When Abdul El-Sayed interviewed for the job of Wayne County health director in 2023, he insisted he had "no intention" of leaving the job "anytime soon" to run for political office and was in it "for the long haul." Just over two years later, he launched a campaign for the U.S. Senate.
It's part of a longstanding pattern for Michigan's Democratic nominee—flitting through a series of prestigious jobs as he pursued statewide office. El-Sayed left his post as Detroit's health director in 2017 after just 18 months to run for governor after realizing, he said, that "this is not what I'm supposed to be doing right now." He had previously quit a prestigious new job at Mt. Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine in New York City—to take the Detroit job—before he even started.
Now, as El-Sayed touts his record in both of those health director jobs on the campaign trail, his brief stints in government are raising questions about whether public service has truly been a mission—or a stepping stone to higher office.
"My opponent talks about building a movement, talks about running for president in 2028," said El-Sayed's Republican opponent Mike Rogers. "Great, you're going to get there, and Michigan will be the last thing on your mind."
A former staffer for both of El-Sayed's campaigns has said El-Sayed "has believed he could be president for a long time."
"Abdul thinks very highly of himself," said Jordan Domingue, who resigned from El-Sayed's Senate campaign this year over the candidate's anti-Israel views.
A model for El-Sayed would be Barack Obama—another academic with a thin résumé—who announced his presidential run in 2007 after only two years in the Senate. Obama pledged multiple times during his Senate race and after he became a senator that he would serve a full six-year term.
In El-Sayed's telling, he "rebuilt a government agency to make it actually work—and then he did it again," referring to his stints in Detroit and Wayne County.
But El-Sayed's bold claims have faced scrutiny.
The Washington Free Beacon reported that El-Sayed, who describes himself as a physician but has never been licensed to practice medicine, overstated his success in removing lead from Detroit schools. And during his Senate campaign, he has grossly exaggerated the scale of other public health initiatives, including a medical debt relief program and another program to give free eyeglasses to children.
El-Sayed has said the eyeglasses program delivered "tens of thousands of glasses" under his watch. Bridge Michigan reported the health agency gave out around 16,000. El-Sayed has also claimed to have erased more than 10 times the amount of medical debt than was reportedly eliminated.
El-Sayed has long hinted that he has his heights set on grander things. In speeches for more than a decade, he has told the story that Bill Clinton—like El-Sayed, a Rhodes scholar—encouraged him at a University of Michigan commencement ceremony in 2007 to run for public office. And El-Sayed has compared himself to Obama.
El-Sayed's political ambitions were of concern to at least one Wayne County commissioner during a Feb. 7, 2023, meeting to discuss El-Sayed's hiring. Commissioner Glenn Anderson noted El-Sayed's previous gubernatorial campaign and asked El-Sayed, "Are we going to see you here as a director for, through that next election?"
El-Sayed assured Anderson he was in for the "long haul."
"I intend to see this job through," he said, adding that he would leave only after "the work that we've done can secure a healthier, more resilient future" for county residents.
"I can tell you I have no intention of running for office anytime soon," El-Sayed said with a chuckle, adding that the job would allow him to "be present for my family" and let him do "the work that I've been committed to my entire career."
El-Sayed quit the job in March 2025 to run for Senate, though he did keep a lucrative contractor gig with the county, billing $9,000 per month for 30 hours of work, the Free Beacon reported.
El-Sayed bailed from his Detroit job under similar circumstances, quitting the director job in February 2017, after roughly 18 months, to run for governor.
He explained the decision on a podcast in 2019 as a sudden revelation.
"It was January 3 [2017], I was getting ready to go back to work, and I was putting on my tie, and I was just like this is not what I'm supposed to be doing right now," he said. "At that moment I, I sort of formulated the idea in my head."
El-Sayed attributed the decision partly to the challenges he faced in Detroit and to Donald Trump's election as president. "I watched Donald Trump win the presidency, and at that point I had to really ask myself if I was doing the thing I needed to be doing and if there was a responsibility to jump into the politics," he said.
