Mallory McMorrow’s Racist Attack on Abdul El-Sayed Is a Betrayal—And a Warning

I admired her. I defended her. Now she's using a racist playbook against an Arab American Muslim doctor to save a campaign losing on the merits

I want to be honest with you about something before I make the below argument.

I have followed Mallory McMorrow’s career for years and celebrated her courage and principled stances. In 2024, I attended the DNC and watched her speak live, reporting afterwards:

The most significant mention of Project 2025 came from Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow, who brought the entire fascist manifesto as a prop with her on stage. Her poise and delivery were excellent, and most importantly, her message was received loud and clear—Project 2025 is a brazen, unapologetic, undemocratic, unhinged attempt by the MAGA Republicans to permanently install Donald Trump as a dictator.

I shared her warning. I celebrated her courage. I thought: this is the kind of Democrat we need more of.

Which is precisely why her attack on Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is not just a political disappointment. It is a personal one. It is a betrayal of the values she claimed to hold, of the party she claims to represent, and of the millions of Black and brown voters she will need if she ever wants to win a general election in Michigan.

Mallory McMorrow’s smear campaign alleging that Dr. Abdul El Sayed is not a doctor is not a political attack—but a racist one. The receipts prove it and far from sweeping it under the rug, we need to talk about it. Let’s Address This.

Mallory McMorrow and Dr. Abdul El Sayed

McMorrow’s Attack—And Why It Is False

Here is what McMorrow said about Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

Turns out Abdul El-Sayed misrepresented, over and over, being a physician. He’s not. The truth? He’s never held a medical license, never did a residency, and never passed his boards.

The false claim went immediately viral. She repeated it numerous times, literally issuing a formal press release like she uncovered a major scandal. Right wing media outlets picked it up. And the MAGA joy has been palpable. Let us deal with the facts first, and asses the damage caused by the racism after.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is a doctor. He is a Rhodes Scholar. He graduated from Columbia University Medical School with an MD. He earned a PhD in Epidemiology from Oxford. He served as the Executive Director of the Detroit Health Department—one of the most consequential public health leadership roles in Michigan’s recent history.

He is, by every meaningful definition, a doctor.

He has also been transparent—for years, publicly and repeatedly—about his deliberate choice to not pursue a clinical residency. That choice was not a failure or a fraud. It was a principled decision rooted in a clear-eyed analysis of where he could do the most good. He looked at our healthcare system that kills 68,000 Americans annually from preventable, treatable conditions, that produces 500,000 medical bankruptcies every single year, that delivers the lowest life expectancy, highest infant mortality, and highest maternal mortality of any developed nation on Earth—and he concluded that the most meaningful change would not come from practicing medicine inside that broken system. Instead, the most meaningful change would come from using his medical expertise to build new policies for a system.

So he became a public health official. A policy architect. And the results of this decision speak for themselves. As Dr. El Sayed recently reminded everyone:

As a public health official in Wayne County, I led the program to set aside $7 million to erase nearly $700 million in medical debt for 300,000 families. It’s the biggest medical debt erasure in Michigan State history.

And in 2024 in his capacity as Wayne County Executive Health Director, he partnered with Vision to Learn to provide eye healthcare to more than 100,000 children and free glasses to more than 30,000 children.

Every aspect of Dr. El Sayed’s career has been on public display. Even a cursory glance shows clearly that McMorrow’s attack is not grounded in fact. It is not grounded in policy. It is what you do when you have lost the policy debate, you are losing in the polls, and you have nothing of substance left to run on.

Mitchell poll for MIRS, the Michigan Information & Research Service in Lansing, surveyed 405 likely voters in the Aug. 4 Democratic primary between May 1-7

And incidentally, McMorrow attack arrived right as a new poll shows she is currently 10 points down with less than 100 days until Election Day. Dr. El Sayed’s existence as a doctor clarified, let’s get to the meat of the discussion. Because McMorrow’s criticism is worse than a desperate political attack—it is an attack grounded in racism. One that threatens the general election. And that is what we need to talk about.

McMorrow’s Attack—And Why It Is Racist

Let’s draw the line—a clear, documented, undeniable line—between what McMorrow did and a pattern that has recurred throughout modern American political history.

Barack Obama. The first Black president followed every rule. Won every election. And still faced years of demands for documentation to prove he is a “real” American. The birther movement demanded his birth certificate. When he released it, it was not the “long form” birth certificate. When he released that too, it still was not enough. To this day—years after he left office—millions of Americans believe the birtherism lie. The credentials of a Black man are never sufficient. The proof is never enough. The legitimacy is always in question.

