HOW DO REPUBLICANS DEAL WITH EL SAYED? On Tuesday morning, Abdul el Sayed, buddy of Hasan Piker, DSA-adjacent, and Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, stepped onto a street corner in Detroit to begin a news conference. Despite all of the controversies that rage around him at any given moment, the event started precisely where any Democratic candidate should start these days — with the cost of getting around.
El Sayed was introduced by Denzel McCampbell, the DSA-endorsed councilman from Detroit’s District 7. “Right behind us you see at this gas station that gas prices are nearing $5 per gallon,” McCampbell said. “And for Michiganders that means that we are paying an average of $74 to fill a 15-gallon tank. That’s nearly $10 more than folks were paying just a week ago.”
El Sayed picked it up from there. “This really is a crisis for Michiganders, Detroiters,” he said. “Seeing that number at the gas pump is the difference between being able to afford the groceries you’re going to buy, or not. It’s the difference between being able to pay your car note or pay your rent or not.”
The price of gas, el Sayed continued, is not the whole story. “When you see that number at the gas tank, yes, that hits you, but then the other number that we all got to pay attention to is the price of diesel. Nearly $6.81 today. That is an insane price. And you may not pump diesel, but diesel pumps you, and the way that diesel pumps you is that you’ve got to pay for the price of everything that gets shipped to the places that you buy it in. So when you look at that loaf of bread or you look at that gallon milk, that loaf of bread, that gallon milk is more expensive because of the diesel that it took to get that to you, you are now paying the price of. And that operates across our entire economy.”
And then the punch line: “So we’re getting hit at the gas pump to go buy our groceries and then we’re getting hit at the grocery store for the groceries that got there — all because of an insane war that we had no business fighting in the first place….”
It’s worthwhile to include all those quotes to make one simple point. El Sayed is a radical, as Vice President JD Vance and others say, and he has some truly terrible ideas, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong about everything. And when el Sayed leads with the cost of living, and when he blames much of it on the cost of fuel, and when he blames recent increases on the war in Iran, as he did Tuesday morning — when he does all that, he’s hitting Republicans in their weakest spot. And that is the way for a Democrat to win when voters have high economic anxiety.
By the way, el Sayed spoke on the corner at virtually the same moment as President Donald Trump made an extended defense of the war in his speech at the U.N. General Assembly in New York.
The Iranian regime was “building a vast missile and drone stockpile that threatened the security of every American service member in the region and everyone else in the region,” Trump said. “They also made a missile that was capable of hitting Europe, and they were very proud of it. I hope the Europeans realize that Iran’s goal was to complete their mad dash to a nuclear bomb from behind this conventional ballistic missile shield.”
Trump’s discussion of Iran was compelling — why didn’t he do something as organized as this when he first announced the war? — but it glossed over the terrible snags the United States has encountered in Iran. As he has many times, Trump said he believes Iran will “make a deal right after the election, because it doesn’t make sense for them not to.” On the other hand, the story of U.S. involvement in this war has been one of assumptions that did not turn out to be correct, and this might be another one.
In any event, Trump and his team are hoping such explanations, repeated enough times, will turn the tide of public opinion that is currently against the war. The latest numbers from poll aggregator Nate Silver say that about 34% support the war, while about 58% oppose it. On Trump’s handling of the war, the RealClearPolitics average of polls shows 32.6% approval and 62.5% disapproval.
Talking with Republican strategists, the great fear in the midterm elections is not that Republican and independent voters will become more opposed to the war itself — it is that they will increasingly blame it (and Trump) for higher gas prices. And that was what el Sayed was trying to do Tuesday morning at the gas station in Detroit.
So what should Republicans do about el Sayed? First, they will inundate him with negative advertising targeting his positions, record, and associates. There’s a lot to talk about, and el Sayed is very vulnerable. But Republicans also have to address the issues that he raises about the cost of living and show that 1) el Sayed does not have a plausible plan to stop the increase in the cost of living and 2) Republicans do have a good plan. So far the GOP has not done that well enough. Now, six weeks from the election, they need to raise their game, lest they spend the next six years with Sen. el Sayed.