Sixteen days before Election Day, Abdul El-Sayed is sitting at the dinette of a bus that has his face plastered all over it.

I had just played him a clip on my iPad. It was of Tashawna Gill, a Detroit organizer he knows well and who was one of his earliest supporters, describing an alarming trend in what she and her canvassers were hearing from Black voters in the city’s retirement communities.

“They’re skipping that part of the ballot,” Gill said. “We do the senior home tour, and they’re not interested. They skipped that on the ballot. They have returned their absentees, and some of them have shared that they’ve returned their absentees without checking the box for anything for the Senate race.”

In the tight space on the bus, the clip finishes, and El-Sayed says: “I hope more folks will fill out that part of the ballot. This one’s for all the marbles.”

How did it feel, I asked? Hearing that his story, his message isn’t landing with people in a community he has long served, people he needs if he wants to become Michigan’s next senator?

El-Sayed has a reputation of being pretty sure of himself. Unflappable, quick on his feet, someone who leans into the “don’t let ’em see you sweat” brand of politics.

For a second, that drops.

”Obviously, it’s heartbreaking. I’ve spent most of my career serving exactly those communities,” he says. “But I also get that campaigns are complicated.”

He blames the tens of millions of dollars in PAC money for the tepidness within the Black community toward his attempt to hold Michigan’s open Senate seat for Democrats, and for “destroying trust” he built with the Black community in his time as a public health official in Detroit.

“Rebuilding it takes a long time, so I’ve got work to do to rebuild trust, but I’ve been serving those communities for a long time,” he said. “I’m confident in the work I have done and confident in the work that I will do. And I hope I get the opportunity to do it.”

He notes that he’s not sure, either, just how widespread the sentiment Gill related is among his would-be constituents.

And just like that, the self-assuredness is back.

It’s clear, though, that he’s hurt that the work he has done in Detroit is being misconstrued or discounted, or that folks just don’t know about it. And he’s running out of time to spread the word.

Empty yards

The clip that I had El-Sayed respond to was from a walk I took with Gill on a quiet street back in Detroit.

She wanted me to see the lawns on Greenview Avenue in North Rosedale Park. It’s a neighborhood of brick houses on Detroit’s northwest side that she calls one of the most educated, highest-turnout precincts in the city. And she would know — her office is one block over.

Gill is a well-known organizer who chairs the Michigan Democratic Party’s Grassroots caucus, founded the African American Leadership Institute, helped get Gretchen Whitmer elected governor and was an early endorser of El-Sayed’s Senate campaign when most of the party establishment — including Whitmer — was behind U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens. Every day, Gill’s office sends out about 70 canvassers across Wayne County.

She knows of what she speaks, especially when it comes to Black voters.

“If you look down here, do you see any yard signs? Look left and right,” she says. I do, and it’s … empty. “It doesn’t even look like it’s an election going on anywhere,” she said.

Typically, Gill said, the streets are pretty lined with them. That they aren’t now, so close to the election, “is scary to me.”

Yard signs are not votes, but they are a sign of enthusiasm and of a campaign that is working hard to get those signs stuck in lawns.

Detroit is 75% Black, according to census data, the largest majority-Black big city in the country. And the Democratic playbook for winning statewide has not changed in a lifetime: run up the score in Wayne and Genesee counties, then hang on everywhere else.

When Detroit doesn’t turn out, Democrats lose. Two years ago, when Elissa Slotkin narrowly held Michigan’s other Senate seat, she won 86% of the Black vote compared with Republican Mike Rogers’ 12%. Recent polling shows El-Sayed hovering below 80% of the Black vote.

The concerns aren’t new. Back in the primary in August, El-Sayed eked out a 1-point win against Stevens. He won the college towns and progressive strongholds. He lost Detroit by 28 points.

El-Sayed seems well aware that the tepidness exists. The campaign says it and party entities have spent nearly $14.3 million in paid media specifically for the Detroit and Flint markets.

