Abdul El-Sayed told Michigan voters he "never, never called for defunding" the police. But audio from a June 2020 radio interview tells a different story, and so do his own deleted social media posts.
The Michigan Democratic Senate candidate is now facing a credibility problem built entirely from his own recorded statements. In a newly surfaced review of El-Sayed's 2020 media appearances, the candidate can be heard on Detroit public radio station WDET describing exactly what "defund the police" means, and endorsing it in detail, while carefully avoiding the slogan itself.
His campaign has since acknowledged that his views have changed. But the gap between what El-Sayed said in 2020 and what he told the Detroit News in November 2025 is not a matter of evolving policy nuance. It is a flat contradiction, preserved in audio and archived posts, now landing in the middle of a competitive Senate primary.
On June 23, 2020, weeks after the death of George Floyd, as the "defund the police" movement gained momentum, El-Sayed sat for an interview with WDET. He laid out his position with precision:
"Defunding the police is disinvesting in the means of incarcerating someone or killing them on the streets and investing more in the means of educating and empowering and engaging communities with the means of being able to take on systemic poverty that we've allowed to fester in too many communities."
That is not ambiguous. El-Sayed defined defunding the police, used the exact phrase, and endorsed the concept, all in a single sentence.
He went further in the same interview, explaining his rhetorical strategy. He acknowledged he had deliberately avoided the hashtag while describing the same policy goal:
"You'll note, I didn't say 'defund the police,' I just described what needed to be done. And I do think we need to be really focused on describing or explaining rather than sort of hedging on one side or the other behind a hashtag."
In other words, El-Sayed understood in 2020 that the slogan was politically toxic. He chose to sell the same policy under different packaging. That is not a man who was misquoted or taken out of context. That is a man who knew exactly what he was saying and how he wanted to say it.
The Washington Examiner reported that a CNN KFile review found multiple media appearances from 2020 in which El-Sayed defended defunding police, with the candidate stating plainly on Detroit Public Radio: "I believe that we do need to defund the police." That quote removes any remaining ambiguity about where he stood.
El-Sayed's social media trail from June 2020 reinforces the audio record, or it did, before he scrubbed it. Archived versions of his deleted tweets show him writing on June 8, 2020:
"Most major US cities spend WAY TOO MUCH on police departments to police poverty & WAY TOO LITTLE on public schools, health departments, recreation departments, & housing to eliminate poverty. Fixing that is what the #Defund movement is about."
Five days earlier, on June 3, 2020, he posted an even more incendiary claim: "The police have become standing armies we deploy against our own people."
Both posts have since been deleted. El-Sayed has declined to explain why. Fox News reported that El-Sayed also accused Michigan police of racial profiling during a 2018 Harvard speech while running for governor, telling the audience that "the cops will pick on you because you look a particular kind of way." The pattern of anti-police rhetoric stretches back years, and the pattern of deleting that rhetoric appears to track neatly with his Senate ambitions.
By November 2025, El-Sayed had a different message. In an interview with the Detroit News, he offered a denial that now reads as plainly misleading:
"I want to be clear, I actually never, never called for defunding. My goal in that conversation was to help everybody to understand what we were talking about."
Set that statement next to the WDET audio. In 2020, he said defunding the police meant "disinvesting in the means of incarcerating someone or killing them on the streets." In 2025, he said he "never, never called for defunding." Both statements are on the record. They cannot both be true.
El-Sayed has also argued that his old social media posts were "misrepresented after being taken out of context." But the archived tweets are complete sentences expressing complete thoughts. The hashtag #Defund appears in his own text. The context is the post itself.
When pressed on the issue as recently as last week, El-Sayed would not give a yes-or-no answer on whether he still supports defunding police. Instead, he pointed to his record running Wayne County's health and veterans department. That is not an answer. It is a redirect, and voters in Michigan deserve to know the difference.
This matters because El-Sayed is not a fringe candidate. A Mitchell Research poll from earlier this May showed him leading the Michigan Democratic Senate primary at 28 percent, ten points ahead of Rep. Haley Stevens at 18 percent. State Senator Mallory McMorrow, who polled at 17 percent, has since suspended her campaign, narrowing the field to a two-person race.
El-Sayed and Stevens are scheduled to debate before the August primary. The winner will likely face Republican Mike Rogers, a former House Intelligence Committee chairman, in the November general election for Michigan's open U.S. Senate seat.
The defund question is not going away before that debate. And the broader scrutiny surrounding Michigan's Democratic Senate field has only intensified as the primary approaches.
The defund-the-police reversal is not El-Sayed's only credibility problem. Fox News noted that he has also called for the abolition of ICE and supports Medicare for All, positions that place him firmly on the progressive left, regardless of how he packages himself for a general-election audience.
More troubling, the Washington Free Beacon reported that El-Sayed appeared on a podcast hosted by Joshua Hoe, a registered sex offender convicted of soliciting a 14-year-old girl, and urged him to run for office, telling him: "We need your voice, folks who are affected by the experiences that you've had uniquely need your voice." The Free Beacon also reported that in a private campaign strategy call, El-Sayed said he planned to use pedophilia accusations against political opponents as a distraction, stating: "I'm just gonna go straight to pedophilia, frankly." The contradiction between publicly embracing a convicted sex offender and privately weaponizing the issue of child exploitation speaks for itself.
Democrats across the country have faced similar moments where past statements collide with present ambitions. A Texas Democratic candidate was recently caught boasting about bailing out a bandmate with a violent criminal record, and the fallout followed the same arc: audio evidence, denials, and damage control.
El-Sayed's situation is arguably worse because the contradiction is so clean. He did not misspeak in a crowded room. He sat for a recorded radio interview, defined "defunding the police" in his own terms, endorsed it, explained his messaging strategy around it, and then posted about it repeatedly on social media. Years later, he deleted the posts, denied the position, and asked voters to trust his current version of events.
The question for Michigan Democrats is straightforward. Their leading Senate candidate told a radio audience in 2020 that police funding should be redirected away from law enforcement. He posted about it. He hashtagged it. He described it as a moral imperative.
Then he deleted the evidence and told voters the opposite.
His campaign now says his views have "changed." That is a legitimate thing for a politician to say, if he says it honestly, names what changed, and explains why. El-Sayed has not done that. He has denied the original position existed at all, even as the audio plays back his own voice describing it in detail.
As Democrats nationally grapple with questions of accountability and credibility, Michigan's Senate primary offers a case study. El-Sayed is not being attacked by opponents. He is being contradicted by himself.
Rep. Stevens will have a chance to press him on this record when they debate. Rogers will certainly press the issue in the general election if El-Sayed is the nominee. And voters will have to decide whether a candidate who deletes his own words and then denies they existed deserves to represent them in the United States Senate.
A politician who changes his mind can earn respect. A politician who pretends he never held the position in the first place is asking voters to ignore what they can hear with their own ears.
