LANSING, Mich. - Socialist-adjacent Michigan U.S. Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed addressed the media during Saturday's state Democratic Party Nominating Convention, where he was dogged by many of the same questions that have plagued his campaign for months.
Surrounded by media in a hallway at the Lansing Center, where the convention took place, El-Sayed was peppered with questions from the press about his relationship with far-left online personality Hasan Piker, along with his stance on Israel and Gaza, which has driven a wedge between his campaign and some Democrats, especially Jewish ones.
El-Sayed, a vocal critic of Israel who describes their military actions against Hamas in Gaza as "genocide," is facing off against former Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee in the Great Lakes battleground state, for a crucial open Senate seat the Democrats must hold in the midterm elections.
"We're in the state of Michigan. If you want to make this race about a streamer in California, I just think you're missing the boat," El-Sayed told reporters. "This is about affordability in Michigan. This is about seeing a doctor in Michigan. This is about Donald Trump's disastrous policies in Michigan. That's what I'm focused on right now."
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Four different reporters asked El-Sayed about Piker, with whom he campaigned and partied during his primary race. He dodged all of them, falling back on describing the polarizing streamer as "a streamer from California" who is irrelevant to his race in Michigan.
"I am not interested in a conversation about a social media person in California. And to folks who want to make this about a social media person in California, let's not forget what actually matters in our politics, what our politics are really about," he said. "I don't ever want my comments to hurt anybody's feelings. It's important to me that people understand that I take serious the pain of all communities in this state. But I don't want to have a conversation about a Twitch streamer in California. This is not a serious conversation."
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Piker is known for saying "America deserved 9/11," praising Mao Zedong and Communist China, arguing that capitalists should be murdered in the streets and making a litany of antisemitic comments.
Fox News Digital asked El-Sayed about a recent controversy stemming from comments he made in March in response to an attack on a Michigan synagogue, when federal investigators say a gunman inspired and radicalized by Hezbollah crashed into the place of worship seeking to kill as many Jewish people as he could.
"Hurt people, hurt people," he said in response to the attack. He has been criticized by members of his own Party, including Michigan Secretary of State Dana Nessel, who discussed the comments in a recent interview with The Atlantic, and declined to attend Saturday's convention partly over concerns of anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party.
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El-Sayed told Fox News Digital his comments "might have been misconstrued to be justifying something I did not intend to justify," but then offered an apology.
"To anybody who feels like my comments may have been hurtful, I'm really sorry. That was not my intention. We condemned that terrorist attack. We condemned it outright," El-Sayed told Fox News Digital. "What I was trying to do was offer context for why it happened, but it wasn't the time for context and you don't ever want to trample somebody's pain."
El-Sayed met Saturday in Lansing with the Democratic Jewish Caucus.
"He just had a very good meeting with us," Daniel Rivkin, a convention delegate and member of the caucus, told Fox News Digital, as he referred to El-Sayed. "We're having real conversations."
But hours earlier, some Jewish leaders in Michigan went public with an open letter urging Jewish Democrats and independents in the state to sign their names in support of Rogers, who is making a second straight run for the Senate after falling just 20,000 votes short in 2024.
"Many of us have been fiercely supportive of Democratic candidates and principles. All of us have felt threatened and alienated by the politics and allies embraced by Abdul El-Sayed, which has included demonization of Jews, equivocation on terrorism, exclusion of Jewish Americans from public life, and expression of implacable hatred of the world's only Jewish nation," the letter stated.
Rogers, in a statement highlighting the letter, claimed that "Abdul El-Sayed fans the flames of antisemitism. We're fighting to extinguish it."
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El-Sayed, speaking to reporters, said his message to Jewish voters in Michigan is, "We may not agree on everything when it comes to foreign policy... I'm not going to stop fighting for Palestinian self-determination... but that does not mean that I will not stand up… for safety for all communities and I believe in the safety and dignity of Jewish kids like I believe in the safety and dignity of my own kids."
He also said it was the responsibility of the Democratic Party to come together.
Michigan Democrats swarmed the convention center Saturday afternoon, where the theme was "unity" amid the controversies faced by the state's highest-profile candidate for elected office.
Other statewide candidates took the stage to rally attendees, and presented a united front, often invoking their opposition to President Donald Trump as a point of common interest.
