On Sunday night, 60 Minutes gave Abdul El-Sayed a chance to talk to every worried parent in the state.
He blew it.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asked the Democratic nominee about the fights parents care most about: what their kids are taught in school, and transgender athletes taking spots on teams and scholarships away from biological girls' on sports teams. These are places, Douthat said, where people's rights are in conflict. What did El-Sayed think should happen?
"I don't know that that's actually true," El-Sayed said.
Then he went further. "I think we manufacture these social issues."
Manufactured. In other words, the parents are making it up.
Then he pointed at the phone in Douthat's pocket. "You have a phone in your pocket, right? You can get access to everything and anything in the whole world." Kids have "all the world's information" too, he said. Parents should share their beliefs and let their kids make their own choices.
"The internet is a real thing," he said.
That was his whole answer. A mom worried about a boy taking her daughter's spot on the team, or her daughter's place on the podium, or her daughter's privacy in a locker room, heard a man running for the U.S. Senate tell her the problem doesn't exist and her kid has a phone anyway.
His plan for parents is to share their beliefs and then get out of the way. That might work for picking a college major. It's no answer for a 14-year-old girl being told to change clothes next to a boy and keep quiet about it.
Riley Gaines can tell him how manufactured it felt. The former Kentucky swimmer tied with Lia Thomas, a male swimmer from Penn, at the 2022 NCAA championships. Officials handed Thomas the trophy for the photo. Gaines later told Congress that she and the other women were made to undress in the locker room with Thomas there, with no warning and no choice.
She's one of thousands. A volunteer project called SheWon has counted more than 3,400 podium spots that went to male athletes instead of women and girls, across more than 1,400 competitions in 46 sports. Every one of them is a girl who trained for years and got bumped down a place.
El-Sayed didn't argue with any of that. He didn't offer a single rule, a compromise or one protection for girls. He just said it might not be real and brought up the internet.
In the longer version of the interview, he said he's "not running to govern sports."
He's running for the one place where it gets decided. In 2025, Republicans brought a bill to the Senate floor to keep male athletes out of girls' and women's sports. Senate Democrats blocked it. A Senator El-Sayed would be one more vote on that side, and on Sunday night he told Michigan he doesn't think there's anything to vote on.
It fits the rest of his week. When Hasan Piker, a streamer El-Sayed has campaigned with, called a Jewish Michigan suburb a "KKK neighborhood," El-Sayed called it "inappropriate." When a fellow Democrat, Rep. Haley Stevens, asked him to condemn an ad she called antisemitic, he said it had "nothing to do with our campaign." Stevens ended up endorsing his Republican opponent. And now, when parents worry about their daughters, he calls their worries "manufactured."
Every time someone tells El-Sayed something is wrong, he says the problem is the person complaining.
Michigan votes tomorrow. Parents with daughters on a team already know whether their worries are real. On Sunday night, El-Sayed told them they're not.