dr. Wendell Anthony, the longtime president of the Detroit branch of the NAACP.
El-Sayed has spent months courting Black voters on his own. He has made regular visits to predominantly Black churches, and last week he released a slate of policy proposals aimed at expanding access to capital for Black-owned businesses and building affordable housing in Black communities.
Still, El-Sayed and several Black Democratic leaders in Michigan told MS NOW that the clearest benefit of Harris’ visit may be its potential to ease, and perhaps repair, tensions between the state’s Black and Arab American communities. Those tensions predate 2024, they said. But they deepened after anger over U.S. military aid to Israel led many Arab American voters in Michigan to withhold their support from Harris. She lost the state to Trump, and she also lost the Arab-majority city of Dearborn.
El-Sayed and several leaders of the 2024 Uncommitted movement, including co-founder Abbas Alawieh, ultimately backed Harris. But some voters still remember their early opposition, and it has colored how they see El-Sayed. That was especially true after Rep. Haley Stevens, his rival in the Democratic primary, repeatedly highlighted his history. One ad accused him of “disrespecting women,” Harris among them.
The attack stuck. Stevens won more than 60% of Black voters in the primary, some of whom specifically cited El-Sayed’s support for the Uncommitted movement as a reason they didn’t back him.
That, El-Sayed told MS NOW, is what sets his race apart from those of other candidates the former vice president has endorsed who have sought to distance their campaigns from her, including Alaska Senate candidate Mary Peltola and Iowa’s Josh Turek, another Senate candidate.
“There were some hurt feelings about the engagement with the Arab and Muslim community around the 2024 election. Folks saying, ‘Well, if your community couldn’t stand up for Vice President Harris, why should we stand up with you?’” El-Sayed told MS NOW’s “Morning Joe.” “Even though I was on the right side of that conversation, but who better to say it than Vice President Harris.”
Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate nominee, cast El-Sayed’s decision to campaign with Harris as both desperate and contradictory, given El-Sayed’s past support for the Uncommitted movement.
“Abdul is so desperate that he’s parachuting Kamala Harris into Michigan to save his flailing campaign. Let’s not forget: Abdul led the Uncommitted Movement against Kamala Harris in 2024,” Rogers said in a statement ahead of the visit.
Harris’ supporters say her decision to campaign with El-Sayed sends a signal that could help not only him but other prominent Michigan Democrats who were sharply critical of her. Those include Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Alawieh, who is now running for the state legislature.
“She’s being a good Democrat. She has forgiven and is saying ‘it’s time to move on,’” Keith Willians, the chair of the Michigan Democratic Party Black Caucus, told MS NOW. “It can do a lot, because most Black folks didn’t vote for him.”
But some Detroit Democrats doubt that the appearance will move many voters in the country’s largest predominantly Black city, especially Black voters who have already tuned out of the race with six weeks to go.
“I find it ironic — folks getting excited about her coming in, but when she was on the ballot, they refused to vote for her,” Detroit City Councilwoman Mary Waters said. “The truth of the matter is she will be preaching to the same choir. Most of the people have checked out of the process.”
Waters knows the city’s electorate well. In addition to serving on the city council, she won the most votes among all council members when seeking re-election, a stat she touts frequently. She generally identifies as a Democrat, but she said she remains undecided in the Senate race and has met with Rogers. El-Sayed plans to meet with her on Wednesday, she said.
To some of Harris’ supporters, her return to the campaign trail in Michigan can’t be separated from her deliberations over a 2028 presidential run. Michigan was her second-narrowest battleground loss in 2024, after Wisconsin. Another bid would likely require Harris to more clearly define her position on the war in Gaza. But boosting candidates who were once among the fiercest critics of the administration she served in could broaden her appeal.
Waters sees the visit in that light, as outreach aimed more at Arab American voters than Black ones.
“It’s going to massage those relationships in the Arab community for those that didn’t vote for her before, that’s what I think,” she said. “But I don’t know if this will change anything. She still, even if she decides to run for president again, she still will not be able to deliver or commit to their demands, whatever those demands are.”
Sam Baydoun, a Lebanese American member of the Wayne County Commission, told MS NOW that he believes there’s an opening for Harris to run again and win — in Michigan. But not without addressing her 2024 policy positions.
“Especially related to the Middle East and the war in Gaza,” Baydoun said. “I’m not saying that this was the main reason, but it’s one of the reasons she lost the election.” He added, “There’s 7 million Biden voters that did not vote in 2024. It wasn’t just the Arab and Muslim community in Michigan, but she needs to form a broad coalition throughout the Democratic base.”
The post Can Kamala Harris repair Michigan’s 2024 fractures? appeared first on MS NOW.