Ilhan Omar. A Black Muslim refugee who built a life in America, ran for Congress, and won. The response? A fabricated allegation—with no basis in reality, no supporting evidence, no credible source—that she “married her brother” and committed immigration fraud. The lie has been investigated and debunked repeatedly. It does not matter. It has become a standard talking point, repeated so often that it has taken on the false weight of established fact.

Zohran Mamdani. A man of South Asian Muslim and Ugandan heritage wins the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City. Republicans immediately allege immigration fraud. When they cannot prove it, they propose legislation specifically designed to bar him from taking office. When you cannot beat them at the ballot box, change the rules to disqualify them from playing.

Notice the pattern. Every target is Black or brown. Every target is Muslim—or accused of being Muslim, or associated with Muslim communities, or simply brown enough that the accusation lands. Every target followed the rules. Every target ran for office the right way. Every target won—legitimately, democratically, decisively. And every target was then subjected not to a debate about policy, but to a campaign designed to delegitimize their very right to hold the office they won.

The message is not about policy. The message is: people like you do not belong here.

That is the message behind the birtherism campaign to attack Barack Obama. Behind the fabricated marriage campaign to attack Ilhan Omar. And behind the racist denaturalization campaign to attack Zohran Mamdani.

And it is the message behind Mallory McMorrow’s delegitimization campaign to attack Abdul El-Sayed. And the only side that wins with these attacks are MAGA extremists, something we’re already seeing with McMorrow’s attacks on El Sayed.

McMorrow’s Attack—And How It Is Arms MAGA

Just as the right wing racist attacks on Obama, Omar, and Mamdani have become mainstay talking points in the conservative ecosystem, McMorrow’s racist attack on Abdul El Sayed is already taking root. Last week Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal posted support for Dr. Abdul El Sayed—an honest, sincere post of support.

The response was overwhelming bigotry from people repeating Mallory McMorrow’s false and racist talking points against Dr. Abdul El Sayed.

This is but a snapshot. I looked up many of these accounts responding to Jayapal’s campaign appearance with Abdul. Virtually, if not every single one, is a MAGA account. And every single one is using Mallory McMorrow’s talking points—verbatim—to claim that Abdul El-Sayed is not a real doctor, while expanding on racism, anti-Muslim hate, and dehumanization.

Read that again. MAGA accounts are using Democratic primary attack lines gifted to them by Mallory McMorrow to target the progressive candidate leading in the polls. It’s important I make a critical distinction here. I am not calling McMorrow a racist. I am, however, absolutely pointing out that racists are happy to use her false claim to try and delegitimize Dr. El Sayed.

And do you think they’ll stop these attacks should Dr. El Sayed win the primary? Of course not—they will double down and point to Democratic State Senator Mallory McMorrow as the validator for their racist, false, attack. This is the catastrophic, irreversible consequence of engaging in racist attacks during a Democratic primary: you hand the enemy the weapon. And it creates a lose-lose situation for all of us.

McMorrow’s Attack Risks a Lose-Lose Situation

And to further remove any doubt about my view of her—Mallory McMorrow would be an exponentially better senator than any Republican. But that’s not the point of this article. The point is, given these racist attacks, wether Abdul wins or loses the primary, the damage is done. If McMorrow’s lie works and it costs Abdul the primary, then we have allowed a racist smear to determine the Democratic nominee in one of the most consequential Senate races in the country.

And if Abdul wins the primary—as he should and polling increasingly indicates he will—then he will walk into the general election while carrying Mallory McMorrow’s lie on his back. He will face an already embedded MAGA disinformation ecosystem, forced to spend time and resources to debunk a lie already treated as established fact by millions of Republican voters who will use it against him in November.

And the thing is, if you are a Mallory McMorrow supporter and still don’t believe this attack is racist, then you still can absolutely agree this attack is meritless and harmful. For example, can you name any Democratic politician who agreed with MAGA when they attacked Dr. Jill Biden for using the title ‘doctor’ without a medical degree? Of course not. Every Democratic voter in the country knew at that time that MAGA attacked Dr. Biden’s credentials, because they could not attack her on policies.

And that same point applies here.

McMorrow could have attacked Abdul on policy. After all, she has policy differences with him—real, substantive ones that voters deserve to hear debated honestly. She could have argued that her vision for healthcare is better. She could have made the case for her record in the Michigan Senate. She could have competed on the merits.

Instead, she chose a lie grounded in the same delegitimization framework that has been used against every Black and brown Muslim candidate in modern American history. Having run for office myself, I’ve faced similar racist attacks from white male Democrats, alleging I’m not a “real lawyer.” This is an old, tried, and racist playbook, and it deserves to be called out and discarded. Mallory McMorrow chose to engage in this racist attack while knowing—she had to know—that in the age of MAGA disinformation, a lie about an Arab American Muslim doctor’s credentials does not stay inside the Democratic primary. It escapes. It spreads. It calcifies.

