00:00Another million dollars from the big health insurance corporations another million dollars from big tech
00:06Five million dollars total from corporations and he acted like it
00:11Voted 19 times to keep prescription drug prices high. You know that ad he does across the river. How we
00:19doing Port Huron?
00:38Y'all too kind. Thank you
00:43All right, y'all I know we got our neighbors in Canada and
00:48It's been it's been a little bit of a rough go of it and as much as Donald Trump wants
00:52to ruin things for them
00:54I think we got an opportunity to remind them what we're about
00:58so
01:02Money out of
01:03Money in your
01:06Medicare for
01:08It's louder money out of
01:10money in your
01:12Medicare for
01:14There it is
01:16for here on I
01:20Am so grateful to be here with you all tonight
01:23My name is Abdul El-Sayed and I am your Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate
01:31And I just want to I want to say an incredible thank you to our earlier speakers
01:38Can we give it up for our nominee?
01:42for State Board of Education Judy Pritchett?
01:50Our Congressional Candidate Ryan Pooley?
01:56And the incomparable indomitable former congressman David Bonier?
02:10Now y'all
02:11I know I'm not supposed to run for office
02:13I got the wrong name for that
02:17I know I pray the wrong way
02:19I know my family comes from the wrong place, but y'all it just shouldn't be this hard
02:23Shouldn't be this hard in the richest most powerful country in the world
02:29To afford a second bag of groceries
02:32Shouldn't be this hard to fill your tank
02:35Shouldn't be this hard to pay your rent or your mortgage
02:39Shouldn't be this hard to see a doctor
02:42Shouldn't be this hard to pay your taxes and know that that money is going to be spent on you
02:46and your kid
02:47Instead of dropping a bomb on somebody else and their kid
02:50Shouldn't be this hard
02:58I never intended to run for office that was not part of my life's plan
03:02After all my parents gave me an 11 letter first name
03:05I wanted to be a doctor and I wanted to be a doctor because I could go 15 hours to
03:09my family's native egypt or 15 minutes from where I grew up
03:13And either way I would cross 10 years difference in life expectancy
03:16Shouldn't matter where you grow up shouldn't matter the color of your skin shouldn't matter what you or your parents
03:20do for work
03:21You deserve a long healthy life in the united states of america
03:32So I went off to college with the intention of being a doctor went off to the university of michigan
03:36got some really bad advice on my last day there
03:39We can go blue listen. We can also go green
03:43Hey, hey as long as we all agree, we don't go red
03:51So my last day there
03:53I got some really bad advice
03:55I was the valedictorian in my class. I got to give the student commencement speech real honor
04:00Nobody went there to go listen to me including my own parents who told me as much
04:04Everybody want to go listen to a former president by the name of bill clinton
04:09So
04:10President clinton so I give my speech, okay
04:12President clinton gives his speech says some really nice things about me in his speech
04:17Prompting my immigrant father to clap for me for the first time in my whole life
04:21And then after the speech president clinton comes up to me and does the president clinton thing
04:26Son
04:29Why are you going to medical school
04:33Looked at him. I was i'm brown and muslims what we do
04:36But also I love people and I love science and this is how I want to serve
04:40So that's great, but you got a gift for communicating maybe someday you'll run for office and I laughed in
04:45his face
04:46I said mr. President really nice of you to say did you see my name?
04:50Got sounds that come out of parts of people's throats most people don't know they have
04:54People like me don't get to run for office thought about it for a second
04:58They chuckled and walked away
05:01That was two thousand and seven
05:04Y'all know what happened 2008 we watched the guy named Barack Hussein Obama
05:12Run for and win the presidency
05:17Believe it or not. It's the first time I ever saw myself reflected in politics at all
05:20I mean his dad immigrated from africa my dad immigrated from a different part africa
05:25He had mixed parents
05:26I was raised by my dad and my stepmom jackie who's a daughter of the american revolution from gratiot county
05:33michigan middle of the state
05:38He's got a funny name i got a funny name
05:42He's tall and skinny
05:49I'm 5'8
05:55So anyway, I filed that away
05:56I got I got to go do a doctorate in england on on a scholarship and then I got to
06:01finish med school and i'm in new york and i'm
06:02Finally doing the thing that doctors do
06:05Which is about asking and answering two questions what's wrong and how can I help
06:07And too often I kept realizing that the answer to what was wrong
06:10Had a lot less to do with all the physiology?
06:12I've been studying and more to do with pathologies in our politics air we breathe the water
06:17We drink whether or not we can be a victim of somebody's violence
06:21Whether or not we get to see a doctor
06:23In the first place when we get sick and I knew I wanted to be a part of solving those
06:26problems
06:27So when I graduated medical school and yes, mike rogers. I really did graduate from medical school
06:34He's like you're he's not a real doctor. I'm like take it up with columbia university. All right
06:41Also, what do you think md stands for?
