Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, has long been a vocal ally to transgender people. In the 2026 midterms, he has not wavered in that support, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars in attack ads, much of which has been focused on transgender people, that have poured into this year’s elections from the Republican Party and, even at times, from the Democratic Party as well. Rather than capitulate to those ads, as some Democrats have done, El-Sayed has defended transgender people outright, on sports, on education and on health care. That was certainly true in his 60 Minutes interview released Sunday, in which Ross Douthat, the conservative columnist Bari Weiss brought to the program this summer, pressed him multiple times on his support for transgender people.