by Kelly House, Bridge Michigan
July 17, 2026
- A new attack ad from a pro-Haley Stevens PAC claims Abdul El-Sayed is benefitting from Republican money
- It also claims El-Sayed supported defunding the police and later lied about it
- We looked into both claims, finding parts of the ad misleading
Are Republicans really spending money to help Democratic US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed? And did he really support defunding the police and then lie about it?
Those are claims made in a campaign ad from the United Democracy Project — a super PAC affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that has spent more than $15 million opposing El-Sayed and supporting his opponent in the Democratic primary, Haley Stevens.
“Republicans are meddling because Abdul El-Sayed can’t win the general election,” a disembodied voice states at the end of the 31-second ad.
Bridge is fact-checking both claims as El-Sayed and Stevens vie for the Democratic nomination to face Republican Mike Rogers in a November general election for Michgian’s open US Senate seat.
Here are the facts:
Republican funding
This week’s ad is not the first time Stevens and her supporters have accused El-Sayed of benefitting from Republican money.
During a televised debate in July, Stevens said Republicans are “spending thousands of dollars” on El-Sayed because “they think it will make it easier for Mike Rogers to win.”
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While it’s true the National Republican Senatorial Committee bought ads about El-Sayed, it was too lambaste him as “too radical for Michigan.”
Federal Election Commission filings from organizations required to report their campaign spending show no Republican-affiliated spending to support El-Sayed.
Asked to explain, a spokesperson for the Stevens campaign highlighted a social media post in which a Semafor reporter wrote that Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyoming, told him El-Sayed is “somebody to the radical extreme, dangerous and scary side of the party…that’s going to make it even better for us there.”
Responding to the claims of Republican support, El-Sayed campaign spokesperson Sophie Pollock called them “misleading and not based in fact.
“It is a disservice to Michigan voters and our democracy that AIPAC’s Super PAC has invested tens of millions to lie and mislead the public,” Pollock said.
That’s a reference to the $29 million in spending for Stevens and against El-Sayed that mostly comes from groups associated with the pro-Israel AIPAC and a corporate lobbyist.
Defund the police?
Following the 2020 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, El-Sayed repeatedly espoused support for defunding the police in social media posts and interviews.
In a 2020 Detroit Public Radio interview, for instance, he said:
“I believe we need to defund the police insofar as defunding the police is disinvesting in the means of incarcerating someone or killing them on the streets, and investing more in the means of educating and empowering, engaging communities with the means of being able to take on systemic poverty.”
The phrase refers to efforts to reallocate money from policing to public services, such as health care, schools and housing. Advocates for such spending policies contend it would alleviate the poverty, homelessness and mental health issues that are closely linked to crime, while opponents argue reducing police budgets threatens public safety.
Most cities that implemented the philosophy quickly backtracked, either over concerns about rising crime or under pressure from state officials. Others have maintained investments in housing, crisis response teams and other services meant to reduce reliance on police for nonviolent crimes.
After CNN reported in November that El-Sayed deleted old tweets supporting the concept, El-Sayed told The Detroit News that “I actually never, never called for defunding. My goal in that conversation was to help everybody to understand what we were talking about.”
“Law enforcement exists for a reason,” he went on to say. “But ideally you want
to make sure that there are not folks out there committing crimes in the first place.”
One of the tweets in question, from June 2020, stated, “Most major US cities spend WAY TOO MUCH on police departments to police poverty & WAY TOO LITTLE on public schools, health departments, recreation departments, & housing to eliminate poverty. Fixing that is what the #Defund movement is about.”
In a recent interview with CNN, El-Sayed said he deleted the old tweets because “I didn’t want them to be taken out of context.”
Back in 2020, when calls to defund the police were at their strongest, El-Sayed hesitated to use the term in the Detroit Public Radio interview, doing so only when pressed by the interviewer.
“What we call that is, to me, less important than what we do on the problems on the ground,” he said.
The bottom line
There is little evidence that Republicans are directly supporting El-Sayed’s campaign, but there is ample evidence of El-Sayed’s past support for defunding the police.
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://bridgemi.com/michigan-government/fact-check-abdul-el-sayeds-record-on-defund-the-police-republican-meddling/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://bridgemi.com”>Bridge Michigan</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/bridgemi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/cropped-android-chrome-192×192-1.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
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