Abdul El-Sayed Just Wants American Democracy to Get Swole

In another cosmic timeline, Abdul El-Sayed would put up numbers in the manosphere. He’s comically buff (Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham refers to him, disparagingly, as “gym boy”) and he’s a dexterous trash-talker. When we speak, a few days after he’s won Michigan’s Democratic nomination for US senator, I ask him to lay out his platform for the general election. Over the course of 2 minutes, he manages to mention that his opponent, Republican Mike Rogers, is “generationally corrupt and incapable” and “nothing more than a beta character and a sock puppet for the insertion of whatever hand is going to make him talk.” Currently, he’s engaged in a back-and-forth with Vice President JD Vance, with the two exchanging "evil” accusations—all while fending off volleys over his association with political streamer Hasan Piker, whose controversial soundbites continue to dog El-Sayed on the campaign trail.His actual platform can be summed up by the catchy, Mamdani-esque call-and-response slogan he deploys at rallies. Money out of? Politics! Money in your? Pockets! And Medicare for? All! Unlike the New York Mayor, El-Sayed isn’t cheesing in Suitsupply. He’s in a fitted black V-neck t-shirt that hugs his bicep pump, and he’s exuding, as his friend, the former New York congressman Jamaal Bowman puts it, “righteous indignation for justice.”El-Sayed has been critical of the Israeli government and was relentless about the record-breaking spending the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and its affiliated groups poured into backing his primary opponent Haley Stevens. Bowman has first-hand experience there: In 2024, Bowman lost his House seat in a primary race where AIPAC’s affiliated super PAC spent millions opposing him. The difference between then and now, Bowman says, is that we’re in the middle of a perfect, inescapable, geopolitical shitstorm: “It’s the atrocities that we’re seeing every day on our phones combined with the affordability crisis, combined with the history of just constant war.”Courtesy of Abdul El-Sayed; GQStill, El-Sayed won his primary by less than he was expected to—just under one percentage point compared to the double-digit lead his campaign had in polls. Even more nail-biting: Michigan is a crucial state to win if Democrats want to flip the Senate.When we speak, his detractors are focused on two things. The first is torching El-Sayed for his relationship with Piker, who endorsed the Michigander earlier this year and appeared alongside him at two campaign rallies. (Amid calls to disavow Piker, El-Sayed distanced himself from the streamer’s remarks, but maintains that the scrutiny over their friendship “is intended to confuse and distract us from the actual issue.”) The other one is emphasizing El-Sayed’s full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. “I expect there to be many attacks on Abdul El-Sayed as being un-American—they’ve already started, actually,” Bowman says. “He’s going to be attacked because he's a brown Muslim with an Arab Egyptian name.”There’s a whiff of Obama-era Islamophobia in the attacks, which El-Sayed meets with his signature trash talk (“If you don’t know how to say the name,” El-Sayed has warned, “keep the name out your damn mouth.”) Last week, CBS News took some heat for a story headline that made it sound like two deleted tweets El-Sayed had made during the pandemic included controversial remarks on the, quote, “Sept. 11 attacks.”Zohar Lazar“I love America,” he tells me, matter-of-factly. “I just love America enough to want what America gave me for all of her kids.” Looking over El-Sayed’s résumé—high school football captain, University of Michigan valedictorian, Rhodes scholar, former public health official and self-described capitalist—it’s almost funny that Republican senators have called him a “terrorist” and a “jihadist sympathizer.”In between campaign videos of El-Sayed bench-pressing in the gym, there is one of him dancing to Taylor Swift in an American-flag cowboy hat. He has challenged his opponent Mike Rogers to a game of tackle football in lieu of a debate. If he sometimes makes a slightly dickish remark—like when he said, at a 2025 campaign rally, “If they go low, we don't go high, we take them to the mud and choke them out”—well, it’s squarely within character for a consummate American jock.“I was born and raised here but for an accident of history,” El-Sayed tells me. The son of working-class Egyptian immigrants, he says that visiting relatives in Alexandria during his childhood summers gave him “a front-row seat to the difference between my opportunities and the opportunities I might have had.” Still—bringing it back to public health—he points out that the life expectancy in Pontiac, a city within the Detroit metropolitan area, is about the same as it is in Egypt.On our call, he expresses his health expertise through language that would, again, appeal to bros and bros-turned-dads. “I want the 10 million people in this state to have the good things in life. I want them to be able to breathe clean air, drink clean water. I want them to be able to afford their groceries, to be able to buy that second bag or buy that steak for a Friday-night grill.” (He added that the simple luxury of going to the zoo with his wife and two daughters recently ran him $132: “That’s insane.”)Zohar LazarWhen I ask if he thinks Democrats have been dismissive of pertinent issues around men’s health, El-Sayed agrees. “It is ironic that you’ve got somebody like Pete Hegseth or RFK Jr. who thinks that the answer to masculinity is some kind of medicine. In a lot of ways, we've got a responsibility to push back on their idea of this fragile kind of masculinity that is about what you look like rather than how you show up,” he says. “You can bench-press 350 and also joke around with your friends and dance and laugh and cry.” He’s harsh on Congress for not doing more to industries that “game men's dopamine in ways that pick their pockets,” namely: sports-betting, pornography, and cannabis marketing.And he compares his vision for the country to—what else?—getting swole.“You look at your current state and say, ‘I can be better and I’m going to do the work of getting better. I’m going to commit myself to the discipline of getting better. I’m going to forego the easy way out, and I’m going to do the hard thing, because at the back end of doing the hard thing, I can be better,’” El-Sayed says. “That’s America. And Donald Trump’s version of America is as flabby as he is.” ★