Something tells me the internals for Michigan Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed must be bad. They must show he's in trouble. 

Because suddenly we're seeing action from him, acting to clean up issues he created for himself by his own actions/statements. 

On Thursday, he said that he has no plans to campaign with Hasan Piker. That appears to be an attempt to put distance between himself and the extremist Twitch streamer.

Then, on Saturday, El-Sayed spoke to the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus at a party convention in Lansing, trying to repair his reputation.

He deflected again on Piker when pressed by reporters. Again, he reportedly did not explicitly disavow him. 

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However, El-Sayed did apologize for a statement he made in March about an attack on a synagogue near Detroit. At that time, he said "hurt people hurt people," expressing an opinion about the attacker in what authorities said was a targeted attack against Jews. 

“I made a mistake,” El-Sayed said to the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus crowd Saturday. “I should have issued a statement, of course condemning it, and it just should have been the full stop.”

He argued he was trying to provide "broader context” but trampled “the dignity that that fear and that pain should have been afforded.” “If my statement caused pain, I’m sorry," he said.  "That was not what I intended.”

He said his comments were inappropriate in the immediate aftermath. 

No, they were inappropriate, period. 

Punchbowl News reported at the time that El-Sayed then actually defended his remarks, "Leadership is being willing to say the thing if you believe it to be true that nobody else is going to say." 

At this point, five months later, the apology rings hollow and a lot like the politics of trying to save himself. Now that he's in the general election race for the Senate, he's trying to run from the things he said during the primary race. People on X generally weren't buying it, although there did appear to be a few people who fell for it. 

His Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, blasted him, saying he was trying to "con Michiganders into thinking his beliefs have changed.  Let me be clear: they have not." He said El-Sayed "had six months to apologize for his incredibly horrific remarks regarding the Temple Israel attack." He termed it "too little, too late." 

We'll have to see how this tap dance plays with the people of Michigan. 

Updated [6:47 PM Eastern]: Here's a clip showing El-Sayed's comment about Piker from Saturday: