Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Democrat running for U.S. Senate, is drawing fire from both sides of the aisle after refusing to distance himself from Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, and after a trail of endorsements, fundraisers, and donations linking his campaign to figures with ties to Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, Cuba's Fidel Castro, and Iran's ruling regime.
The scrutiny, detailed by Fox News Digital, paints a picture of a candidate whose political orbit extends well beyond mainstream Democratic politics, and whose response has been to insist that sharing a stage with someone does not mean sharing their views.
That argument is getting harder to sustain. El-Sayed appeared with Piker at a campaign event at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on April 7, 2026, even as Piker's record of inflammatory remarks, including saying "America deserved 9/11" and comments minimizing aspects of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, had already drawn condemnation from Jewish organizations and fellow Democrats.
The Piker controversy is only the most visible thread. Fox News Digital reported that El-Sayed touted an endorsement last month from IATSE Local 26, whose president, Tom Burke, also serves as organizational secretary of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, a group that describes itself as working to build a new Communist Party in the United States.
Burke's record goes further. He attended the 2022 political convention of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela in Caracas, Maduro's ruling party. In 2020, he met with the president of Venezuela's elections agency, which has been accused of interfering in elections. Photos reviewed by Fox News Digital, which the outlet said it could not independently verify, showed Burke at a 2020 protest in Caracas and appearing alongside individuals who met with Venezuela's Bolivarian Militia.
In a 2023 radio interview on Fight Back! Radio, Burke called Maduro "very popular with people." He also laid out his broader vision in stark terms.
"We want social change that builds upon the civil rights movement and the women's liberation movement, the LGBTQ movements of the 70s and 80s, and especially the labor movement. We want to build up those movements to create a new society from the ashes of the one that the billionaires are destroying."
Maduro, it bears noting, was recently captured by the Trump administration and sent to court on narcoterrorism charges.
El-Sayed also held a fundraiser with Anas "Andy" Shallal, a wealthy Iraqi-American business owner. Shallal posted on Instagram praising Fidel Castro as "a bigger than life figure whose impact reached far beyond his beloved country, Cuba." He also posted a letter from American activist Alice Walker praising Castro and visited the Cuban Embassy.
The candidate's donor list raises its own questions. Nancy Romer, a Brooklyn professor who has criticized America's "savage capitalism," donated to El-Sayed's campaign. So did Robert Meister, a Marxism philosopher and former director of The Bruce Initiative on Rethinking Capitalism, who gave thousands to the campaign.
El-Sayed has attended or spoken at at least five events organized or sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America since 2019. As a gubernatorial candidate in 2018, he said of the DSA: "We've had great conversations, and we share a lot of ideals, [but] I don't like labels."
The foreign-policy dimension extends beyond Venezuela and Cuba. Fox News Digital previously reported on El-Sayed's connections to Mohammad Ali Elahi, a Michigan-based imam who leads prayer at the Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn Heights. Elahi eulogized Ayatollah Khamenei after U.S. forces took him out in February, held formal events honoring his death, and was shown regularly meeting with Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
El-Sayed himself drew controversy when leaked audio caught him declining to comment on Khamenei's death, reportedly because some people in Dearborn were "sad" about it. He later defended those remarks on Fox News Channel's "America's Newsroom," where anchor Bill Hemmer pressed him on the issue.
El-Sayed framed his comments around the cost of war, telling Fox News:
"I just want to remind you that most people in the city of Dearborn and Dearborn Heights are not Arab-American. They are White. And they're worried, just like I am, they're saddened by the fact that their tax prices go up and they are watching their gas prices go up with it all to fight a war that we shouldn't really be a part of."
Former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren condemned El-Sayed over the leaked audio, and the episode has dogged his campaign ever since.
Separately, Fox News Digital noted that a September gathering on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly included the co-founder of CODEPINK, a left-wing activist group, as well as Scott Ritter, a former U.S. intelligence official and UN weapons inspector whose house was raided by the FBI for what Ritter himself described as a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
The criticism is not limited to conservative media. The Washington Times reported that Democratic figures including Rep. Haley Stevens, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, and Rep. Brad Schneider all criticized El-Sayed's decision to campaign with Piker. Stevens said El-Sayed "is choosing to campaign with someone who has a history of antisemitic rhetoric." Schneider called Piker "an unapologetic antisemite."
