As the nation prepares to mark 25 years since Sept. 11, 2001, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, may be facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack.
El-Sayed is a leader of a new crop of candidates from a wing of his party that opposed American wars and capitalized on anger over anti-Arab sentiment in a state with a robust and active Muslim community. But now he is attempting to adapt — and in some cases delete — past statements that may run afoul of a broad, general election audience.
As El-Sayed heads into the fall general election campaign against Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, El-Sayed, a former public health official, has already been forced to distance himself from the views of Hasan Piker, a popular Twitch streamer who has appeared at El-Sayed’s campaign events and who generated controversy for declaring that “America deserved 9/11” before later retracting the remark.
Meanwhile, El-Sayed’s past references to the deadly attacks have continued to surface, including two deleted social media posts verified by CBS News that have not been previously reported. In those posts, he calls for the American public to muster the same outrage for the COVID-19 death toll that they displayed after 9/11.
In one, from April 2020, El-Sayed compared the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on Sept. 11 to the mounting COVID-19 death toll and argued for a response commensurate with the nation’s post-9/11 mobilization. In another, El-Sayed wrote that because more Americans had died from COVID than in the Sept. 11 attacks, he hoped “that means we’ll spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty … like we launched a global #WaronTerror after 9/11. We could save lives rather than take them.”
“Abdul has always unequivocally condemned terrorism and the September 11 attacks,” a spokesperson for El-Sayed’s campaign said in a statement to CBS News. “Mike Rogers’ attempts to misrepresent Abdul’s beliefs are bad-faith lies meant to mislead Michiganders.”
In another deleted post, first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, El-Sayed wrote on Sept. 11, 2021: “Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith. Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country.”
For El-Sayed, the emergence of old social media posts could present a unique challenge, said Adrian Hemond, a bipartisan political consultant based in Lansing.
“El-Sayed has what I call a ‘Quacks like a duck problem,'” Hemond said. “There’s enough quacking going on, sort of directionally, that it has raised questions for a lot of people, and he hasn’t done a very good job addressing those questions.”
The coming anniversary will mark another chance for El-Sayed to navigate a uniquely sensitive chapter of American history in a way that reassures moderate voters without alienating the progressive activists who make up a significant part of his political coalition.
“I think that people underestimate how critically important the Arab vote is in Michigan,” said Kristian Ramos, a Washington-based progressive strategist.
“I think that the war in Iran and everything else has scrambled a lot of people’s perceptions on what is and isn’t acceptable in this moment,” Ramos added. “And I also think what people are missing is there’s a reason that he came out of the primary the way that he did: because he was speaking to issues that resonated with Michigan primary voters who he will need to win the general.”
The Sept. 11 attacks have largely served as a source of unity in American politics. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people, launched two decades of military conflict and reshaped everything from foreign policy to airport security. For candidates seeking statewide office, even indirect references to the attacks can invite scrutiny that references to other tragedies might not.
Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State University, said El-Sayed’s deleted social media posts are unlikely to damage his campaign on their own, but they feed a narrative pushed by his opponent that he holds fringe views.
“Is any specific tweet going to matter for the general election? It seems unlikely,” Grossmann said. “But does the general impression that he might be too extreme […] will that make a difference? That has a bigger chance of doing so.”
The more El-Sayed is questioned about his prior rhetoric, the less he will be able to wage successful attacks on his opponent, former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, said Democratic strategist and CBS News contributor Joel Payne.
“He applies a kind of non-traditional voice to some of those ideas. That allowed him to stand out. That also allowed him to demonstrate his willingness to kind of break from convention,” said Payne. “Right now, I think what that’s created for him is that [his non-conventional voice] is what people want to talk about, as opposed to him executing an economic case against Mike Rogers.”
The most acute example of this dynamic emerged when El-Sayed sought to address his association with Piker, the Twitch personality who in 2019 declared that “America deserved 9/11” before later retracting the remark. As El-Sayed campaigned alongside the streamer this spring, he was repeatedly pressed to explain the relationship. In an interview on Fox & Friends in April, El-Sayed said: “Of course I don’t think 9/11 was justified. Just because you appear with somebody doesn’t mean you agree with them on everything.”
Republicans have since sought to turn the issue into a broader test of character and judgment, arguing that El-Sayed’s continued association with Piker reflects poorly on his political instincts. His opponent, Rogers, issued a statement after El-Sayed secured the Democratic nomination that falsely attributed Piker’s comments to El-Sayed himself.
“I spent years hunting terrorists and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice,” Rogers said. “Never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11.”
Separately, El-Sayed had called the events of September 11 “craven terrorist attacks” and said they “devastated him” in his 2020 book “Healing Politics.”
More broadly, the Sept. 11 issue fits a recurring challenge for El-Sayed’s campaign. Throughout the race, he has repeatedly been pushed to explain controversial associations or comments touching on national security, foreign policy and extremism. In each case, opponents have portrayed him as outside the political mainstream, while El-Sayed has argued that critics are misrepresenting his views or taking them out of context.
The balancing act may be especially difficult in Michigan, home to one of the nation’s largest Arab American and Muslim communities. Many voters in those communities remain deeply engaged in debates about the consequences of the post-9/11 era, including the wars with Iraq and Afghanistan, and surveillance programs that targeted Muslims.
