When a radical who is running for office suddenly experiences a campaign conversion in order to portray himself as more of a moderate, how can voters really trust him? If PolitiFact’s Caleb McCullough is to be believed, it is because he says so. The “he” in question is Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, whose Republican opponent Mike Rogers recently accused him of supporting efforts to defund the police and empty prisons. On Monday, McCullough slapped a “mostly false” label on Rogers for simply recalling El-Sayed’s pre-candidate record.
Reacting to a Rogers ad with a corresponding X post, McCullough observed that “El-Sayed said he supported defunding the police in the past, and spoke about reducing incarceration rates and prison sentences broadly. Rogers’ X post is written in current tense as if El-Sayed “supports” these positions now, while the ad uses past tense to describe El-Sayed’s statements. During his Senate campaign, El-Sayed has not supported defunding the police and said he wants to increase funds for certain aspects of policing. He has not called for emptying prisons.”
The idea that El-Sayed may be trying to hide his radicalness is not foreign to McCullough, as he wrote in the next paragraph, “Rogers’ campaign spokesperson Alyssa Brouillet said El-Sayed’s recent positions backtrack on his past statements. ‘Now, his insulting disapproval of law enforcement is coming back to haunt him, so he’s lying to Michiganders,’ she said.”
If McCullough wants to believe that El-Sayed has changed, he can argue that in an opinion piece somewhere else. When candidates are arguing about whether a change in positions is genuine or not, fact-checkers should simply judge whether the accusations are plausible.
On multiple occasions McCullough admitted that there was a historical record behind Rogers’s accusations including how El-Sayed had previously supported defund the police efforts, ‘“I believe that we do need to defund the police insofar as defunding the police is disinvesting in the means of incarcerating someone or killing them on the streets,’ El-Sayed said in a Detroit Public Radio interview in June 2020.”
He also observed how “CNN reported that El-Sayed in 2020 posted about a dozen times on social media about defunding the police. The posts have since been deleted.”
As for prisons, McCullough again admitted how, “El-Sayed said he supported reducing prison populations because COVID-19 spread easily in crowded jails and prisons. He also backed policies to reduce jail and prison populations even after the pandemic.”
The burden of proof on whether or not El-Sayed has changed is on him, and it requires more than flip-flopping during campaign season. There was nothing false about Rogers’s post or ad. It was just standard campaigning.
