Michigan’s left-wing Democratic Senate nominee, who vastly underperformed public polling in eking out a very narrow primary victory, has a pat answer when he’s asked about his close friend and campaign surrogate, Hasan Piker. Abdul el Sayed has appeared on Piker’s show multiple times and invited him to come stump for him on the campaign…
Page A2From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 17 September 2026
El-Sayed's vow to avoid Piker lasts four days before Piker says US out-terrorizes Al Qaeda 'pound for pound.'
As it ran on the front
On Aug. 27, per The Hill, Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed told Semafor he had "no plans" to campaign with Hasan Piker, his friend and campaign surrogate, after a slew of Democratic lawmakers criticized Piker's remarks about American Jews. That distancing held for five days. On Sept. 1, the Washington Examiner reported El-Sayed "rips effort to 'cancel' Piker," publicly defending the same streamer he had told Semafor he had no plans to appear alongside — a man El-Sayed had campaigned with multiple times before clinching the Aug. 4 primary.
By Aug. 31 the Examiner had already counted six Democrats who had explicitly spoken out about Piker's remarks blaming Jews for violence against them. El-Sayed was not among the six. A day later he was defending Piker anyway, and by Sept. 2 The Hill had him walking what it called a "political tightrope" — trying to hold skeptical Jewish voters without disavowing Piker outright.…
…(cont) On Sept. 13, CBS's Weijia Jiang asked him directly: Jewish voters in Michigan are concerned about his relationship with Piker, and he has condemned antisemitism in general but never called out Piker's rhetoric by name — why not? El-Sayed's answer was that he was not interested "in having a conversation about streamers in California." Four days later, the New York Post reported that the streamer in question had told an interviewer the U.S. military commits "pound for pound" more terrorism than the network behind the 9/11 attacks.
That is the whole shape of it, laid end to end. Each denial buys a window — five days, a day, four days — and the window closes the moment Piker opens his mouth again, because Piker was never asked to stay quiet; he was asked to stay unnamed. El-Sayed doesn't have to say anything false to keep the arrangement running. He only has to keep saying "no plans" fast enough to stay one news cycle ahead of the plan already underway, on a platform he doesn't control, from a friend he won't disown and won't stand next to either.
The candidate's own words carry the collapse better than any outside critic could. He is not interested in a conversation about streamers. The streamer keeps having one anyway, on the record, on a schedule El-Sayed does not set and cannot end by not mentioning it.
“The guy gets to run as the moderate while his surrogate does the actual talking on Twitch, and both halves of that arrangement are the same campaign — that's not a friendship problem, that's a division of labor. "No plans to campaign together" doesn't undo the plans they already ran on before the primary. You don't get credit for distance you keep re-explaining every week.”
“Look, the candidate has been crystal clear: no plans, not interested, this is a manufactured story built out of — the Examiner counted six Democrats on this, so, six, which is nothing, practically a rounding error. He hasn't defended Piker's rhetoric once, he's only defended Piker's right to not be — well, he did call it a cancellation effort against him directly, so I guess technically he defended the rhetoric's guy. That's not what I meant to say.”
The receipts
Far-left streamer Hasan Piker argued in an interview published Thursday that the US military has committed more terrorism than Al Qaeda, the Islamist network behind the 9/11 attacks.
· El-Sayed says he has 'no plans' to campaign with Piker from the morgue, 27 Aug 2026
· El-Sayed walks political tightrope in Michigan with Hasan Piker from the morgue, 2 Sep 2026
· El Sayed rips effort to ‘cancel’ Piker after streamer exits Michigan campaign trail from the morgue, 1 Sep 2026
· No, Democrats haven’t distanced themselves from Hasan Piker from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
· El-Sayed on Piker: Not interested 'in having a conversation about streamers in California' from the morgue, 13 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.