Democrat Abdul El-Sayed wins Michigan’s Senate race

Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former public health official aligned with the Democratic Party’s left flank, has won Michigan’s highly hostile Senate race, defeating his Republican rival, former Rep. Mike Rogers, NBC News projects.

El-Sayed, 42, overcame a raft of Islamophobia fomented by President Donald Trump and others to become the first Muslim elected to the chamber.

He also overcame a last-minute defection from Rep. Haley Stevens, a vanquished primary rival who reneged on her pledge to support him and endorsed Rogers after she attended church with him Sunday.

El-Sayed’s victory extends a long-running GOP drought in the state. A Republican has not won a Senate seat in Michigan since 1994. El-Sayed will succeed retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters.

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The clash between El-Sayed and Rogers, 63, was rated among the country’s most closely watched and aggressively fought, given El-Sayed’s alliance with progressive firebrands such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. El-Sayed’s criticism of the Israeli government, which he has accused of genocide, was also a consistent flash point.

A group affiliated with the pro-Israel group AIPAC spent more than $30 million in an unsuccessful effort to lift Stevens over El-Sayed in the Democratic primary and re-engaged in Michigan in the closing weeks of the general election. Stevens, meanwhile, linked her defection from El-Sayed to his position on Israel and his campaign’s suggestion that she was not welcome at his campaign events after she began voicing her criticism more in the race’s closing days.

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Rogers and his Republican allies tried to spin El-Sayed’s anti-Israel stance into attacks that evoked his religion and raised questions about his loyalties. Vice President JD Vance, in particular, relished criticizing El-Sayed — a rift that grew out of El-Sayed’s sarcastic questioning of whether Vance’s late, white Appalachian-born grandfather would have approved of his Indian American wife.

Trump’s attacks on El-Sayed’s faith went furthest.

Within days of El-Sayed’s August primary victory, Trump began falsely asserting that “jihadists” were gaining purchase in U.S. politics and government. The attacks escalated over the next three months, with Trump at one point whipping a crowd in Youngstown, Ohio, into a frenzied chant of “Deport! Deport!” He often referred to El-Sayed by his middle name, Mohamed.

El-Sayed had a handy retort for that one.

“That’ll be Sen. Mohamed to you, bro,” he said at an Oct. 25 event with Sanders.

Trump’s rally the same day in Port Huron, Michigan, brought an escalation in his rhetoric.

“I’m here to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator, and that’s the fact,” Trump said. “We’re not going to let that happen.”

Rogers tried to distance himself from the most heated rhetoric, but he also accused El-Sayed of harboring ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, an international Sunni Islamist organization founded in Egypt in 1928. The Trump administration has designated certain chapters of the group as terrorist organizations. El-Sayed has denounced and denied having any ties to the group.

El-Sayed framed his campaign pitch around a simple, ideologically focused slogan: “Money out of politics, money in your pockets and Medicare for All.” While that established him firmly to the left of his party, polling throughout the race suggested his message was helping him make strides with Trump voters.

Rogers struggled to escape Trump’s shadow. In the race’s closing weeks, he tried to distance himself from Trump’s war in Iran and tariffs — two developments that caused prices to rise and compounded voters’ economic concerns.

“Well, there are some things that Canada does that [are] absolutely unfair to Michiganders and the rest of the country,” Rogers said in an interview this month with “NBC Nightly News.” “I’ve been a targeted and temporary tariff guy to correct those things. I thought the broad sweep was too much, and I’d like to see it wrapped up.”

Asked in the interview whether the Iran war was a mistake, Rogers replied less than confidently: “Well, we’ll find out. I don’t think so.”