So, a Huge Piece of a Michigan Dem's Senate Campaign Just Got Blown Up

Abdul El-Sayed is the frontrunner for Abdul El-Sayed, which is scheduled for August. He has gained notoriety—mostly negative—as he aligns himself with radical left-wing and potentially antisemitic factions within the Democratic Party. Some also accuse him of being a terrorist sympathizer, hanging out with figures like Hasan Piker, but we’re not going to focus on that low-hanging fruit today.

El-Sayed claims he’s a medical doctor, but Politico, of all outlets, published a damaging piece exposing the far-left Democrat as having an inconsistent history in that regard, making it hard to determine if he’s even treated patients. Does he have fake credentials? No, but Mr. El-Sayed, at the very least, has not been completely transparent about a key part of his campaign. He may have the credentials and education of a medical professional, but he’s like Dr. Green from ER (via Politico) [emphasis mine]:

Politico: Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed for years has publicly said he’s a physician — but there’s overwhelming evidence that he’s had no experience as a licensed medical doctor.https://t.co/5tqtTqtdy5
— Politics & Poll Tracker 📡 (@PollTracker2024) May 12, 2026

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed for years has publicly said he’s a physician — but there’s overwhelming evidence that he’s had no experience as a licensed medical doctor.
This April, he gave an interview to a local TV journalist where he talked up his credentials as a physician multiple times. In March, he told a group of Teamsters nurses that he had “been in enough codes to watch who really does the work” and said that same month on a podcast that “I’ve been a doctor my whole career.”
His LinkedIn profile currently says he’s a “physician,” and late last month he called himself “a physician and epidemiologist” at a Council of Baptist Pastors debate in Detroit.
But according to a review of Michigan and New York state medical records, he’s never been granted a medical license in those states. El-Sayed’s hands-on experience treating patients appears to be a short clinical rotation called a sub-internship at a small hospital in Manhattan for four weeks at the end of medical school, he told a podcast in 2022, where he said his “job was to be the, like, worst doctor on the team” and he was “cosplaying a doctor.”
“The perception in Michigan is that he is, at least at one point in his life, a licensed physician,” said Chris Dewitt, an unaligned Democratic strategist based in Michigan. “That apparently is not the case, and it blows up a big part of his campaign.”
[…]
…his history of suggesting to voters that he served as a practicing physician — with examples stretching back almost a decade — has muddled his personal history, adding confusion to his otherwise impressive achievements. In 2018, when El-Sayed was running for governor of Michigan, Crain’s Detroit Business published a story that also examined his claims of being a physician but not having a license to practice medicine in Michigan.
“I think there’s a lot of ways that one serves as a physician. And I think the work that I have done and I continue to do is true to the core and the ethos of medicine,” El-Sayed told Crain’s Detroit Business at the time. “And when I took my Hippocratic Oath, that is still an oath that I use to guide my work today. I’m a physician because I have an MD, but I’m also a physician because of the work that I’ve dedicated my career to.”
Yet El-Sayed has made his medical credentials a key part of his appeal on this campaign, often highlighting his background in medicine and as a physician — or not correcting people when they mention it. When Sen. Bernie Sanders appeared with El-Sayed last year at a Medicare town hall, the Vermont independent stopped to remind the livestreamed audience why he was backing El-Sayed: “there are no people in the Democratic caucus who are physicians,” he said. Abdul sat silently by and didn’t correct him.