Abdul El-Sayed wins Michigan Senate race, set to become 1st Muslim U.S. senator
· Yahoo NewsDemocrat Abdul El-Sayed has won one of the marquee battles of the 2026 midterms: the race to succeed retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters in Michigan.
El-Sayed, an unapologetic 42-year-old progressive and the son of Egyptian immigrants, will become America's first Muslim senator. He has pushed policies such as Medicare for All and ending U.S. military aid to Israel, and has been willing to confront his critics and his own party's establishment.
His victory over Republican candidate Mike Rogers came on a night that saw Democrats regain control of the U.S. Senate in a midterm blue wave that also saw the party win control of the House of Representatives.
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"You took a chance on the unlikeliest of candidates," El-Sayed told a crowd of supporters in Detroit on Wednesday as he declared victory. "Thank you. This is all yours."
El-Sayed defeated Rogers, a 63-year-old former congressman who lost an extremely close Senate race to Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin two years ago, and who has since broken with President Trump on tariffs and the war in Iran.
The race was rocked by several controversies, with the biggest coming two days before the election. Rep. Haley Stevens, the Democrat El-Sayed narrowly defeated in the primary, endorsed Rogers after she worshipped with the GOP candidate at Perfecting Church in Detroit.
"Our Democratic nominee for Senate said I was no longer welcome in his campaign and that I should stay away," Stevens said in a video. "And he's right. And that's why I am endorsing Mike Rogers for the United States Senate today."
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Stevens had said days earlier that she would vote for El-Sayed, and the two were due to appear together Sunday for the first time since August. That plan collapsed after she called on him to condemn an outside group's ad tying U.S. support for Israel to grocery prices. His campaign then asked her to stay away, NBC News reported. El-Sayed has stated he did not agree with the contents of the ad.
Defending her stance, Stevens told CNN on Sunday the decision was a "weight off my shoulders" and said she had decided to switch allegiances because El-Sayed had been getting "angrier and angrier" throughout the campaign.
When Stevens announced her change in support for Rogers, she maintained that she was "still a very proud Democrat." Michigan's Democratic Party chair, Curtis Hertel, fumed over the decision in a Sunday post on X, writing, "Congresswoman Stevens is not a current member of the Michigan Democratic Party, nor will she be in the future."
Trump told a rally in Iowa on Sunday that he'd "love" Stevens to join the Republican Party and said she'd been "very brave" to endorse Rogers.
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Rep. Debbie Dingell, who helped arrange the event, told the AP before the endorsement that she had called it off. "I'm the one who pulled it because it had become way too distracting," she said.
"I would rather not distract from the key issues of this campaign," El-Sayed said Saturday. He attended a different Detroit church Sunday with Dingell and other Democrats, and did not address the dispute there, the AP reported.
On Sunday, El-Sayed spoke with reporters before a unity event with other Democrats and reacted to Stevens's endorsement, saying, "At the end of the day, I actually don't think about Haley Stevens."
"This is a state of 10 million people who deserve a lot better from their government. I'm a lot more focused on the 9,999,998 that are not the ones you guys are talking about," El-Sayed said, referring to Stevens and Rogers.
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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote on social media on Sunday that Stevens's reversal was a "despicable betrayal."
How controversial has the race been?
El-Sayed's background has made him the target of persistent attacks from Republicans, with Trump going so far as to call him a "jihadist" and accuse him of being "on the side of the terrorists."
Vice President JD Vance recently said El-Sayed had "zero attachment" to the United States. El-Sayed is a U.S. citizen who was born and raised in Michigan. Rogers has claimed, without evidence, that El-Sayed has supported the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the Arab world's oldest and most influential Islamist groups.
In a recent exchange at a town hall with a critic who asked him whether he denounced the Muslim Brotherhood, El-Sayed highlighted what he called the "implicit" suggestion in the question: the assumption that he'll have "dual loyalties" because of his faith.
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"I'm not running to be a Muslim senator," he said. "I'm running for the U.S. Senate and happen to be Muslim."
After Trump referred to El-Sayed as "Mohammed" — his middle name — the Democrat responded in what has become his signature pugnacious style.
"I don't care how he pronounces my name," El-Sayed said during a rally in Grand Rapids on Oct. 25. "Because he can just go on and call me 'senator' after November. I will be Senator Mohamed to you, bro."
(AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
Meanwhile, El-Sayed has campaigned with Hasan Piker, a Marxist streamer whom other Democrats have called antisemitic and even anti-American.
"If perfectly inoffensive won elections, then Donald Trump would never have been president," El-Sayed said in April when reporters questioned his choice of allies.
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An independent left-wing group affiliated with Piker's uncle, commentator Cenk Uygur, also recently released an ad linking U.S. support for Israel to high grocery prices. The ad shows two parents shopping for their kids' lunch items; the mom tells the dad to put a carton of eggs back on the shelf.
"They don't like eggs anymore?" the dad asks.
"No, they like eggs," the mom answers. "But we have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians."
Some Democrats and Republicans have urged El-Sayed to denounce the content of the ad rather than just distancing himself from it.
"That has nothing to do with our campaign," El-Sayed said of the ad. "It's certainly not what I want to be talking about right now."
Who is El-Sayed?
El-Sayed, 42, was born on Halloween 1984 in Rochester Hills, Mich. — a northern suburb of Detroit. His parents were immigrants from Egypt, and his first language was Arabic. He captained his high school's wrestling, football and lacrosse teams, then continued to play club lacrosse at the University of Michigan, where he majored in biology and political science.
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El-Sayed went on to study medicine at Michigan, Oxford University (as a Rhodes Scholar) and Columbia University, where he received his MD. Before politics, he pursued a career in public health epidemiology as a tenure-track professor, and later led the Detroit health department.
In 2017, El-Sayed, then just 32, resigned as Detroit's health director to run for governor. He said at the time he was inspired by his work on the Flint water crisis. He was endorsed by prominent progressives — Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — but lost the Democratic primary to Gretchen Whitmer by more than 20 percentage points.
After a stint as Wayne County health director, El-Sayed decided to try again in 2026. He has since become the most prominent Democratic insurgent to channel left-wing disillusionment with politics and outrage over Israel's actions in Gaza to win his party's nomination in a state where more moderate candidates typically prevail.
His argument is that even in so-called purple states such as Michigan, Democrats have a better shot at success when they pick buzzy, big-swing progressives over safe, "electable" incrementalists.