El-Sayed Put Both Hands on a Sky News Reporter on Election Day and Said He Wanted ‘Zero’ UK Votes
Election Day, Tuesday, November 3, 2026. Hours before the Michigan Senate race was called, Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed (D-MI) was approached on camera by Sky News U.S. correspondent James Matthews. El-Sayed put both hands on the reporter’s shoulders, declined to take his questions, and said he wanted “zero” votes from the United Kingdom.
Sky News posted the video itself, so the core event is not in dispute. What is in dispute is how to describe it. Some British headlines said “grabbed.” The accounts we read describe hands on shoulders, not a grab, and we found no complaint, injury or police report. By the next morning Newsweek, citing a Fox News projection, reported that El-Sayed had beaten Republican Mike Rogers (R).
- 2 handson the reporter's shouldersDescribed by RedState, Yahoo UK and Daily Wire; Sky News posted the clip.
- 5.4Mviews on XNewsweek's reported reach for the clip.
- 0charges or complaints foundNo police report, complaint or campaign statement about the exchange appeared in any source we read.
Sky News framed its own clip this way: El-Sayed “confronted” Matthews, “telling him he wouldn’t answer his questions as he wants ‘zero’ votes in the UK.” Per Daily Wire, the contact was both hands on the shoulders. Yahoo UK’s body text says hands on shoulders, even though its headline says “grabbed.” We did not open HuffPost UK’s or Deadline’s pages for this report.
Michigan’s Democratic candidate for Senate Abdul El-Sayed confronted @jamesmatthewsky, telling him he wouldn’t answer his questions as he wants "zero" votes in the UK. Watch the heated exchange between the two. Watch our live coverage of the US midterms
From the clip, as transcribed by Yahoo UK and RedState, El-Sayed said: “Are you registered to vote in Michigan? So why would I care to have a conversation with you?” And: “I am never running for election in the UK, so I do not care what you think or the questions you ask.” Yahoo UK also gives “stop chasing me around.” The “zero” line is Sky News’s own description of the exchange, and RedState and Daily Wire also have El-Sayed answering “Zero!” when the UK vote came up; it is not in the longer quotes above.
Matthews answered, “Abdul, I’m not chasing you. I’m asking you questions,” and said the election “matters to the world.” The question he was trying to ask is not clear from the accounts we read. El-Sayed has not, in anything we found, addressed the exchange. His victory-night remarks, per Newsweek and Yahoo UK, were about the race: “You took a chance on the unlikeliest of candidates,” and, of Rogers, “enjoy your retirement.”
The reaction came mostly from British journalists. Broadcaster Piers Morgan wrote: “Pathetic, and very patronising, by @AbdulElSayed. He should show more respect to the UK and one of our best journalists.” Sky’s Alex Crawford praised Matthews for “always asking the pertinent question,” and Mark Wallace wrote, “Take your hands off him; it’s weird!” per Soap Central.
Pathetic, and very patronising, by @AbdulElSayed . He should show more respect to the UK and one of our best journalists.
Two points cut the other way. The contact was shoulders, not a grab or a push. And Yahoo UK reports the two had met before, about two months earlier; some viewers read the gesture as familiarity. We could not confirm that encounter. Fox News, the New York Post, the Detroit News and the Rogers campaign had not, in the coverage we found, weighed in on the exchange.
Conservative outlets frame this as part of a pattern. Twitchy reported on October 9 that El-Sayed “flipped out” on a female reporter who asked about Khamenei, and HonestReporting published a list of five clashes with journalists. Those are advocacy outlets characterizing events, and we did not verify the underlying clips. The documented fact on this page is narrower: one filmed exchange, one reporter, hands on shoulders, a refusal to answer, and a candidate who was then projected to win a U.S. Senate seat.
Documented: Sky News posted the video; El-Sayed put both hands on Matthews’ shoulders; he declined questions and said he wanted “zero” UK votes.
Disputed: whether the contact was aggressive or familiar. “Grabbed” is a headline word; the body text says shoulders.
Not documented: any complaint, police report, injury, charge, or El-Sayed or campaign statement about the exchange.
On Election Day a Senate nominee put his hands on a journalist’s shoulders and refused his questions. It is on video, nothing in this record makes it a crime, and the nominee has not yet said anything about it.
