This candidate for governor wants to be middle finger to Donald Trump

LANSING — For Abdul El-Sayed, the race for governor is all about changing the national political conversation.

After Michigan turned from blue to red in 2016, narrowly electing the unconventional and controversial Donald Trump as president — the first Republican since 1988 — El-Sayed wants the rest of the nation to know that the “America First,” nationalist agenda espoused by Trump is not what Michigan stands for.

“If I win this primary, I want you to think about what happens to this race,” he told a Democratic audience in Sterling Heights last month. “This race goes from being a sleepy Midwestern governor’s race to being one of the most important races in defining this moment of the electorate in 2018. That means national coverage, national fund-raising and the optics of this race go sky high.

“A lot of people want to send a message to Donald Trump. I’m like a 215-pound middle finger to Donald Trump.”

That’s because El-Sayed is a very different candidate than most. He tells almost every audience on the campaign trail that friends tell him, “You’re a little too young (he’s 33), you’re a little too brown and you’re a little too Muslim” to win a race for governor.

But this Muslim American thinks  he represents a winning combination that will lead him to the state’s top job.

Growing up in an unusual mix of cultures

Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed was born on Halloween in 1984 to Egyptian immigrants who came to Michigan for opportunities that weren’t available in Egypt. His father is an engineer and professor at Eastern Michigan University, his mother a nurse practitioner. The couple split and El-Sayed mostly stayed in Michigan with his father and stepmother, a professor at Marygrove College who grew up in a Protestant household in mid-Michigan’s Gratiot County.

It was an unusual mix of cultures for El-Sayed, especially on holidays when both sides of the extended family —parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and siblings — would get together for annual feasts.

“I’m running in part because I was really lucky to experience the kind of diversity in our state and in our home. I was raised by my father, an immigrant from Egypt whose parents had a vegetable stand, and a stepmom who was born and raised in Gratiot County and whose family has been in this country for generations,” he said. “I watched them make a home for themselves. And I watched as my family would come together every Thanksgiving — you’d have an imam and a deacon and an avowed atheist (a reference to an uncle) come together because they had a shared sense of the future, which was their kids.”

El-Sayed had a comfortable childhood, spending summers either in Alexandria, Egypt, at his stepmother’s family cottage in Montcalm County or with his mother in Missouri. Between the National Honor Society, lacrosse and football games, where he was the co-captain of the team at Andover High School in Bloomfield Hills, and jobs as a bag boy at a local grocery story or fixing grinders at a local Bellacino’s Pizza, El-Sayed got the grades that allowed him to attend the University of Michigan, where he received bachelor’s degrees in political science and biology.

Students, staff and faculty at U-M took notice of his accomplishments: an honors student every semester; a varsity lacrosse team player; the vice president of the Muslim Student Association; a medical clinic volunteer and a science tutor. They selected him to address the student body at the 2007 commencement ceremony.

“The Michigan difference is us, the students. It’s in the diversity of names, faces, stories and experiences with which we decorate this place. It’s the care we’ve shown, the people we’ve helped and the passion we have that defines us,” he told the graduating seniors. “We’re about to go into a world that absolutely needs us. It needs to hear our stories spoken loudly.”

Former President Bill Clinton, the U-M commencement speaker that year, also took notice.

“I don’t want to embarrass your senior speaker. But I wish every person in the world who believes we’re fated to have a clash of civilizations and can’t reach across the religious divide could have heard you speak today,” he said. “I just wish every person in the world could have heard you speak today.”

Now, El-Sayed wants Michigan’s 9.9 million residents to hear his voice.

The path to public service

El-Sayed spent two more years at U-M’s medical school, where he met his wife, Sarah, and they got married before he won a coveted Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University in England. There he earned a doctorate in public health. He then attended Columbia University in New York for his medical degree and became a professor of epidemiology. Sarah is now a psychiatric resident at U-M.

But when it came time to do his residency and become a practicing physician, El-Sayed decided to take a different path.

“I came to appreciate the structure of health care is so broken that, as a doctor, it’s hard to fixate on solutions to the problem,” he said. “So I decided not to do a residency and took a risk by dedicating my life to public health.”

Two years in academia, teaching public health at Columbia, however, was enough. He said his research papers were being read by fewer and fewer people, so he decided to jump into public service. A two-hour job interview with Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan about running the city’s nearly nonexistent health department formed the next chapter of El-Sayed’s narrative in 2015.

