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Progressive
Abdul El-Sayed wins Michigan Senate race to become first Muslim US senator
Democrat
defeats Mike Rogers in race marked by Islamophobic attacks from Trump and
Republican allies
Joseph Gedeon in Detroit
Wed 4 Nov
2026 08.42 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/nov/03/abdul-el-sayed-mike-rogers-michigan-senate
Abdul
El-Sayed, the doctor and progressive insurgent, has made history in winning the
closely watched US
Senate race in Michigan, defeating the Republican Mike Rogers to become the
country’s first Muslim senator.
El-Sayed’s
victory adds to a decisive Democratic majority in the Senate after the party
wrested control of the upper chamber on Tuesday with shock victories in Texas,
Kansas and South Carolina.
El-Sayed,
42, declared victory in Michigan’s US Senate race early on Wednesday at the
state Democrats’ headquarters in Detroit.
“You took a
chance on the unlikeliest of candidates,” El-Sayed told the crowd in his
election night speech. “You welcomed me in your homes, your churches, your
synagogues.”
He credited
a movement built over a year and a half of campaigning in Michigan’s biggest
cities and smallest towns, and said voters gave him strength in his lowest
moments.
His opponent
and detractors, including Donald Trump, led a
largely Islamophobic campaign against him, often pointing to his name and
faith, including the president alleging he was a “jihadist” and that he would
need to walk through a metal detector to get into the Senate.
El-Sayed
said his denigrators chose to be divisive rather than address the cost of gas
and groceries because they didn’t have an answer to the problems he said they
created.
Abdul
El-Sayed and his wife, Sarah Jukaku, on stage after his victory in the US
midterm elections. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters
“They want
an America that is too small for some of us,” El-Sayed said. “We know that
America is big enough for all of us.”
Rogers, a
former congressman who was endorsed by Donald Trump and ran as his close ally,
previously lost the 2024 Senate race to Elissa Slotkin by roughly 0.3
percentage points.
This time he
ran against El-Sayed, a former Wayne county health director who upset the
Democratic establishment favorite Haley Stevens in the primary earlier this
year. He advocated for the Medicare for All proposal for universal healthcare
and called for an end to US military aid for Israel.
Both
candidates were running to succeed Gary Peters, an outgoing Democratic senator
who has held the seat since 2015.
Republicans
cast the general election as a referendum on the Democratic left, and
El-Sayed’s nomination prompted Trump to call him a “communist”, and to slander
him as a “jihadist” and member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
The race was
seen as a test of whether a progressive insurgent could win a swing state.
The
pro-Israel lobby Aipac, through its Super Pac United Democracy Project, spent
roughly $30m in the primary trying to stop El-Sayed, a record for a single
race. More than $220m in total ad spending had been poured into the general
election by mid-October by both parties, according to AdImpact.
In his
victory speech, he said: “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.”
Rogers had
backed Trump’s aggressive tariff policy and war with Iran, before breaking with
the president on both in the closing weeks of the campaign, calling for an end
to the US-Canada trade war and for swift conclusion to the Iran conflict. He
has previously opposed the Affordable Care Act, defended the Trump
administration’s immigration enforcement, and has repeated Trump’s false claims
about the 2020 election.
Republicans
had sought to portray El-Sayed as too far left for a swing state. A Fox
News poll in August found 54% of Michigan voters thought his positions were
too extreme, though 51% also said Rogers was too close to Trump.
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