The progressive victory
The 42-year-old doctor and former Wayne county health director defeated Republican Mike Rogers to win the Michigan Senate seat, making him the first Muslim US senator in the country. This victory helps Democrats maintain a decisive majority in the Senate after the party took control of the upper chamber with wins in Texas, Kansas, and South Carolina. El-Sayed ran as a progressive insurgent and defeated the Democratic establishment favorite Haley Stevens in the primary earlier this year. He advocates for Medicare for All and an end to US military aid for Israel. "You took a chance on the unlikeliest of candidates," El-Sayed told the crowd at the state Democrats’ headquarters in Detroit early Wednesday. "You welcomed me in your homes, your churches, your synagogues," he said. He credited his victory to a movement built over a year and a half of campaigning throughout Michigan’s largest cities and smallest towns. He said voters gave him strength during his lowest moments. He added, "We want our taxes spent here, for schools here, and healthcare here, and infrastructure here. We don’t want our money sent to do apartheid, or genocide, or war."
Campaign spending and attacks
Donald Trump and JD Vance led an Islamophobic campaign against El-Sayed. Trump called the candidate a "communist" and a "jihadist" while slandering him as a member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The president also claimed El-Sayed would need a metal detector to enter the Senate. El-Sayed told the crowd that his denigrators chose to be divisive instead of addressing the cost of gas and groceries. He addressed Vance directly, saying, "JD, habibi, there is this delicious irony in the fact that you’re constitutionally obligated to swear me in in January."
The pro-Israel lobby Aipac, through its Super Pac United Democracy Project, spent about $30 million in the primary trying to stop El-Sayed, a record for a single race. Both parties poured more than $220 million into the general election by mid-October, according to AdImpact. A Fox News poll from August found 54% of Michigan voters thought El-Sayed held positions that were too extreme, though 51% of voters also said Rogers was too close to Trump. Rogers, who lost his 2024 Senate race to Elissa Slotkin by 0.3 percentage points, previously opposed the Affordable Care Act and defended Trump’s immigration enforcement. He also repeated false claims about the 2020 election. He had supported Trump’s aggressive tariff policy and war with Iran before changing his stance in the closing weeks.
