On Friday’s broadcast of CNN’s “AC360,” CNN Chief Political Analyst David Axelrod said that Democratic Michigan U.S. Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed “should have rejected” the “offensive” and misleading ad blaming Israel for high costs.

Axelrod began by saying, “I understand the irritation” coming from El-Sayed since it looks like Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) is still litigating the primary, but “As for the ad itself, it is an offensive ad, because it misleads people into thinking that the reason that their costs are way up now is because of what happened in Gaza. However you feel about what happened in Gaza, the costs are up now because we’re at war in Iran. It’s a different issue. Rogers has been on one side, El-Sayed on the other. And then the he — the they/them ending was really heavy with inference. So, I think he should have rejected the ad.”

He continued, “But, at this point, he needs to focus on the arguments that he’s running on, which go to the things that he talked about at the end of that statement. But he didn’t need to respond to her.”

Later in the segment, Axelrod said that Stevens isn’t trying to be “constructive” and stated that “I disliked the ad for the reasons that I suggested, but then also be consistent and denounce what the president did in Michigan, suggesting — essentially suggesting that El-Sayed was a jihadist and a terrorist and was a threat to our national security and so on.”

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