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.
“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.
