First posted on Instagram · @profilopolitics
Sen. John Kennedy has a gift for reducing a campaign to one sentence, and on Fox News's The Story he aimed it at Michigan's Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed.
"Mr. El-Sayed worships at the altar of Ocasio-Cortez and Mayor Mamdani," Kennedy said. "If these folks were in charge, you'd have nothing to worry about — unless you're a taxpayer, business owner, parent, cop, person of faith, or an unborn baby." Then he delivered the frame he wants Michigan voters to carry into Election Day: "That's the choice."
The occasion for Kennedy's appearance was itself part of the story: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is transferring $1 million to a fund supporting El-Sayed's campaign — the national progressive movement putting serious money behind its candidate in a state that could decide control of the Senate.
Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, has been campaigning in Michigan for Republican nominee Mike Rogers, whom he casts as the firewall for the seat. His argument is bigger than one race. As he put it to Sean Hannity this month, he listens to "the new leaders of the Democratic Party — Mayor Mamdani, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, Dr. El-Sayed in Michigan — and they're all socialists." Republicans, Kennedy concedes, "aren't perfect." His verdict on the alternative: "The other side's crazy."
It is not the first round of this fight. Campaigning beside Rogers in Michigan on October 9, Kennedy said AIPAC would not be spending against El-Sayed if the Democrat did not "sleep in a bin Laden jersey" — a line delivered as Rogers laughed beside him. El-Sayed fired back on social media: "That's rich coming from someone who wears his bed sheets out at night."
El-Sayed, a physician and former public health official who won the Democratic primary in August, has denied extremist ties and publicly condemned Hamas's October 7 attack. The terrorism-tinged attacks on him have drawn scrutiny of their own: a Rogers claim that El-Sayed "believes America deserved 9/11" was rated Pants on Fire by PolitiFact, which found the quote belonged to a streamer and that El-Sayed had said the opposite. Kennedy's "altar" line is a different kind of attack — aimed not at El-Sayed's faith but at his politics, and at the two democratic socialists he says El-Sayed follows.
Michigan votes on November 3, and its open Senate seat is one of the few that will decide who runs the chamber. Kennedy's mission is to make sure Michigan voters do not see a local race at all — he wants them to see a national one, between the party of Trump and the altar of AOC and Mamdani. "That's the choice," he says. In just over two weeks, Michigan makes it.
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