If Michigan Democrats lose this Senate seat in November, they will need to reckon honestly with who handed MAGA the ammunition to make that happen. And they’ll need to reckon with the failed strategy of hiring communications consultants who refuse to run on hope and progress, and insist on running on fear and division.

No, we are not done yet in this article—there is one more piece of disturbing news about McMorrow’s campaign that every Michigan voter, and every Democratic voter nationwide who cares about women’s rights, needs to know. I looked up who is advising Mallory McMorrow’s communications strategy, and I am even more mortified than I already was.

Lis Smith: The Woman Behind McMorrow’s Comms Strategy

The racist attack on Abdul’s credentials did not emerge from a vacuum. It came from a campaign operation whose infrastructure deserves serious scrutiny.

As Jacobin and the Lever have previously reported in a comprehensive investigation, McMorrow’s campaign is deeply embedded in a new dark money-backed Democratic machine called Majority Democrats and its affiliate, the Bench. This is a new influence network of PACs, rich donors, and consultants taking advantage of increasingly threadbare campaign finance law to pour millions into Democratic campaigns, aiming to elect leaders committed to returning the party to the “moderate” middle. (Side note, I have no idea what “middle” exists between MAGA fascism and upholding democracy, but Democratic moderates seem to think it exists).

The network’s donors read like a who’s who of Silicon Valley and Wall Street billionaires. Hedge fund manager Stephen Mandel and his wife Sue are the network’s largest financial backers, having collectively donated $9.3 million to entities tied to Majority Democrats and the Bench since their inception. Other donors include billionaire tech mogul Mark Heising, who has contributed $2.1 million, Nvidia board member Tench Coxe, Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings, and cryptocurrency CEO Michael Novogratz. Again, this is not my research, it has already been documented in detail by investigative journalists with full receipts at the article linked above.

I share this because, sitting at the center of this operation, serving as a senior adviser to both Majority Democrats and the Bench is communications consultant Lis Smith.

Who is Lis Smith?

Smith’s past clients include Elissa Slotkin, the centrist Michigan Senator who is silent on genocide in Gaza, is drowning in corporate money, and confirmed more of Trump’s nominees than all but five Democratic Senators. Arguably worse, Smith worked for disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo. That work included running communications operations against the women who accused Cuomo of sexual assault—smearing survivors to protect a powerful man.

I want that to land fully. Mallory McMorrow hired Andrew Cuomo’s comms consultant, who Cuomo hired to silence his accusers. And she is now running McMorrow’s comms strategy in her race against Abdul El Sayed.

We cannot pretend that McMorrow’s attack on Abdul El-Sayed is just a rough patch in a competitive primary. It is a deliberate, racist, and false smear. One that MAGA is celebrating. That is a betrayal. Of Abdul. Of the Party. Of Michiganders. And of everything McMorrow says she stands for.

And, it also points to exactly why Abdul is who this moment demands.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed—Who This Moment Demands

So let’s close with a reset.

Mallory McMorrow is an accomplished State Senator, one whom I have long admired. She should have run a campaign on her platform, values, and principles. Sadly, she has chosen to include a racist smear.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is a doctor. He is Rhodes Scholar, a Columbia-trained physician, an Oxford-trained epidemiologist, a former public health director, and the only candidate in this race who has never taken a single dollar of corporate money. Not because he couldn’t. Because he chose not to. Because his campaign begins and ends with one principle: money out of politics, money in your pocket.

Dr. El-Sayed is the only candidate in this race who will fight for universal healthcare as a human right—not as an aspiration to be negotiated away in committee, but as a moral and policy imperative that he has spent his career building the intellectual architecture to achieve. He is fearless in the face of fascism. Unapologetic in his advocacy for working families. Clear-eyed about the genocide in Gaza when other candidates look away. Inclusive of all people, of all faiths and no faith, because that is what genuine democratic leadership requires.

And he has been smeared with the oldest attack in America’s racist politics playbook. In response he has not flinched. He has not responded in kind. He has not abandoned his principles. Instead, he has doubled down with a smile and a continued focus to fight for working people.

That is not just who Michigan needs in a Senator. That is who America needs.

Michigan Democrats should select Dr. Abdul El Sayed as their nominee in the August 4 primary election, and all Michiganders should vote for Dr. Abdul El Sayed in the November 3 midterm election. Let’s stand together to change politics for good.

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Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This — a platform dedicated to human rights, accountability, and the people-powered politics that corporate media ignores. Subscribe, share, and let’s remain relentless in our mission for a more perfect Union.