A 2016 video shows Michigan’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate saying the opposite of what his campaign has told voters about him.
Story Highlights
- A 2016 video shows El‑Sayed telling a Detroit audience he carries dual citizenship, which means being a citizen of two countries at once. The second country is Egypt.
- In January his campaign said he was never a dual citizen and called an earlier résumé entry an error.
- Michigan Democrats who say they cannot support him gave his record on Israel and the Jewish community as their reason.
- Lansing Mayor Andy Schor, a Democrat, said he will not vote for El‑Sayed until the two of them talk.
“I carry dual citizenship, and I grew up spending most of my summers in another country where I understood what it meant not to have the right to self‑govern.” Abdul El‑Sayed said that on camera in 2016. He is now the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, and his campaign has said he “is not a dual citizen by any verifiable metric and never has been.”
Both statements cannot be right, and the campaign has declined to answer questions about the video. It came out as El‑Sayed was losing ground with voters in his own party for a separate reason. On Tuesday, October 6, Michigan Democrats said on a cable news program that they cannot back him, and the mayor of Lansing said he is holding back his vote.
The Room and the Words
El‑Sayed was Detroit’s health director when he spoke at a 2016 conference of GlobeMed, a student group that works on health in poor countries. He was talking about his own life. He told the audience he held citizenship in two countries and spent childhood summers in the other one. He also described being questioned by Egyptian police after speaking against Hosni Mubarak, who was Egypt’s president at the time.
Fact: Abdul El-Sayed wrote his dual citizenship on a resume AND said it proudly in a speech. https://t.co/yHNzcj91Vv pic.twitter.com/3DgIBgtT0m
— CommunityNotesFTW (@CNsFTW) October 7, 2026
The video was published on Monday, October 5. El‑Sayed, a doctor, was born in Michigan in 1984. His parents came to the state from Egypt in 1978.
What the Campaign Had Already Said
This is the second record to say the same thing. A résumé El‑Sayed posted in 2014, around the time he became a professor at Columbia University, listed him as a citizen of the United States and Egypt. When that surfaced in January, campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner gave the flat denial quoted above.
Richner said El‑Sayed had been told as a child that his grandfather sought Egyptian citizenship for him, and that the family later could not find papers to show it. The campaign called the résumé line a mistake. It has not said the same about the speech, and it has not said he is a dual citizen. It has not released records from either government.
The Democrats Who Say They Cannot Back Him
The voters in the Tuesday segment were described on air as committed Democrats who want to vote for their party’s candidate. Their objection was not the video. It was El‑Sayed’s record on Israel and the Jewish community. One said she “would love for him to make a definitive statement” and wanted to hear him say he supports Israel and the Jewish people. Asked whether the group would believe him, another answered, “How could we?”
Schor leads Michigan’s capital city. He said he will not vote for El‑Sayed until they have a conversation, and that the conversation has not taken place. “If he doesn’t need me, he doesn’t need me,” Schor said.
What the Law Says, and What It Leaves to Voters
No law keeps a dual citizen out of the Senate. The Constitution asks three things of a senator: that he be at least 30 years old, a U.S. citizen for nine years, and a resident of the state he serves. El‑Sayed, born in Michigan, meets all three either way.
So the matter is one of trust. A candidate said one thing about himself to a room in 2016, and his campaign said the opposite ten years later. El‑Sayed faces Republican Mike Rogers, a former congressman who lost his last Senate race by fewer than 20,000 votes. Election Day is Tuesday, November 3. Michigan voters have the tape, the denial, and the words of Democrats in their own state, and they can weigh all three for themselves.
Sources:
townhall.com, freebeacon.com, dailywire.com, breitbart.com
