Abdul El-Sayed slams Mike Rogers for Texas appearance and offers a plan for Social Security reform
With less than two months until the midterm elections, Michigan’s Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, is campaigning hard. The candidate kicked off his “Shouldn’t Be This Hard” town hall tour in Detroit, visited a 9/11 memorial in Lansing on Friday morning and moved on to town halls at Michigan State University and Lansing later.
Between the two Friday town halls, El-Sayed covered his campaign priorities, including Medicare for All and outlawing outside political spending and he pushed back against criticism from Republicans.
MSU students packed into a room in the university’s union, filling the seats with a few dozen standing for the better part of an hour to get a chance to ask El-Sayed a question.
The event was a partnership with More Perfect University, a progressive group that aims to organize students “against corporate greed on their campus and locally.”
William Lawrence, the Democratic U.S. Congressional candidate for Michigan’s 7th district, spoke at the town hall ahead of El-Sayed. He emphasized Michigan’s position as a battleground state, calling the election “a check on the president’s out-of-control agenda.”
El-Sayed opened by asking students, many of whom weren’t alive during the 9/11 attacks, to take a moment of silence to observe the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks. El-Sayed then criticized his opponent, Mike Rogers, for attending the historic first-ever Republican midterm convention in Texas. “Why was he in Dallas, Texas,” he said, “given that he’s running for Senate in Michigan?”
During the convention, Rogers used his platform to attack El-Sayed and his connections with Hasan Piker. Piker, a far-left streamer, previously campaigned with El-Sayed and has made inflammatory comments about the 9/11 attacks. El-Sayed has since distanced himself from the streamer, calling his comments “dumb” in an interview with Politico.
On Friday, El-Sayed referred to Piker as “a streamer in California.”
While speaking with students, El-Sayed used his public healthcare background as a contrast to Rogers’s previous voting record. Rogers, who represented Michigan in the House from 2001 to 2015, endorsed financial help for 9/11 victims in the immediate aftermath, then appeared to flip when he voted against the 2010 James Zadroga Act. The act, which passed, provided medical treatment and financial support to first responders and survivors of the attacks.
“Rather than vote to make sure that the brave first responders who ran into the rubble that day to save lives, rather than make sure they they had healthcare,” El-Sayed said, “he voted not once, but twice against giving them healthcare.”
El-Sayed said Rogers is refusing to participate in an organized debate. “He’s more interested in being in Dallas than Detroit or Lansing,” he said, later to reporters.
While it’s not at the top of many candidates’ priority lists, whichever candidate wins will face the Social Security trust fund crisis.
Born out of the Social Security Act of 1935, the system is known mainly for supporting seniors by taxing individuals’ wages and employers’ payrolls.
The problem is that current payroll taxes aren’t enough to sustain paid-out benefits, forcing the administration to dip into the trust’s funds. At this point, funds are so low that benefits will have to be cut by roughly a quarter in 2032. Senators elected this year will have to find a solution.
President Donald Trump’s tax-and-spending-cut bill, along with an aging population and lower birth rates, has depleted the trust fund earlier than expected, according to a June 9 report from the Social Security Board of Trustees.
As it stands, Congress has a few options to extend the deadline: increase payroll taxes, enact taxes on income not coming from wages, cut benefits for wealthier Americans, or eliminate Social Security’s maximum taxable income, known as the “tax cap.”
Income earned beyond the tax cap isn’t subject to the Social Security tax. In 2026, the maximum is $184,500.
El-Sayed’s solution is to eliminate the cap. “Lifting the cap will go a long way,” he told City Pulse, “and we’ve got to get serious about solving the problem.”
Rogers’s website doesn’t list a Social Security reform proposal.
Bipartisan efforts by Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno to raise the payroll tax, adding revenue to the trust fund, were knocked down. Congress has yet to offer another solution.
