Republican Ads Attack El-Sayed for Past Comments, Positions on Policing and Prisons

Filed 2h ago · Via FactCheck.org · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Merry Go Slower

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Florian Klauer florianklauer · CC0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Republican-aligned groups including the NRSC, SLF PAC, and a Trump-linked super PAC are airing Michigan ads accusing Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed of wanting to defund police, abolish prisons, and release violent criminals.

The record shows a narrower trail: 2020 comments about reallocating some police funding toward social services, a webinar remark about reducing Michigan's pandemic-era prison population, and a 2018 gubernatorial proposal to consider commuting sentences only for people convicted as minors, deemed low-risk, or who had served 25-plus years. El-Sayed's 2026 campaign instead talks about funding police recruitment, retention, and retirement.

None of the ads mention that the sentence-commutation idea is eight years old and narrowly scoped, or that his current platform explicitly calls for more police funding, not less.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Campaign ads stretching an old quote into a crime wave is about as surprising as a rooster crowing at sunrise. The trick works because nobody in a 30-second spot has to show their math, and by the time anybody checks the webinar transcript the election's already over. If voters want the whole sentence instead of the three scariest words of it, they'll have to go looking themselves.

Source: Read the original at FactCheck.org → Scored: Merry Go Slower · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0