A 2016 video has surfaced showing Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed telling a Boston University audience he couldn’t understand why residents of Flint, Michigan, want to stay in the city.
El-Sayed, the former Detroit health director, made the comments while fielding a question about relocating Flint residents in the wake of the city’s 2014 lead-contaminated water crisis. Conservative journalist Chuck Ross first surfaced the remarks through the Washington Free Beacon.
“You talk to folks in Flint, they love Flint, right, and you’re like, ‘What the—why?'” El-Sayed told the crowd at the health policy symposium.
El-Sayed said he understood residents stay because Flint is home, and compared it to his own decision to move to Detroit after leaving Columbia University in New York. He recalled colleagues questioning that choice at the time.
“To Detroit of all places,” he said people told him. “If you’re going to Cali, I get it, but Detroit? Their winters are worse than ours. There’s nothing there.”
El-Sayed, who grew up in an affluent Detroit suburb before attending the University of Michigan, Columbia and Oxford, told the Boston audience he had “ruined” his family’s life by leaving New York for Detroit.
The remarks are resurfacing as El-Sayed has gone after Republican opponent Mike Rogers for buying a home in Florida after leaving Congress. El-Sayed’s own financial disclosure shows he and his wife own property in Dubai, as well as in India.
This isn’t the first old clip to dog the campaign. A 2020 documentary posted by Michigan outlet The Midwesterner caught El-Sayed saying, “I hate Mackinac so much,” referring to the island that hosts the governor’s summer residence. He stood by the comment after it resurfaced, pushing back on the idea that car-free Mackinac Island is “the most American place” in Michigan.
Rogers jumped on that clip on X, writing, “There’s no place like Mackinac,” with a heart emoji.
The Flint tape comes as El-Sayed heads into his first general-election debate against Rogers in a race that could decide which party controls the Senate. El-Sayed has also been struggling to lock down black voters. Flint, the birthplace of General Motors, has lost 36 percent of its population since 2000.