They’ve invited the equivalent of the Black political Avengers to endorse and campaign with him in the state, including former Vice President Kamala Harris, Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock and Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. Former President Barack Obama is stumping with El-Sayed in Detroit this weekend.

The campaign says it has been to 45 Black churches and had more than 125 meetings and roundtables with Black elected officials, faith leaders and community organizations.

It’s not something that’s been lost on his opponent either; they see an opening. The Rogers campaign opened a storefront office on Livernois Avenue in Detroit while we were there, and a group calling itself Democrats for Mike Rogers has been campaigning for him. A recent ad features Black voters saying they felt El-Sayed cared more about Palestine than Detroit.

“If you’re from Detroit, you know no Republican will be going through Detroit like they’re going through Detroit. They are in places a Republican would never be,” Gill said. “So I’m scared that a slice of that, just a little bit, will go to them.”

A Rogers campaign spokesperson touted their outreach, saying they are the first Republican to open a Detroit office, have visited a dozen Black churches and visited Flint and Pontiac “multiple times.” And multiple Democrats in Michigan have told me that Rogers is showing up in places in Detroit that haven’t seen a statewide GOP candidate in years.

Nearly every person I talked to on the ground in Detroit pointed to three reasons why El-Sayed is underperforming with Black voters.

Community conflict

The first one is uncomfortable to talk about: historic tensions between Black and Arab Michiganders. Dearborn sits right on the edge of Detroit, and today Arab Americans are estimated to make up the majority of that city’s 105,000 residents. Older Black voters know the long, violent history between the two communities. In 1980 an Iraqi immigrant store owner shot a Black customer he suspected of stealing soda. In 2023 a clerk at a gas station locked customers inside with an armed man after a card used to purchase less than $4 was declined. One of them was killed. A crash this fall reignited the fight.

Gill puts it in plain terms: “African Americans, especially seniors, feel like they were treated disrespectful, targeted, kicked out of the stores in Dearborn. So our seniors and our parents, when they see Abdul, they blame him for all of that.”

He wasn’t there, I point out. She knows that but says that trauma is unfairly being taken out on his candidacy.

Former Obama administration official Portia Roberson is CEO of Focus: HOPE, a civil rights organization in Detroit founded in 1968. She put those tensions this way:

“It has seemingly been that Arab people have been able to move to Detroit in this area and find ways to be successful, whether that is owning gas stations, whether that is owning party stores, and that Blacks who have been here have been locked out of those places,” she said.

I asked El-Sayed about the tension.

“I’ll be honest with you, I understand. I’ve worked in the city of Detroit. You walk into one of these party stores, you walk into a gas station and you’ve got somebody that looks like me behind bulletproof glass, and you look at the way that they’re treating customers. The number of times that people have been denied a bathroom or their kid gets sold a loosie cigarette out of the back or they’re catcalling a woman in the community. That’s deeply inappropriate. It’s wrong and I’ve never been one of those guys,” he said, “even if I look like one of those guys.”

While he was health director in Wayne County, he said, he led a conversation with “those guys” about why that behavior was inappropriate, adding, “You can’t just take money out and not invest in the local community. You can’t just deny local contractors opportunities to service your business and think that’s OK.”

A fateful stance

That second reason? The Uncommitted movement in 2024. In February of that year, more than 101,000 Michigan Democrats, about 13%, voted “uncommitted” in the presidential primary to protest President Joe Biden’s support of Israel’s war in Gaza. El-Sayed publicly announced that he was one of them. Nine months later, Harris lost the state as Black voters watched a party they had carried for decades fail to show up for the first Black woman at the top of the presidential ticket.

When it comes to the Black community, El-Sayed leans hard on his track record. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan’s mandate to him when he hired him back in 2015 to run a health department that had been gutted: “rebuild it.” In his first year, the department restarted lead screenings for children and helped pay for them in Detroit schools. The department also partnered with a nonprofit to offer free eye exams and glasses to thousands of students. After his failed run for governor in 2018, El-Sayed became director of Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services.

His stance on Uncommitted is overshadowing all of that.

Roberson has voted consistently her entire adult life, and that movement still stings.

