Have you ever noticed how, more often than not, Democrats have to pretend to be more moderate than they really are during an election cycle? Barack Obama ran the con in 2008. He said he'd be a uniter who worked with both parties. He said he supported traditional marriage. He said he didn't want socialized medicine. He said he wanted strong borders. Then he pushed this country far, far, far, far to the left.
Joe Biden ran a version of the same play in 2020, marketing himself as a pragmatic, center-left Democrat who rejected "defund the police" and promised to keep his party's leftist wing in a cage. After he was installed in the White House, he doubled down on the Obama-era radicalism.
Now Michigan is getting its own version of the con, starring Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. He wants voters to see a capitalism-friendly guy, just slightly left of center. However, between 2017 and 2020, El-Sayed attended and spoke at six events hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America, including a 2019 fundraiser he headlined himself. He clearly didn’t wander into the wrong room six times. That's a guy who knew exactly where he was, and knows exactly who he is.
But if you’ve seen the polls, you know that socialism isn’t popular outside of the Democrat Party. So, he’s been trying hard to distance himself from his socialist tendencies.
"I'm not technically or practically DSA," he told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month. CNN got the same act. "I am not somebody who is a socialist," he insisted. "I believe in capitalism, I just believe that capitalism has to be regulated."
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El-Sayed is favored to win his primary, and that's precisely what has establishment Democrats sweating. They know a candidate this tight with the DSA is a walking attack ad in a general election, and they're worried he'll help Republicans flip the Senate seat, crushing the Democrats’ dreams of flipping control of the upper chamber.
Greg Gutfeld nailed the pattern Tuesday night on The Five. When co-host Jessica Tarlov protested that she isn't one of the "nutbags," Gutfeld pointed out that liberals almost always feel the need to say that. "It's because you kind of innately know that leftism is loony and out of step with mainstream thinking that you have to go, yeah, I'm a little nutty, but I'm not that nutty," Gutfeld said. "You guys call us Nazis, but we get rid of our Nazis; we don't push them into the Senate and hope they win."
Gutfeld then gave the DSA credit for something El-Sayed clearly can't manage: honesty. "Right now, what I find is that the DSA is saying exactly what they are to everyone, and they may be the most honest leftists about what they want," he said. "They're saying what they want to take over, they're saying what they want to tax, they're saying what they want to ban."
That candor, Gutfeld argued, exposes the whole racket.
"It reveals an essential truth about socialism, and I would say the slower socialism called Democrats, is that it's all top-down social engineering," he said. "And it cannot exist unless you enforce it aggressively, which means it is antithetical to human nature. If this stuff was so innate, why do you have to force it down our throats?"
"They always walk back their beliefs at every chance." @greggutfeld sounds off on radical Dem MI Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed for denying he's a socialist. pic.twitter.com/CYWiOVgWNG
— The Five (@TheFive) July 29, 2026
That's the question El-Sayed should be answering instead of playing word games about what "technically" counts as DSA. If his politics are as reasonable as he claims, he wouldn't shy away from what he really is. But this is what the left does all the time to win.
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