On Tuesday, Kamala Harris sat down in Detroit with Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, for an hourlong roundtable on Black maternal health at Birth Detroit. There was no arena, no confetti, and remarkably, no news chyron screaming about 2028. Just a former vice president and a physician running for upper-chamber election, sitting with frontline providers to address a stark, persistent public health failure: why Black women in this country continue to die from pregnancy-related complications at roughly three times the rate of white women.
That conversation should not feel like an exotic political anomaly. It ought to be institutional standard practice. Every elected official professing a commitment to public health should be conducting it loudly, systematically, and often. Black maternal mortality is not a niche policy interest; it is a structural diagnostic—a stress test measuring whether an administrative apparatus works for the communities it was never originally designed to serve. When a major-party Senate candidate and a former vice president devote a full hour to institutional systemic failure six weeks before a national election—rather than burning the afternoon on standard-issue photo lines and back-slapping—it offers a rare signal of programmatic priorities. The rest of the party might consider taking the hint.
It was a substantive dialogue. Naturally, in modern Democratic politics, no good policy discussion goes unpunished by coalition friction.
El-Sayed has spent months attempting to repair his standing within Michigan’s Jewish electorate, a campaign that included an unpublicized summit with rabbis at Temple Israel following an apology for earlier comments that appeared to equivocate on a March attack at the synagogue. Between his past rhetorical maneuvers on Israel and his previous platform associations with Hasan Piker, El-Sayed remains a polarizing figure for a sizable contingent of Jewish Democrats—an ideological rift that a single policy roundtable was never going to magically reconcile.
Then there are Black Detroit Democrats, many of whom regard the electoral mechanics of 2024 with the enthusiasm usually reserved for a root canal. At a separate fireside chat with Harris, Detroit NAACP president Wendell Anthony—who had actively endorsed El-Sayed’s primary opponent, Haley Stevens—offered a blunt assessment of the Uncommitted movement: “Many of us were angry, and some still are”. That is not a fringe grievance or a fleeting social media dispute; it represents an open wound inside the core constituency of the largest municipality in a crucial battleground state.
And then, naturally, came the performative outrage from the far-left commentary class—those deeply unserious actors who expressed profound theoretical shock that El-Sayed would deign to sit at the same table as Harris. It’s the usual cast of characters: the folks who spent two solid years treating the vice presidency as if it comes equipped with an executive veto power that constitutional scholars somehow managed to overlook. I see no compelling reason to grant these professional internet provocateurs the digital engagement they feed on. They represent the worst tendencies of the anti-establishment industrial complex—an enterprise that monetizes ideological purity while producing zero tangible legislative output.
That said, let me be clear: practically nobody found the Uncommitted movement more exasperating than I did. The structural grievances surrounding the Biden administration were entirely understandable—watching a devastating humanitarian catastrophe unfold in Gaza with American munitions directly in the supply chain generated justifiable public indignation. But as a strategy of political calculus, the movement was deeply flawed. It operated as a targeted referendum against a single incumbent; yet when that incumbent exited the race, the Uncommitted leadership inexplicably doubled down. Declining to endorse Harris and settling for a passive-aggressive suggestion that supporters simply vote against Trump was an exercise in strategic incoherence.
Harris was handed a 107-day high-wire presidential campaign, only to be saddled with the collective fallout of a movement that effectively threw its hands up at the finish line. Now that we are living through Trump’s second non-consecutive term, we can evaluate that electoral gamble with objective clarity: the voters who opted to play chicken with a second Trump presidency got precisely what they bargained for.
El-Sayed was aligned with that movement, but his subsequent political behavior diverged sharply from its most dogmatic factions. He was among the first prominent Michigan Democrats to endorse Harris the moment she assumed the top of the ticket, foregoing the endless grievance cycle through the general election. So when an enterprising reporter pressed him on Tuesday about whether voters might view this shift as opportunistic flip-flopping, El-Sayed executed a textbook rhetorical pivot. Who was the candidate when he supported Uncommitted? Biden. And what did Biden do? He withdrew. End of thesis. It is analytically difficult to “flip-flop” on a candidate who was not yet on the ballot.