“As a Black woman, I’ve never had the luxury of voting on one issue. I’ve never had that luxury. I’ve never been able to walk into a polling booth and say, this is my one issue and if it doesn’t correlate with my one issue, I’m willing to throw the rest of it away,” she said. “We knew all of the things that have now happened to us, and you still decided to be uncommitted because of your issue.”

El-Sayed endorsed Harris the day after she became the nominee; Uncommitted largely was about the primary for him. And Harris came to Detroit just last month to endorse and campaign with El-Sayed. She has gotten over his criticism of the Biden-Harris policies.

“But a lot of folks haven’t,” Roberson said, laying out the very kind of single-issue objections she had just disavowed. “And I have friends who are very politically astute, and they have said, ‘I will never forgive that.’ It got so big so quickly that they couldn’t pull it back when it was time to coalesce around Kamala Harris, and now we are here.”

At the doors Gill’s team knocks on, the version that seniors are sharing is harsher than what actually happened and full of wrong information, she said.

They tell her teams, “‘He didn’t vote for Kamala. He didn’t help her get in.’ That’s the No. 1 thing,” she said. So the message from his campaign to set the record straight “needs to be louder.”

Democrats’ dilemma

The third reason is largely ideology, and in some ways reflects the maneuvering between progressives and mainstream Democrats within the larger party. Older Black voters in Detroit are more likely to be politically moderate. El-Sayed is running on Medicare for All, and Rogers has spent the fall telling anyone who will listen that Detroit is about to elect a socialist. For the record, El-Sayed says he is a capitalist.

The campaign’s answer to older Black voters has largely been to head to the Black church, the Old Faithful of politics. His team says he has been to 45 Black churches during this election season.

Last Sunday he visited two churches in Flint. His message was, yes, political and full of references to a shared God between his Muslim and their Christian faith. But one of his biggest applause lines was his promise to be back as Sen. El-Sayed.

“This is not my first time in communities like these,” he said from the front of the stage. “I’ve been showing up to do this work for the better part of a decade, and I hope that I can show up for you in the United States Senate. If you give me that honor, I promise you this will not be the last time you see me, and the next time I come, God willing, I’m bringing resources and I’m taking your pain and your purpose with me to the halls of power.”

The bridge he’s trying to build is a difficult one. A 2024 poll from AARP found that among Black Michaganders, only 29% called themselves “liberal.”

El-Sayed’s bet is that a different Black voter can come and make up the difference. “There’s a generational divide, and even if there are some seniors who might say, ‘You know what, we’re going to leave this blank because we’ve seen all the ads,’ there are a lot of young Black voters who are like, ‘This is the first time I’ve ever voted,’” he said.

The candidate isn’t blind to the tensions. On the contrary, he seems very aware of them and how hard they may be to overcome. But he’s also running out of time.

I asked Roberson if she thinks he has done enough in the short period he has been the nominee to get the Black vote where it really needs to be.

“That’s tough. Probably not,” she said. “I think there’s more he could have done. And listen, I’m giving grace to the fact that he had a contentious primary. But I do think there were more voters out there, and there are still more voters out there that he could be talking to.”

Her larger point is that it’s less about effort and more about translation. That in a lot of his ads, his platform sound great to the voters who follow politics closely, and who maybe aren’t affected by those three points of tension.

She’s also pretty hopeful. That when Detroit’s most reliable voters wake up on Election Day, they will do what they’ve always done.

”We know what we’re going to get if he doesn’t win,” she said. “So what are we so afraid of that we’re going to get if he does win?”

Nobody on Greenview Avenue has answered that yet. The lawns are still empty.

“Detroit just needs to be waking up. It needs to be waking up because it is asleep,” Gill said. “That is my fear, that Detroit has not woken up.”

El-Sayed says he’ll keep coming back either way.

“At the end of the day, whether folks vote for me or they don’t vote for me, I intend to serve in the same way that I showed up to serve back in 2015 when I came to Detroit to rebuild the health department.”

MS NOW producer Alexander Trowbridge contributed to this report.

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