Rabbi Davey Rosen of Michigan Hillel issued a pointed statement: "We are deeply disappointed by the decision to host a speaker at the University of Michigan with a documented record of antisemitic rhetoric."
McMorrow, as Breitbart reported, told Jewish Insider that Piker "says extremely offensive things in order to generate clicks and views and followers." The bipartisan pile-on suggests El-Sayed's associations have become a genuine liability in a state Democrats cannot afford to lose.
A longtime Democratic strategist offered a blunt assessment to Fox News Digital:
"Abdul El-Sayed cannot win a general election in Michigan, full stop. This is a candidate who spent years calling police 'standing armies we deploy against our own people,' posted more than a dozen times in support of defunding the police, and then deleted his entire social media history the moment he decided to run statewide, hoping Michigan voters wouldn't notice. They will notice. And so will Mike Rogers."
That deleted social media history, scrubbed as El-Sayed pivoted from local progressive activism to a statewide campaign, adds another layer to the credibility problem. Voters may well ask what else was on those accounts.
El-Sayed has tried to thread a needle. On his association with Piker, he told Fox News it was "an active decision to reach out to people who feel locked out of their politics." The Washington Examiner reported that El-Sayed framed the relationship as a way to reach younger voters who do not consume traditional cable news.
When pressed further, El-Sayed said: "Just because you invite somebody to campaign with you, or you're engaging with them, does not mean that you agree with them."
On socialism, he has been more careful, and more slippery. He told interviewers he comes from a world where people "pick our words very carefully" and that the term "socialism" is "too slippery of a word right now." For millennials, he suggested, it simply means government engagement in key areas of life. For people over sixty, it conjures Cold War fears.
Just The News reported that El-Sayed also declined to disavow Piker directly, telling Politico: "I'm not here to disavow people's views. This whole gotcha game, platform policing, cancel culture, I thought we were over it."
That framing, casting accountability questions as "cancel culture", may play well with the online left. It is less likely to reassure Michigan voters in a general election, particularly when the "gotcha" in question involves a streamer who said America deserved 9/11 and who described what Piker himself called an "honorable end goal" in the context of remarks that included "you really don't need suicide bombing anymore."
Jessica Anderson, president of the conservative Sentinel Action Fund, connected the dots plainly:
"Abdul El-Sayed is campaigning with, and for, extremists. If his recent comments weren't bad enough, El-Sayed's ties to the DSA, Maduro cronies, and Iranian regime sympathizers check all the boxes of radical leftism that has become all too commonplace in the Democrat Party. Michiganders are tired of the chaos and extremism. That's why we see support growing for commonsense leaders like Mike Rogers."
GOP strategist Collin Reed framed the stakes for the Democratic primary itself:
"Welcoming the support from open and avowed socialist sympathizers will no doubt make Mr. El-Sayed the belle of the ball at No Kings rallies and other left-wing resistance movements, but it's a tough sell in a battleground state like Michigan. You are the company you keep, and the other Democrats competing in this primary would be wise to use these revelations to disqualify Mr. El-Sayed in the eyes of their voters."
Reed warned that if Democrats fail to draw the line, "it will be another sign that the tail is wagging the dog and the far left driving the debate in these primary contests, which is poised to shape the overall contours of the midterm elections."
Michigan is a state where the Senate map remains fiercely contested, and the Democratic brand is already under pressure from internal divisions. El-Sayed's associations hand Republicans an opposition file that practically writes itself, a candidate whose endorsers praise Maduro, whose fundraisers celebrate Castro, whose donors critique capitalism from a Marxist framework, and whose campaign partner has a trail of remarks that repel mainstream voters.
Fox News Digital said it reached out to El-Sayed for comment but did not receive a response.
El-Sayed says he does not like labels. But the people surrounding his campaign have chosen their labels quite clearly, socialist, Marxist, communist. Michigan voters will decide whether those labels belong anywhere near the United States Senate. The growing unease among Senate Democrats nationally suggests the party already knows the answer.
You can dodge the word "socialism" all you want. But when your endorsers fly to Caracas and your rally partner says America had 9/11 coming, voters tend to fill in the blank themselves.
