Detroit Councilwoman Mary Waters put it plainly: "Some Detroiters have said, 'Listen, if Kamala Harris walked down the street holding his hand, I still would not vote for him.'"
She was talking about Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan. The day before the election.
The video making the rounds shows Black voters in Detroit reacting to El-Sayed's actual positions and record — and the reactions range from disbelief to open hostility. One voter, after hearing El-Sayed's platform, said flatly that she was switching her vote. "It's a first time thing because I've been Democrat forever," she said. "So yeah, I'm switching Republican now."
Townhall's Matt Vespa reported that the damage goes deeper than one viral clip. El-Sayed pulled just 31 percent of the Detroit vote in the primary. His opponent, Haley Stevens, beat him by 28 points in the city — a place where any Democrat running statewide needs overwhelming margins, not split decisions. El-Sayed didn't just underperform in Detroit. He got buried there.
The campaign's attempts to shore up Black support have been clumsy at best. El-Sayed's team paid $105,000 in consulting fees to a nonprofit run by Horace Sheffield, a Detroit pastor — the kind of transactional outreach that looks less like coalition-building and more like a line item. When voters are already skeptical, writing six-figure checks to community gatekeepers doesn't fix the trust problem. It confirms it.
One voter in the footage compared El-Sayed unfavorably to his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, noting that Rogers was "at least he's American" — a blunt shorthand for the cultural distance voters felt from El-Sayed's candidacy. Another put the broader frustration into words: "We cannot keep sitting here saying that we're going to vote blue no matter who, and we don't even have a seat at the table."
That second quote is the one that should worry every Democratic strategist in the country. It's not about El-Sayed specifically. It's about the transaction. Black voters in Detroit are saying, publicly, that decades of automatic loyalty have produced nothing — no seat at the table, no tangible return, just the expectation that they'll show up again.
Rep. James Clyburn was deployed to Michigan to help stop the bleeding. The fact that national Democrats had to send Clyburn — the man they credit with saving Joe Biden's 2020 primary — tells you everything about where El-Sayed's campaign stands with the voters it cannot win without.
El-Sayed already struggled with Jewish voters over his refusal to denounce an antisemitic ad. Now the Black vote in Detroit is fracturing on camera. The two constituencies a Michigan Democrat absolutely must hold are both walking away, for different reasons, at the same time.
Tomorrow Michigan votes. El-Sayed got 31 percent of Detroit in the primary. The video is still spreading.