A black leader in Michigan — who’s been dubbed Al Sharpton’s “little brother in the movement” — is rejecting Democratic Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed, blasting the radical candidate as an untrustworthy “snake oil” salesman and saying there’s “flat-out disdain” for him in the community.
Charles E. Williams II, Michigan chapter president of Sharpton’s National Action Network, lambasted El-Sayed’s lack of cultural credibility in undercover footage that lays bare the dilemma facing black leaders torn between their aversion toward El-Sayed — and the community’s expectation they vote blue no matter what.
“You can’t pluck the heart strings of people selling them all of the pie in the sky, that’s not realistic,” Williams said in a video taken outside a meeting at his historic King Solomon Missionary Baptist Church last Saturday and obtained by The Midwesterner.
“You can tell people ‘Medicare for all’ and ‘money out of politics,’ how you going to do it? You ain’t no majorities. You ain’t got no executive branch. You put together legislation and you’re going to send that to Donald Trump, he going to sign that? No!” he exclaimed.
“So you just selling snake oil …. That’s the real issue that I have with the so-called Democratic Socialists and super progressives anyway,” he went on, getting increasingly wound up.
“You selling wolf tickets … You will not get that across.”
Williams acknowledged he did not want El-Sayed to win the Democratic primary.
“I’ve tried to be cordial to the party and make sure they don’t feel like I’m just completely off the farm or anything, but I’m not really happy … I supported the white lady over him!” he said, referring to El-Sayed’s Democratic primary challenger Haley Stevens.
“Him and I have some issues that we have had personally, telling me one thing and then doing another, which is a thing culturally that I have seen, I’ve had to deal with that community,” he added.
Inside the meeting at his West Side Detroit church, Williams made it clear the black community is lukewarm at best towards El-Sayed yet would be shamed for voting Republican.
“I know that there is some hesitancy, some skepticism, and there’s some just flat-out disdain for the person who is the senatorial candidate for the Democratic Party,” he said.
“Let’s be very clear, it ain’t just us. … white folks know how abusive the Arab community have been to not just people in Detroit, they do it all over the place. … so we ain’t the only people who had to struggle with this,” Williams added in the meeting with get-out-the-vote volunteers.
“Sad to have to paint the brush over Abdul but you know, it’s a sticky situation,” he stated.
“I’m educating people to make sure that they go out and vote, but I ain’t going out to tell them to go vote Republican, either,” Williams continued in the video, eliciting multiple “amens” from the crowd. “If they do, that is their prerogative. That is their prerogative.”
“We can’t risk losing the ballot, the entire ballot, because of places where we have some consternation,” he explained, seemingly resigned. “Do what you gotta do. Vote how you gotta — vote how you feel.”
That aversion was on full display Thursday, as El-Sayed spoke at the Historic Second Baptist Church in Benton Harbor.
The crowd that came to hear him — in a neighborhood that is 82% black, according to the latest census — was almost entirely white.
“Crowd looks a bit different,” quipped journalist David Weigel on X.
Sharpton, who trekked to Detroit on Tuesday to meet with Williams and rally get-out-the-vote efforts, stopped short of endorsing El-Sayed.
“It’s not whether we’re Democrat or Republican, it’s that we’re going with who’s best for us,” Sharpton said as he rallied black voters in Detroit.
Reached by phone, he wouldn’t comment on El-Sayed, only saying he was in Michigan to encourage the black community to exercise their right to vote.
“They ought to go out and not be in any way hesitant to vote,” he told The Post, declining to comment on black voters’ concerns about El-Sayed, only adding “our efforts are nonpartisan.”
Throughout the campaign, El-Sayed has struggled to win over black voters and faced criticism he hasn’t engaged with them or addressed their concerns — only making cringe efforts to relate to the critical voting bloc for Democrats, like during an awkward visit to a barbershop in Grand Rapids.
There’s a 16-percentage-point gap between general Democratic support and support for El-Sayed among Black voters in Michigan, a Washington Post–Schar School poll found in September.
Williams and El-Sayed’s campaign did not return The Post’s request for comment.