“For the first time, it felt like the work we were doing was having a real impact,” he said.

The city’s health department was in a transition back to city control after the department was dismantled in 2012 amid cost-cutting and impending bankruptcy. The city had transferred most of the health services to an independent nonprofit agency, but under El-Sayed, the department grew from five city employees to 200.

More:14 candidates aiming to replace Rick Snyder as Michigan governor

More:Bitter talk between Mich. gov. hopefuls tackles sharia law, terrorism

He was able to rebuild the city’s Animal Control Department, give glasses to needy Detroit children, reinvigorate maternal and infant health care programs, test the city’s schools for lead in the water and get more emission controls on industrial polluters in Detroit.

And although he left the city after only 18 months to run for governor, he hoped and expected to get the endorsement of Duggan.

But that was not to come, especially after El-Sayed started harshly criticizing Duggan,  his first boss in public service, this year for several of the programs in the city.

He told one crowd in Bloomfield Hills, “Some people wonder if the mayor of Detroit is Mike Duggan or Dan Gilbert,” a reference to the founder of Quicken Loans and a major investor in the city. At another campaign event in Detroit and on a radio program, he accused Duggan of poisoning children because of the demolition of homes in the city that released lead contamination.

He also has been sharply critical of the city’s water shutoff program, which stopped water services for city residents with delinquent bills, and the tax incentives that have been given to businesses that decide to locate in the city.

Yet when El-Sayed had the chance to speak out as health department director against the programs he now criticizes, he didn’t do it, according to e-mails obtained by the Free Press.

In one e-mail about the demolition program, he wrote, “From our colleague at U-M: They haven’t seen increases in lead deposition into soil following demos — which is a huge win.” In another, he wrote building department authorities, “Thank you for making health a priority in this process.”

El-Sayed says the e-mails don’t tell the whole story: “I don’t know that the e-mails reflect the full course of what actually is said in rooms and conversations.”

Duggan called El-Sayed “a remarkably accomplished and talented public health administrator” when he started his job at the health department in 2015. On Wednesday, his office said, "We aren't going to dignify these ridiculous comments from Dr. El-Sayed with a response," said John Roach, spokesman for Duggan.

Instead, Duggan endorsed former Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer for governor in February, saying he didn’t intend to speak out against any of the other  Democratic candidates, but rather for “this outstanding candidate."

Taking on the progressive mantle

There was never a hint that El-Sayed had political ambitions before he jumped into the governor's race last year.

His contributions to political campaigns are virtuallly nonexistent and his voting record in Michigan is spotty, mostly because of his time away in New York. Several people even challenged his eligibility to run for office because he didn't begin voting again in Michigan until the 2016 presidential election.

Michigan law requires that a person running for governor has to be a registered voter in the state for the four years prior to the election. While El-Sayed's Michigan voter registration was on a challenged status while he was in New York, he never officially lost his Michigan voter's registration.

After the Secretary of State cleared up that issue last week, El-Sayed declared at a candidate forum in East Lansing, "I am an eligible candidate for governor."

He said he decided to run after seeing the devastation to families as a result of the Flint water crisis, which happened when the city, which was under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager, decided to switch the city's water source to save money. But the water was improperly treated and allowed lead to leach into thousands of homes and businesses in Flint.

"I know my skill set in an operational role," he said. "I looked at the Flint water crisis and I looked at the people lining up to run and they didn’t have the operational experience or value set I have and decided I could do the job better."

El-Sayed has taken on the progressive mantle of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, who lost the presidential primary to Hillary Clinton in 2016, but still has a huge swath of mostly young, wildly enthusiastic supporters.

So El-Sayed talks repeatedly on the campaign trail about two key issues that are essential for progressives: health care coverage for all and getting corporate money out of politics. He reminds voters that he is forgoing campaign donations from political action committees while his opponent Shri Thanedar is trying to buy the election by pumping $6 million of his own money into the race  and Whitmer is freely taking PAC donations.

All of the ills facing the state can be traced back to big business and corporate money in politics, he said, and most politicians are bought and sold by special interests. The issue is his North Star.

