“It just shouldn’t be this hard,” Abdul El-Sayed, the insurgent candidate for Michigan’s open Senate seat, says to a packed Mumford High School auditorium in Detroit’s northwestern corner.

“Shouldn’t be this hard to afford a second bag of groceries,” “to get your kid to a doctor,” or “to pay your taxes and know that that money’s gonna be spent on you and your kids instead of dropping bombs on other people and their kids.”

El-Sayed is here with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who’s passing through town on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, and state Rep. Donavan McKinney. El-Sayed is locked in a tight three-way race with establishment picks for Michigan’s open seat, a must-win for Democrats hoping to reclaim the chamber, while McKinney is running to unseat incumbent Democratic Congressman Shri Thanedar (MI-13), one of the body’s richest members, whom McKinney has called a ​“cardboard cutout of a congressman.” Sanders has endorsed both.

But instead of each of us enjoying the “long, healthy life” we deserve, the physician and former head of Detroit’s and then Wayne County’s Health Department goes on, our system is captured by billionaires and corporations that buy politicians “to do their bidding instead of ours. We pay more for all the stuff we gotta buy, get paid less for the work we do, and spend our tax dollars dropping bombs on other people when they should be spent on our own.”

All three hammer this message relentlessly: Your life is far more grueling than it needs to be because our political system is owned by billionaire bandits who’ve fixed it to rob us blind.