As former President Barack Obama remains one of the Democratic Party’s most popular figures, a growing number of insurgent progressive candidates are increasingly willing to criticize his presidency and the politics of the Obama era, signaling a broader reassessment taking shape on parts of the Democratic Left.The tension has surfaced across several 2026 races, where candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America or broader populist movements have argued Obama’s presidency failed to deliver the transformational economic change many voters expected after the 2008 financial crisis.Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el Sayed has emerged as one of the clearest examples of a progressive Democrat openly revisiting and criticizing the Obama era while running for federal office. El Sayed spent years criticizing Obama, at various points writing that the country was “not better off than we were before him,” that the 44th president “had a list of failures,” and that he “was not the right choice.”
Now, as he campaigns for Senate in Michigan, el Sayed has continued making versions of that argument publicly. During a June 20 campaign stop in Saginaw, he said Obama’s presidency “wasn’t quite what we had wanted” and argued many Americans remained frustrated by the economic fallout of the Great Recession.
