On a recent Monday afternoon, in an almost empty office in downtown Detroit, the youngest and least politically experienced candidate for governor of Michigan is tossing a lacrosse ball against the wall. Abdul El-Sayed is full of nervous energy, fueled partly by lack of sleep because he was up late observing the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, and partly because for the past couple of hours he’s been welded to a phone doing tedious but essential fundraising calls. But the thing that has him really keyed up is the big goal for the afternoon and the reason that he is standing in front of two campaign aides in a room decorated with nothing more than a couple of “Abdul for Michigan” posters: He needs to learn how to get his message across to large crowds, specifically large crowds of people who he knows are more likely to vote for Donald Trump than a progressive Democrat, and a Muslim one at that.
At 32, El-Sayed has amassed an impressive résumé. He was a three-sport athlete in high school and then played on the lacrosse team at the University of Michigan. He won a prestigious Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, got his medical degree at Columbia and then taught at the university’s Mailman School of Public Health before returning to Detroit to serve as the executive director of the health department for the city of Detroit, the city’s top public health official. But he’s got one big gap on his CV: He has never held elected office. Energetic or not, he knows he has a lot to overcome if he has a prayer of winning the Democratic primary in August 2018.