I’m volunteering with Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign and reading about this race or El-Sayed is disconcerting because how it is being portrayed is so far from reality.
It reminds me a little of when I was an Ohio delegate to the DNC in ‘08 and national political media focused almost exclusively on “PUMAS” when there about 11 of them there in Denver and no one was paying them any attention. I confronted an AP reporter about it, told her she was misleading her readers with her insane focus on the SINGLE PUMA delegate from Ohio and she got really mad at me. I make friends everywhere I go.
Despite what you may see on cable tv or social media, Abdul El-Sayed focuses mostly on health care in his campaign - understandable because he’s a physician and was the health director for Detroit and Wayne County. El-Sayed’s second focus is money in politics, but almost no one in media wants to talk about that so no one asks him about it.
There is one good interview with El-Sayed - David Remnick of the New Yorker interviewed El-Sayed for the New Yorker podcast. Remnick is smart and a good listener and possesses the background and context to do a good interview. He’s also operating in good faith - no gotchas or clever tricks to promote his own career and no conducting a cross examination. Just real questions. A cross examination is a poor way to get people to talk - it deliberately elicits yes or no answers. The saying in law is a cross is where the lawyer testifies. When you listen to an interview that is actually about the media person talking you are listening to a poor imitation of a cross examination. It’s a specific legal tool used for a specific purpose in a trial. Every dope in media wasn’t supposed to model their interviews on it.
If I had to characterize these two candidates, Stevens and El-Sayed, I would say Stevens is a government nerd and El-Sayed is a science nerd. Both of these people grew up in households with plenty of resources. Both of these people attended good public high schools - “well resourced” as they say in public school circles. Both of these people attended selective colleges. If Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed had been in high school together they would have been in the same group - the honors classes and 15 extracurriculars group.
The interview begins with Remnick describing an encounter El-Sayed had with Bill Clinton in 2007. El-Sayed was the student commencement speaker for his undergrad graduation at U of M. Bill Clinton was the commencement speaker. Clinton approached El-Sayed after the ceremony and complimented El-Sayed’s speech and asked him what he was doing next. El-Sayed told Clinton he was headed to NYC for med school. Clinton seemed surprised and told him he should consider politics.
And thus Bill Clinton is actually responsible for all of this - kidding, I’m kidding.
Anyway, listen to the podcast, it’s only 35 minutes and you’ll get a real sense of who this dude is - I think you will like him.
The campaign is in the home stretch and they’re feeling pretty good although there plenty of caveats (primary polling is notoriously bad) and no one is taking anything for granted. This morning they are tracking the youth vote using the University of Michigan’s excellent voter and elections information shop, which focuses on the youth vote and is free and publicly available.
