Democratic Senate candidate can't hide from 'defund the police' comments, no matter how hard he tries

Another Democrat has tried and failed to distance himself from previous statements against law enforcement.

Abdul El-Sayed, the 41-year-old Islamic leftist who ran an unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign in 2018 then served two years later on former President Joe Biden's Unity Task Force for Healthcare, is running as a Democrat to represent Michigan in the U.S. Senate.

'I didn't want them to be taken out of context like this.'

Enjoying the help of the Democratic Socialists of America and endorsements from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), El-Sayed — the son of an Egyptian immigrant — has led establishment Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens by several points in recent polls ahead of the Michigan Democratic primary on Aug. 4.

Since launching his Senate campaign in April 2025, El-Sayed has attempted to downplay some of his anti-police rhetoric and gaslight about what he had said previously, telling the Detroit News in an interview published mid-November, "I want to be clear, I actually never, never called for defunding."

Of course, that wasn't anywhere close to being true.

Among the thousands of tweets he deleted before launching his campaign was a tweet where El-Sayed stated in June 2020, "Most major US cities spend WAY TOO MUCH on police departments to police poverty & WAY TOO LITTLE on public schools, health departments, recreation departments, & housing to eliminate poverty. Fixing that is what the #Defund movement is about."

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Photo by Sarah Rice/Getty Images

Per the Detroit News, another said, "#GeorgeFloyd and hundreds of other Black folks are murdered because our police departments are OVERfunded. #COVID19 devastated us, in part, because our health departments are UNDERfunded. There’s an obvious answer: take from one and give to the other."

El-Sayed explicitly called for the defunding of police in multiple interviews reviewed by CNN's KFile.

For instance, according to KFile, he told Detroit Public Radio in June 2020, "I believe that we do need to defund the police insofar as defunding the police is disinvesting in the means of incarcerating someone or killing them on the streets."

In a 2020 WDET-FM interview, the Democratic candidate emphasized the need to spell out what was meant by the hashtag, stating, "Defunding the police is disinvesting in the means of incarcerating someone or killing them on the streets and investing more in the means of educating and empowering and engaging communities with the means of being able to take on systemic poverty that we’ve allowed to fester in too many communities."

"I want a re-fund on the taxpayer dollars that I pay to police who use that to buy war materiel to wage war in our streets. And I want to re-fund public health and public libraries and public schools and the means of uprooting poverty," added El-Sayed.

Confronted with the mountain of evidence demonstrating El-Sayed had in fact called for the defunding of American police, a spokeswoman for El-Sayed's campaign, Roxie Richner, told CNN, "His perspective has become more nuanced."

"One simple word has never been enough to fully explain the reforms we need for a challenge as complex as our criminal legal system," said Richner.

When asked repeatedly by CNN talking head Kasie Hunt last week whether he still supported defunding the police, El-Sayed weaseled out of directly answering the question, suggesting that he deleted his old defund-the-police tweets "because I didn't want them to be taken out of context like this so that you could distract from the actual conversation that Michiganders really want to have about what they want their leadership to actually fight for them to do."

Rather than focusing on funding or defunding American law enforcement, El-Sayed apparently tried instead to make spending and support for Israel a top topic in Tuesday's Democratic debate against Rep. Stevens, stressing that "if Congresswoman Stevens makes it or [Republican candidate] Mike Rogers wins, either way, Israel will win."

"AIPAC is perfectly fine with either of my two opponents, because they know that they will have a comfortable, reliable vote in the U.S.A.," added El-Sayed.

El-Sayed also argued with Stevens — who has received a small fortune from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee via United Democracy Project, according to FEC filings — about the conflict in Gaza.

"I also believe that your money needs to be spent here, because at the end of the day, the ultimate losers are you and me, the taxpayers who paid that money to provide good infrastructure, build schools, provide health care for our own kids," said El-Sayed. "Not to watch it get sent to buy bombs and tanks that end up annihilating other people and their children."

Following the debate, the Michigan GOP slammed El-Sayed for his radical record. In a statement given to Blaze News, Michigan GOP senior communications advisor Greg Manz said:

Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, a terrorist sympathizer and phony physician, is the face of the far-left takeover of the Democrat Party. He embraces a radical, Marxist agenda that includes Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and calls to irresponsibly defund the police.

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