Abdul El-Sayed wants Michigan voters to think one thing about him. 

Michigan’s Democrat Senate nominee even picked out a brand-new label for himself. But some of his oldest admirers never got the memo.

A trail of old posts from one far-left outfit tells a very different story. And the single word they kept using for him says plenty.

The “Capitalist” Who Kept Turning Up at Socialist Dinners

El-Sayed cleared the Democrat Senate primary in August after a nasty fight with Congresswoman Haley Stevens (D-MI). He now faces Republican Mike Rogers, a former Congressman, in the November 3 general election.

Ever since he jumped into the race, reporters have pestered El-Sayed about the Democratic Socialists of America. He keeps swatting the question away.

“I’m not technically or practically DSA,” El-Sayed told The Wall Street Journal in July. He told CNN that “I am not somebody who is a socialist.”

In a sit-down with The New York Times, he went a step further and planted his flag on the other side of the field.

“So if you believe in capitalism, you have to believe in government regulation to protect markets,” El-Sayed told the paper.

Then came the zinger. “So, I’m a capitalist who just knows about capitalism. I have a bad habit of reading; I’m so sorry.”

Cute line. But a capitalist who wants Washington to tax billionaires on their wealth, on top of everything they already pay, has a funny idea of how free markets work.

And the socialists in Detroit apparently saw him very differently.

Fox News Digital surfaced a string of old posts from the Detroit DSA chapter. In 2019, after El-Sayed’s failed run for governor, the group shared his photo with a short message: “Welcome to the team comrade.”

Comrade. Not neighbor, not supporter. Socialists don’t toss that word around lightly, and they never have.

When El-Sayed endorsed US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) for President, the chapter gushed again. “Thank you to our friend and ally Abdul El-Sayed for endorsing Bernie Sanders. Our movement is unstoppable,” the group wrote.

Six Events and One “Longtime Friend”

The social media trail doesn’t stand alone. Between 2017 and 2020, El-Sayed spoke at six events that DSA chapters put on, according to Fox News, which credited the Washington Free Beacon with first reporting his appearances.

One of them, a 2019 fundraiser, pulled in $10,000 for the organization. Organizers billed El-Sayed as “a longtime friend of Detroit DSA.”

The chapter’s promotional posts for its annual Douglas-Debs Dinner put him right alongside Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI). “The one and only Rashida Tlaib will give the keynote, with special guest speaker Abdul El-Sayed,” one read.

DSA officials also told Politico in July that they had started mobilizing resources to help him win the primary. That’s an awful lot of elbow grease to spend on a man who supposedly isn’t one of them.

To be clear, the DSA has not formally endorsed his Senate campaign. And El-Sayed’s team did not immediately answer Fox News when the outlet asked whether the old praise undercuts his capitalist pitch.

A Funny Way to Love Free Markets

Back in his governor days, El-Sayed put his name on something that should make any small business owner sit up straight.

General Motors announced it would cut about 14,000 jobs at sites across the country. Detroit DSA answered with a resolution that called for seizing the idle plants and turning them over to green, public use.

El-Sayed joined roughly 140 co-signers, a list that included Tlaib and Detroit DSA co-chair Natasha Fernández-Silber. The chapter cheered him on, telling followers, “This is the courage and vision we need from our leaders to make the Green New Deal a reality.”

The resolution itself left no doubt about the thinking behind it. “These facilities are not just the ‘property’ of a corporation,” it read. “They belong to the workers who have contributed their labor, and the taxpayers who have provided enormous tax breaks, public subsidies and bailouts to GM.”

Look at the little quote marks hugging the word property. That bit of punctuation carries the whole argument. If a factory doesn’t truly belong to its owner, then the government can grab it whenever activists decide the time is right.

Karl Marx had a name for that idea. He called it seizing the means of production. Venezuela tried it with oil fields, farms, and factories, and ordinary Venezuelans ended up standing in grocery lines that wrapped around the block.

But Adam Smith, whom El-Sayed name-dropped during a debate in this race, would hardly recognize any of it.

What the New Label Is Really Covering For

El-Sayed’s current platform still reads like a socialist wish list with the stickers peeled off. He backs Medicare for All, higher taxes on top earners, and tougher penalties on businesses that, in his view, abuse resources like water and air.

Medicare for All is government-run healthcare, plain and simple. The version Sanders has pushed in Congress would wipe out the private plans that tens of millions of Americans get through their jobs and put Washington bureaucrats in charge of what care patients receive.

The wealth tax carries the same flaw. Governments don’t create a single dollar of wealth. They take it from the people who did, and every dollar Washington grabs is a dollar that stops building factories, hiring workers, or padding somebody’s retirement.

In fairness, the national DSA platform goes further than anything El-Sayed has said on the trail. According to Fox News, the group has championed abolishing the US Senate, government ownership of the country’s largest corporations, and defunding the Department of Defense. El-Sayed has not voiced support for those ideas.

And there’s a rich bit of irony in a man running for the US Senate drawing cheers from an organization that wants the Senate gone altogether.

But the GM resolution deserves a second look here. Seizing private plants for public use is public ownership on a smaller scale. El-Sayed signed it. He just never called it socialism.

Maybe people grow out of old causes. Plenty of politicians have. Yet El-Sayed hasn’t disowned the GM seizure, the comrade talk, or the dinner speeches. He has mostly swapped out the vocabulary.

And the timing tells its own story. DSA member Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayor’s race in November 2025, and socialist candidates across the country have smelled opportunity ever since. Michigan isn’t New York, though. A statewide race there runs through union halls, suburbs, and farm towns that still remember what happened when the auto plants started going dark.

So the “capitalist” label looks a lot more like packaging than a change of heart.

The comrades in Detroit clearly remembered who showed up for them. Now those old posts are out in the open for anybody in Michigan who cares to read them.

“Unearthed social media posts contradict El-Sayed’s ‘capitalist’ narrative,” Fox News

“Top Dem hopeful flips script after years in socialist orbit with puzzling claim,” Fox News

“Michigan Senate candidate endorsed by AOC and Bernie Sanders insists he’s not a socialist,” Fox News

“‘I’m dangerous’: Abdul El-Sayed pushes back on opponent’s attack,” MEAWW

“El-Sayed: ‘I am a capitalist’,” World Socialist Web Site