A former press secretary to Jill Biden says he will not support Michigan's Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, and is backing Republican Mike Rogers instead, because El-Sayed refuses to distance himself from a streamer who said America deserved the September 11 attacks.
Michael LaRosa, who served as Jill Biden's spokesperson in the White House, made the split public in a written post responding to reports that he had thrown his support behind Rogers, the Republican nominee for Michigan's open Senate seat. LaRosa did not hedge. He framed the issue in personal terms: the mother of his best friend died at the World Trade Center on September 11, and he will not stand behind a candidate who, in his view, lacks the courage to repudiate people who celebrated that day.
The seat belongs to retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, and the race could help determine which party controls the Senate. That a veteran of Biden's inner circle would publicly endorse the Republican in a battleground state signals how deep the fracture over El-Sayed's alliance with streamer Hasan Piker has cut inside the Democratic coalition.
LaRosa's post left no room for misreading. Fox News reported the full passage:
"I won't defend or support anyone who is too cowardly to stand up to extremists who think the mother of my best friend, who jumped from 95 stories because the alternative was worse, deserved what happened to her. Her only crime was showing up to work that morning."
That is not the language of a surrogate floating a trial balloon. LaRosa called El-Sayed "cowardly", a word chosen to describe conduct, not character, and tied the candidate's refusal to act directly to a woman who died in the towers. For a Democrat who built his career inside the Biden operation, the public break amounts to a repudiation of the direction his own party's Michigan apparatus has taken.
El-Sayed has not issued a direct public response to LaRosa's rebuke, at least not one captured in the available reporting. His position on Piker, as described in Fox News's account, is that appearing alongside the streamer does not mean he endorses everything Piker has said.
That distinction may satisfy a campaign communications team. It does not answer the specific charge LaRosa leveled: that El-Sayed has been "pressed" on Piker's 9/11 remark and still declined to condemn it.
Hasan Piker, a left-wing political streamer, said during a 2019 livestream that "America deserved 9/11." The remark drew widespread condemnation at the time. Years later, it has resurfaced as a live political liability, not for Piker, who has no ballot line, but for El-Sayed, who won Michigan's Democratic Senate primary and has campaigned alongside Piker rather than putting distance between them.
El-Sayed's argument, that joint appearances do not equal blanket endorsement of a surrogate's every past statement, is a standard political deflection. Politicians share stages with controversial figures routinely. But the 9/11 remark is not a stray comment about tax policy. It is a declaration that nearly three thousand Americans, including the woman LaRosa described, got what was coming to them.
When a candidate is asked point-blank whether he agrees with that statement and still will not say no, the deflection itself becomes the answer.
Mike Rogers, the former U.S. representative and Republican Senate nominee, has begun making a direct pitch to Michigan Democrats following El-Sayed's primary victory. The LaRosa endorsement gives that pitch a concrete proof point: here is a Biden-world insider willing to cross the aisle because his own party's nominee will not meet a baseline test of moral seriousness.
Michigan is a battleground state. The Fox News report noted that even a small erosion of Democratic support could matter in a race this competitive. Rogers does not need to flip the entire Democratic base. He needs to peel off enough voters who share LaRosa's discomfort, voters who may lean left on economics or health care but draw a hard line at tolerating someone who campaigns with a figure who celebrated the murder of American civilians.
Lara Trump, the Fox News host, observed on her segment "My View" that El-Sayed's conduct makes it look as though he wants Rogers to win the seat. The comment was pointed, but the underlying logic is straightforward: every day El-Sayed refuses to condemn Piker's remark is another day Rogers can run an ad writing itself.
El-Sayed and Piker have brushed off criticism from senior Democratic figures before. The question is whether that defiance plays differently now that the primary is over and a general-election audience, including independents, moderate Democrats, and 9/11 families, is paying attention.
LaRosa is not the first prominent Democrat to raise the alarm. Veteran strategist James Carville has publicly threatened to leave the party over Piker's growing influence in Democratic politics. The warnings have come from different corners of the party, from operatives, from strategists, from Jewish voters concerned about Piker's broader record of inflammatory statements, including remarks about Israel.
Each time, El-Sayed has held his ground. He won his primary with progressive backing, and he appears to have calculated that the activist energy Piker brings outweighs the establishment blowback. That may have been a defensible bet in a Democratic primary electorate. In a general election in a swing state, the math changes.
Piker himself has not retreated. Fox News referenced reports that the streamer called for Democrats who oppose El-Sayed to be "punished", a posture that suggests the alliance is not incidental but ideological. El-Sayed is not merely tolerating Piker; he is embedded in a political project that treats mainstream Democratic dissent as something to be disciplined.
Piker's controversial public statements extend well beyond the 9/11 remark. He has made incendiary comments about Israel that have drawn sharp criticism from Jewish communities and foreign-policy hawks in both parties.
El-Sayed edged past his Democratic rivals with strong progressive support, securing the nomination for a seat that both parties view as critical to Senate control. The primary rewarded his left-flank strategy. The general election will test whether that strategy can survive scrutiny from voters who did not choose him and do not share his base's tolerance for Piker.
Gary Peters's retirement opened the seat, and the party expected to hold it. Michigan has trended competitive in recent cycles, but Democrats have won the last several Senate races there. Losing it because the nominee refused to say five words, "America did not deserve 9/11", would be a self-inflicted wound of remarkable proportions.
LaRosa's defection is one data point. But it is a specific, named, credentialed data point from inside the Biden orbit, not an anonymous grumble. If other Democratic operatives, donors, or officeholders follow his lead, even quietly, Rogers's crossover pitch gains real traction.
El-Sayed still has time to change course. He could condemn Piker's 9/11 remark clearly and unequivocally, accept the backlash from the online left, and neutralize the issue before it defines the fall campaign. Every indication so far suggests he will not.
When a candidate cannot bring himself to say that murdering three thousand Americans was wrong, the voters he loses will not be the ones who need convincing, they will be the ones who were ready to give him a chance.
