Editorial: Michigan's Abdul El-Sayed is failing to remove the Hasan Piker deadweight from his Senate campaign

Chicago Tribune Editorial Board, Chicago Tribune on Sep 21, 2026

Published in Op Eds

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As Democratic senators in Washington, D.C., coalesce awkwardly — and in some cases reluctantly — around the Michigan Senate campaign of liberal firebrand Abdul El-Sayed, the candidate himself has his own uncomfortable relationship to navigate.

We refer to the incendiary Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, with whom El-Sayed seemed almost inseparable during his primary contest against moderate U.S. House member Haley Stevens, a campaign he narrowly won with less than 50% of the vote.

Now that El-Sayed is in a tight race to convince all voting Michiganders, not just the Democratic primary electorate, to send him to the U.S. Senate, his bromance with Piker is a major liability rather than an asset. Piker isn’t making El-Sayed’s unconvincing efforts to distance himself from his highly controversial pal any easier.

That isn’t a surprise. At the end of the day, Piker is a content producer; his job is to feed the beast. And feed it he’s continuing to do, forcing El-Sayed to perform his “Hasan? Hasan who?” response on repeat.

The latest Piker rhetorical bomb El-Sayed had to dodge was the streamer’s assertion in an interview with Axios, excerpts of which were posted Thursday, that the United States is more of a fomenter of terrorism than al-Qaeda. You know, the bunch who deliberately flew planes and their passengers into the World Trade Center towers, killing almost 3,000. Americans recently and solemnly observed the 25th year remembrance of those attacks.

Asked if he thought the U.S. was worse than al-Qaeda, Piker considered for a moment (take that in) and then responded, “Pound for pound, as far as the number of deaths, yes, we’ve caused tremendous terror all around the world.”

His example was the Feb. 28 bombing of a school in Minab, Iran, which international authorities have determined was the work of U.S. Tomahawk missiles and which killed more than 100 schoolgirls. A U.N. fact-finding mission concluded on Thursday that it believed the action constituted a war crime, mainly due to recklessness. The mission didn’t accuse the U.S. of purposefully targeting the school.

Obviously what happened in Minab was horrifying. But there’s a significant difference between making a terrible mistake and deliberately killing civilians.

Asked to react to what Piker said, El-Sayed responded in a statement, “I do not agree with this statement, nor do I give much weight to the statements made by a social media streamer.” He also described Piker as simply a “streamer in California” after criticism resurfaced of Piker’s 2019 comments that America “deserved 9/11.”

Indeed, whenever Piker says something that most outside the uber-progressive bubble Piker and El-Sayed have occupied until now would find alarming or insulting, El-Sayed’s modus operandi is to issue a bland statement of disagreement and refer to Piker as some random streamer, as if El-Sayed has merely appeared a few times on Piker’s platform in order to reach his large audience. The reality, of course, is that El-Sayed has campaigned repeatedly with Piker at his side.

El-Sayed seems to think most voters are idiots.

After all, it was only last March when El-Sayed himself reacted to the violent attack on a suburban Detroit synagogue by a man who had lost four relatives in Lebanon to an Israeli airstrike by condemning the act but then saying, “Hurt people hurt people.” El-Sayed apologized for his remark in late August, after he’d won the Democratic nomination.

At this stage, those voters who find Piker and what he stands for objectionable — as we sure do — have no reason to believe El-Sayed’s attempts to distance himself are anything but political expediency. El-Sayed keeps trying to claim Piker is an irrelevant distraction, but the company one keeps is a legitimate consideration for voters. Other noteworthy politicians have had to permanently separate themselves from people with whom they were close when those people became abject political liabilities (see Barack Obama and Rev. Jeremiah Wright in 2008).

At the very least, El-Sayed ought to promise Michigan voters he will have nothing whatsoever to do with Piker if those voters grant El-Sayed six years in Washington.

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