‘I Didn’t Expect to Be a Main Character’: Abdul El-Sayed Heads to the Senate With a Mandate – And a Spotlight

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“My name is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed,” he said at the beginning of his victory speech in downtown Detroit on Tuesday night, as the crowd erupted in cheers. He then thanked the voters of Michigan, for taking a “chance on the unlikeliest of candidates”.

He won with majorities among Black voters and Jewish early voters, and with a larger share of the vote than Kamala Harris or senator Elissa Slotkin in 2024 in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, despite Republican attacks on his faith and objections from some Jewish leaders to his stance on Israel. Now he takes that mandate to Washington as one of the most visible Democrats to have emerged from this election cycle.

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For many Arab and Muslim Americans, the result was vindication. Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, called voters’ rejection of the attacks on El-Sayed “tremendous” for “every little boy named Abdul, every little girl named Zainab”, arguing that the question at stake was whether the country supports an inclusive democracy.

Donald Trump and other Republicans repeatedly used Islamophobia to target his faith. At a rally in Port Huron on 25 October, the president baselessly called El-Sayed a jihadist and a Muslim Brotherhood member, said he was “on the side of the terrorists”, and claimed he would “have to go through a metal detector” before entering the Senate. John Kennedy, the senator from Louisiana, said El-Sayed “sleeps in a Bin Laden jersey”, while Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, called him a “jihadist leprechaun”, and JD Vance called him “evil”.

Campaign mailers paid for by the Senate Leadership Fund, a prominent Republican Super Pac, and seen by the Guardian would link El-Sayed with Sharia law, with text that said his specific views “dictates how women dress”, “requires women have a guardian” and “prohibits women from divorcing”.

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On election night, Dearborn’s mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, said voters chose El-Sayed “regardless of the direction in which he prays”. He called it “a beautifully American story”.

Some Jewish leaders, such as the Detroit community director for the American Jewish Committee, Amy Sapeika, said El-Sayed’s rhetoric, and even his victory speech, made many in the community “feel excluded as Jews and as people who support Israel”.

While exit polls and preliminary analyses show that a majority of Michigan Jews voted for El-Sayed, his margins in heavily Jewish communities trailed other Democrats in the state, such as the governor-elect, Jocelyn Benson. In West Bloomfield, where a synagogue attack took place in March, Rogers’s share of the vote rose to 46% from 42% two years ago, when he ran against Slotkin for the Senate.

El-Sayed would reach the same parity with Black voters as Slotkin’s win in 2024, where he won about 86% compared to her 85%, according to an exit poll by NBC.

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