06:45medical doctor
06:48I realized I wanted to be a part of solving the bigger picture problem
06:52So I took my career into public health
06:53I got to rebuild detroit's health department after it'd been shut down got to lead wayne county's department of health
06:59human and veteran services
07:03And
07:05We thought outside the box about what public health could be we did things like guarantee every child a free
07:10pair of glasses delivered at school within two weeks of vision test
07:15Took on some of the biggest polluters in our state forced a petroleum refinery that wanted to increase its emissions
07:20To spend 10 million of their own dollars to reduce emissions when they had initially applied to increase them
07:26We had every school daycare and head start tested for lead in the water after the foot water crisis
07:30Helped to rewrite the state's led policies after flint in wayne county
07:34We put narcan and vending machines for free in a hundred different locations
07:44We built a program to provide
07:45Free health insurance for new small businesses
07:48And when we found out that our county ranked number eight for medical debt nationwide
07:52And that we could eliminate it for a penny on the dollar guess what we did
07:55We set aside seven million dollars to erase up to seven hundred million dollars of medical debt for three hundred
08:00thousand families
08:05But i'm i'm never going to forget that day sitting in my office when
08:09This administration froze federal funds y'all remember that
08:12Feels like 10 years ago. It was less than two years ago
08:16And i'm trying to
08:17Figure out how to get one more round of wick checks out for families trying to make sure that our
08:22federally qualified health centers
08:23Don't get shut down trying to make sure vaccines keep going to arms
08:26When i get a notification on my phone that after his two terms in the u.s. Senate our current
08:30u.s. Senator gary peters
08:32Is retiring and not seeking reelection now to ask myself where's the fight for the public's health now?
08:38See if i were to be elected i'd be the first democratic doctor elected the u.s. Senate in nearly
08:4150 years
08:46First first ever
08:48Public health official elected to the united states senate and if you've ever wondered
08:52Why the guy who runs health for our country
08:56Literally takes his grandkids swimming in schitt's creek
09:03I think we all could agree we probably need a public health senator right about now
09:13But y'all this is not my first rodeo i ran for governor in 2018 some of y'all might
09:17have supported me in that race
09:18i'm really grateful for you
09:21I'll be honest with you i was 32 years old i had no business running out for office
09:24I had never run for office before in my life to be fair i had bad advice from a former
09:28president
09:31I said i'm gonna go big or go home i went big then i went home
09:38But i said something in that race i think folks weren't ready to hear yet
09:41Which is that donald trump is not himself the disease of our politics he's the worst symptom of the disease
09:45of our politics
09:47The disease
09:49It's the system that allows billionaires and corporations and special interests to buy and sell politicians
09:54In ways that leave them rigging the system against us it's why we pay so much more for all we
09:59have to buy
09:59It's why we get paid less for the work we do it's why
10:03We spend our tax dollars to buy two thousand pound bombs to drop on other people's children
10:07Instead of to buy good schools and good roads and bridges for our own
10:14So we built the campaign to do three things you already know what they are we want money out of
10:20money in your
10:22medicare for
10:23and we took that campaign all over
10:27110 cities 600 public events
10:30rooms of five turned into 50 turn into 250 500
10:341200 here today
10:43i went everywhere i talked to everybody including fox news y'all see that interview yesterday
10:53like why why do you oppose war i'm like uh war sucks and also
10:58i i think five dollar gas is insane and also eight dollar eight dollar diesel
11:03i mean we're paying for it at the pump paying for it in our taxes paying for it at the
11:10grocery store
11:11add that to this insane tariff war that we have no business fighting with our neighbors in canada
11:16i mean look if you want to tariff the hell out of ohio go ahead but not canada
11:30i feel like the like ohio state should just have like like a hundred percent tariff for every player
11:40but here's here here's here's the funny thing about it i went on yesterday at a 25 minute interview in
11:49a belly of the beast
11:50i was literally in fox news headquarters
11:56and mike rogers he couldn't last for eight minutes today they asked him so like uh you know are you
12:02for or against the iran war he was like uh all of the above not an option
12:08but i guess that's the thing about him is that at the end of the day he doesn't actually have
12:14any real beliefs
12:17he will do whatever a corporation tells him to do
12:22when he was in congress all right he took a million dollars from big pharma another million
12:28dollars from the big health insurance corporations another million dollars from big tech
12:34five million dollars total from corporations and he acted like it voted 19 times to keep
12:41prescription drug prices high you know that ad he does across the river
12:48talking about prescription drugs are more expensive in canada yeah you did that bro
12:53that was you he voted four times to block americans from being able to get prescription
12:59drug prices from canada the audacity of pretending like he didn't cause that
13:07it's one thing to be stupid like donald trump you know like you can't help it like you just
13:18it's another entirely to be so craven that you know that the person you're taking orders from
13:26is a fundamental idiot and you're sitting here like bobbleheading at the whole idea the whole time
13:36go to war with
13:41tariff war roger
13:44the man does not think for himself there's a reason he skipped the first debate
13:56a week earlier he went all the way to dallas
13:59donald trump had two nights he gave two two hour speeches you know how much time
14:07six minutes and 48 seconds
14:12nothing says we believe in our candidate like giving him six minutes and 48 seconds
14:20here's the thing about it the whole time he didn't talk about gas or groceries
14:26he didn't talk about the the price of prescription drugs he didn't talk about seeing a doctor
14:31he didn't want to talk about roads and bridges you know he wanted to talk about me
14:38and for
14:40keep my name out their mouth either
14:51it's okay i mean it's all right
14:54at some point we're going to teach him how to say it with the word senator in front of it
15:07but here's the thing this race is not about me it's not about him it's not about
15:14donald trump or jd vance it's about you it's about whether or not you can afford your gas
15:19it's about whether or not you can afford your groceries it's about whether or not you can see
15:23a doctor in the richest most powerful country in the world it's about whether or not we have a
15:27democracy of by and for the people rather than of by and for corporations billionaires and special
15:33interests
15:39and they think they think they're going to spend their way out of the problem
15:43i mean in the primary they spent 70 million dollars to be 70 million dollars they set a record
15:49all the special interests for the amount of money spent against a single candidate in a statewide primary
15:55anywhere apac alone 33 million dollars but here's the thing about it you could buy as many ads and lies
16:04as you want doesn't make it true and if you have to choose
16:10between the power of their money versus the power of a message and the many friends we're betting on the
16:17power of the many
