ICYMI: Youth Voters Band Behind Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s Campaign for U.S. Senate

Mike Rogers: “Unfortunately, they are doing a good job on campuses.”

MICHIGAN –  Today, a new report from MLive highlighted the immense youth engagement and enthusiasm behind Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s bid for U.S. Senate.

Across the state, young Michiganders are mobilizing at record-levels for Abdul’s campaign to place a check on corporate power and deliver for workers over billionaires. While Rogers runs from reporters and refuses to take questions from voters, Abdul has made it a point to host countless town halls across Michigan college campuses to better understand how we can build the future our young people deserve. 

See below for key excerpts from the article:

MLive: In a tight Senate race, El-Sayed has the youth vote locked up

  • “We hosted Abdul twice last year, and you could already see that there was this influx of support for a candidate that will say things as they are and not beat around the bush,” said [Aastha Singh, president of MSU College Democrats].
  • It’s not unusual for Democrats to poll well among young voters, but El-Sayed may be overperforming.He’s been drawing crowds in the hundreds on campuses across the state since the spring, which is not par for the course among candidates for the U.S. Senate.
  • A New York Times/Siena College poll released in September found him leading his Republican opponent Mike Rogers 82% to 11% among voters between the ages of 18 and 29.
  • “Unfortunately, they are doing a good job on campuses,” Rogers acknowledged.
  • Rogers has made campus stops this year, but courting college students is less his thing. In fact, in the year he mounted his first run for the U.S. House of Representatives, he did just the opposite, sponsoring a bill in the Michigan state Senate that made it harder for college students to vote.
    • One of his former staff members and several of his colleagues in the legislature said that was the point.
    • Public Act 118 of 1999 mandated several small bureaucratic changes in the way the Secretary of State’s office would handle changes of address for driver’s licenses.
    • It also included one big change: saying for the first time that Michiganders could only register to vote at the address on their driver’s license
  • “I don’t think it’s about an aversion to Mike Rogers,” [said Matt Grossmann, an MSU political scientist]. “It’s more about disproportionate attraction to El-Sayed.”
  • “I actually believe in Abdul,” said Ellie Rice, a 20-year-old Kettering University student, as she waited in line to see him at a Sunday campaign stop in Flint. “He makes it easy, because he wants to take care of the American people, he wants to take care of Michiganders, and I’ve never felt that from any other politician in my life.”

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