"We have assumed in Michigan that the only way you build jobs is to incentivize corporations to bring their jobs here," he said. "But those subsidies have gone into big corporations and in this climate, they’re looking for opportunities to decrease labor costs and that means cutting jobs. Corporations buy and sell politicians, who then make decisions to help them automate jobs and it's killing our economy over the long term."

He doesn't mention that political action committee donations are legal and a standard fuel for most campaigns. And a voter at the Sterling Heights forum objected, asking "Why do think corporations are so bad?"

"They’re not bad, but they always optimize their financial position," El-Sayed replied. "A company that is not owned by an individual or group, but by stockholders, who don’t have allegiance to any one place, so they make decisions to optimize that quarterly bottom line. It’s the stock price that drives everything. It was never meant to be that corporations dictate what happens in our politics."

Those issues are what drove Kelly Collison of Lansing to El-Sayed's campaign last year.

"He’s the only one who is really pushing for the things I believe are the most important issues, getting money out of politics and fighting for single-payer health care," she said.

State Sen. Nina Turner, an Ohio Democrat and president of the liberal activist group Our Revolution, which was born out of the Sanders movement, came to Detroit earlier this month to sing El-Sayed's praises.

"The fact that he recognizes his privilege, the fact that he is willing to use his degrees and gift to shake things up and make this state a better place … those are the kind of leaders that we need," she said. "He doesn’t have to walk around and say he’s a real progressive. He is the progressive. This is not about spending $6 million of your own dollars to buy an election. This is about earning the office."

Looking to connect with mainstream Dems

Despite the enthusiasm for El-Sayed from the left, he hasn't gained traction with mainstream Democrats and has been mired in third place in the polls behind Whitmer and Thanedar for most of the past year.

And he has run into other problems as well.

State Sen. Patrick Colbeck, a Republican candidate for governor, who is as conservative as El-Sayed is liberal, has stirred up a controversy, claiming, without proof, that El-Sayed is part of a Muslim plot to take on positions of influence in America and start a “civilization jihad," a right wing conspiracy theory that Muslims will take over the political reins of the country and institute sharia law in the U.S.

When the issue came up in an East Lansing debate last week, El-Sayed angrily responded to Colbeck's latest diatribe with: "You may not hate Muslims, but Muslims hate you." He has since apologized for the outburst and said he's not going to respond anymore to the claims.

"I’m a lot more interested in making sure this is the type of state where everybody gets to live the life with which they choose, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, independent of how they pray or the color of their skin," he said. "We’re starting to call certain people more American than others and that’s really dangerous."

When the taunts and the frequent death threats start to wear him down, El-Sayed says all he has to do is walk into the Shelby Township home he shares with his wife, her parents and their newborn daughter, Emmalee, which means My Hope in Arabic.

"She does two things for me: her smile can take away all the stress and she is a reminder every day of what I’m working for is the world I want her to grow up in —  is a world that should not matter who she is. I can’t express that to a little kid, but some day, I hope to tell her how much she meant to me in a moment that was really hard."

Contact Kathleen Gray: 313-223-4430, kgray99@freepress.com or on Twitter @michpoligal.

Abdul El-Sayed on the issues

Roads: Create a state “infrastructure bank,” where state dollars can only be used for infrastructure projects such as roads and water pipes. The bank would be fueled by a shift of money that is now given to corporations in tax incentives, tax revenues from the sale of medical marijuana and a shift to a graduated income tax from a flat income tax rate that would require a change in the state’s constitution. The infrastructure bank would also be used to provide free water to all Michiganders for basic needs, such as bathing, drinking, cooking and cleaning, with a surtax on people who use more water above and beyond the basic needs.

Auto insurance: Remove health insurance coverage, through the state’s catastrophic fund that pays lifetime benefits to people critically injured in car crashes, from auto insurance and require that only driving-related issues, instead of credit scores and ZIP codes, be used when figuring insurance rates.

School safety: Push for tougher gun laws, including universal background checks on gun purchases and a ban on assault-style weapons. Don’t allow guns in schools, but add money for mental health services and counselors.

Pension tax: Think holistically about how much of the tax can be rolled back to make sure other state services can still be addressed and “where there are opportunities to repeal the tax, I want to do that.”

Legalized marijuana: Supports legalization for adult recreational use.

Medicaid: Supports Medicaid health care coverage for all and opposes legislation that would require most Medicaid recipients to work.