ICYMI: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed Calls to Unite Against Mike Rogers at Detroit Press Conference

MICHIGAN – Today, after major outlets called the Michigan Senate primary for him, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed held a press conference with Curtis Hertrel, chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, and former candidate and State Senator, Mallory McMorrow, who was one of the first to endorse Abdul as soon as the race was called.

After defeating a record of nearly $70 million in outside spending – the most in any Senate primary in history – Abdul used the opportunity to thank his supporters and the volunteers who brought the campaign over the finish line. More than 13,000 volunteers knocked on over 200,000 doors and made over 1 million phone calls, overtaking AIPAC and corporate money with grassroots power.

With just months until the November general election, Abdul called for Democrats to unite against Mike Rogers, a career politician who, much to the detriment of Michiganders, has built his political career off of the dollars of corporate lobbyists and special interests. The matchup presents a clear choice for voters: a doctor and public health official who has never taken a dime of corporate PAC money, or a Trump acolyte who repeatedly voted to raise prescription drug prices and kickstarted the opioid crisis in America at the whim of Big Pharma. To give Michiganders the chance to see Mike for who he really is, Abdul publicly challenged him to five televised debates – a commitment Abdul looks forward to following through on.

Key excerpts from Abdul’s speech are noted below:

Abdul El-Sayed: “To everybody who put their shoulders into the work, anybody who made a contribution, who knocked on a door, who made a phone call, who put yourself into this democracy, who gave us your stake in democracy. This movement, this moment, is for you, and I just can’t say how grateful I am to have earned the votes that we got. We took on a machine. You’re not supposed to be able to beat 70 million dollars of outside spending, a record amount of money spent in a campaign against a Democrat in a primary in any campaign, you’re not supposed to be able to beat that. And what we showed is that the power of our many is greater than the power of their money. What we showed is that if you’re willing to build a movement brick by brick, if you’re willing to go and travel your state and have the conversations in rooms big and small, starting in moments when people aren’t even paying attention to an election, but are paying attention to the price of gas and the price of groceries and the price of housing and the price of healthcare. That you can build a conversation that builds into a movement that defeats Goliath…”

“…right now, as bitter and as divisive and as cynical as the campaign against us might have been, I want us to realize that there is so much more that unites us now, because the campaign that Mike Rogers and Donald Trump and their GOP MAGA allies are launching is already more bitter. All you got to do is look at the ads you’re already watching on TV… You know they think they want to use my whole name against me. Mike, listen, man, if you can’t say the name, it’s Abdulrahman, keep the name out your damn mouth. I’ll be happy to give you lessons. But they understand that the only way that they think they can win is to drag us into the mud, to believe the worst about each other, to believe that what divides us is bigger than what unites us.”

“See, Mike’s a guy who spent 14 years in Congress with one goal: to figure out how to cash out the day he left. And guess what he did? As soon as he left Congress, after having taken corporate check after corporate check after corporate check to empower the corporations to pick your pockets, he went and he cashed out. Not in Michigan. No, winters are too cold for him. He’s got thin skin after all. He went to Florida, so Mike, if you want to be a Florida man, go be a Florida man. If you want to golf in Florida, go golf in Florida. But I promise you, in November, we are going to send you back to Florida.”

You can watch the full video here. 

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