Michigan Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said in newly circulating video that every third clip auto-playing on his Instagram feed is an “OnlyFans model.”
The 40-year-old progressive made the remarks in footage posted Tuesday by RNC Research, the opposition-research arm of the Republican National Committee, as El-Sayed faces Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) in Michigan’s Democrat Senate primary.
El-Sayed said his own browsing habits had little to do with what the platform pushed to him.
“Like you think about if you’re on Instagram, my team has access to my Instagram account and like the things that I actually look at on Instagram, right?” El-Sayed said. “Of course, we get served that on your for you page, but then like every third video that scrolls on its own is going to be some Only Fans model.”
He pinned the pattern on the platform reading his demographics rather than his behavior.
“And it’s because it clocked me as being a 40-some-year-old man,” El-Sayed said.
El-Sayed has built much of his campaign around winning back young men, a bloc that drifted toward President Donald Trump and Republicans in 2024. He told Newsweek last year that Democrats faced “an epidemic right now of feeling like you don’t belong,” arguing the problem “hits young men hardest.” Trump’s 2024 run leaned heavily on podcasts popular with young male audiences, often called the “manosphere.”
El-Sayed leaned into that same online lane in his closing stretch. He spent the final hours of his campaign at a content-creators pool party in Detroit, where far-left Twitch streamer Hasan Piker was among the guests.
The video surfaced during a race in which attack ads have cast El-Sayed as disrespectful to women, a characterization he has called a racist trope.
El-Sayed entered primary day Tuesday as the favorite. An Emerson College poll released last week showed him leading Stevens 54 percent to 39 percent, though the same survey found him trailing Republican Mike Rogers by 10 points in a November matchup.
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