Democrat US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed speaks during a rally at the McMorran Theater in Port Huron, Michigan on October 6, 2026.Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty
When Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign announced that Barack Obama would join him on the campaign trail later this month, media outlets and prominent online voices quickly sounded the alarm—the Michigan Senate candidate, it turned out, had voiced strong criticisms of the former president.
On Wednesday, CNN traced El-Sayed’s comments from the time of Obama’s 2012 reelection through the 2020 presidential campaign, zeroing in on a 2012 HuffPost piece where El-Sayed wrote that the former president did not deliver on the promise of “hope and substantial change” during his first term but instead “perpetuated war, violated our civil liberties, deported more people from our shores than any other president before him.” “The list of his failures,” El-Sayed wrote, “goes on.”
It’s not that people are calling El-Sayed’s criticisms wrong. They’re pointing out that they exist.
In a statement to CNN, El-Sayed praised Obama: “He changed what was possible for someone like me, with a name like mine.”
“Despite all he did, there remains so much left to do,” he added. “That’s where the next generation, inspired by him and his leadership, picks up.”
The New York Post extended the supposed concerns to other Democrats, pointing again to El-Sayed campaigning with former Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday, despite El-Sayed publicly endorsing the Uncommitted movement in 2024, supporting calls for Democrats to withhold their primary votes from Joe Biden in protest of US military aid to Israel in its ongoing genocide in Gaza. While the movement declined to endorse Harris ahead of the national election—instead urging supporters to “vote against” Trump—El-Sayed actually did endorse her, in a marked break.
El-Sayed, the implication runs, is not such a good friend to his fellow Democrats after all. But intense critiques of Obama are something he has in common with both wings of his party. Countless Democrats and progressives have previously criticized Obama, in private and in public, from the former president’s left and right flanks, and supported him afterward (or, for some of those who actually held national office at the time, during). In party politics, done right, political alliances cut across ideological and policy disagreements. That’s just strategic campaigning—which Obama still plans to do alongside El-Sayed in October.
