By Nathan Layne
DEARBORN, Michigan, Nov 4 (Reuters) – The US president repeatedly branded him a jihadist. His Republican opponent questioned his loyalty to America. Campaign mailers suggested he had ties to terrorists and warned that, if elected, he would bring sharia law to Michigan.
Before Abdul El-Sayed could make history as the first Muslim elected to the US Senate, he endured what critics called one of the most overtly Islamophobic campaigns in modern US politics.
He won anyway. El-Sayed cast his victory in Tuesday’s midterm elections as a rebuke to such rhetoric, accusing his Republican opponent Mike Rogers of running what he called a historically ugly, hate-based campaign.
“You chose hate, and Michigan chose hope,” El-Sayed said in his victory speech.
The attacks were a defining feature of the race, stirring safety concerns among residents in and around Dearborn, home to one of the nation’s largest Arab American communities, local officials and residents said this week.
El-Sayed, 42, a Michigan-born Egyptian American who has a medical degree and formerly served as Detroit’s health director, ran as a progressive focused on healthcare and the cost of living.
David Kolar, a 32-year-old music teacher, said the focus on El-Sayed’s faith recalled the backlash Muslims faced after the September 11, 2001, attacks, a period he believed the country had left behind.
“We have freedom of religion, and if he is of the Muslim faith, so be it,” Kolar said after casting his ballot for El-Sayed in the Detroit suburb of Warren.
Rogers said his objections to El-Sayed were ideological, not religious. Yet he portrayed him as a national security threat and campaigned alongside Republicans who went further.
Foremost among them was President Donald Trump, who labeled El-Sayed a terrorist and compared him to the September 11 hijackers. Rogers appeared with Senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican who said El-Sayed sleeps “in a bin Laden jersey,” and with Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, when he called El-Sayed a “jihadist leprechaun” and warned Americans would die if he won.
The attacks stood out not only for their severity but for how readily prominent Republicans embraced them, said Nazita Lajevardi, an associate professor at the University of Michigan who studies the intersection of politics, race and religion.
Unlike after September 11 or during Trump’s first-term Muslim ban, she said, there was little pushback from Republican party elites.
“This is the most egregious and most bigoted Islamophobic campaign I have seen,” she said. “What you’re seeing is not just hostility, racism and bigotry from the president … but you’re seeing it from rank-and-file members of the Republican Party.”
ANATOMY OF AN ATTACK CAMPAIGN
Led by Trump, Republicans portrayed Democratic candidates as radical, un-American and even communist throughout the campaign. Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico was derided in Texas as “Talafreako” over his views on gender and sexuality. In Ohio, ads weaponized Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton’s account of surviving sexual assault in her youth.
Voters appeared far more concerned with pocketbook issues than attacks, however, in an election season when Democrats, including Talarico and Acton, chalked up sweeping wins.
Still, perhaps no campaign leaned into identity politics as heavily as the Michigan Senate race.
Republicans sought to link El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood using decade-old writings on political change in Egypt and social media posts by his half-sister. The United States designated some Brotherhood branches as terrorist organizations this year. El-Sayed disavowed the group and denied any association, and no evidence has emerged linking him to it.
Republicans also seized on El-Sayed’s response to the March attack on Michigan’s Temple Israel synagogue. In a statement denouncing the violence, he said “hurt people hurt people,” drawing anger from some Jewish leaders who criticized the remark as rationalizing antisemitic violence.
He later apologized, saying that his comments may have been misconstrued and that “it wasn’t the time for context.”
Rogers’ allies invoked the episode through the campaign’s final hours. On the eve of the election, the Michigan Republican Party held a press conference featuring Jewish and Black community leaders opposed to El-Sayed beside a large red sign accusing him of offering “SAFE HARBOR TO TERRORISTS.”
Asked by Reuters to substantiate the claim, party communications director Ted Goodman pointed to the “hurt people hurt people” remark, which he said amounted to justifying a terrorist attack against children.
The argument resonated with some voters. Five of roughly 30 people Reuters interviewed in the Detroit area said El-Sayed’s Muslim faith or perceived links to extremism strongly influenced their vote for Rogers.
Robin Cook, 73, was one of them. “I don’t think he’s a true American,” he said of El-Sayed. “I don’t trust him.”
DEARBORN PUSHES BACK
Most voters interviewed dismissed the attacks as desperate and a distraction from their economic concerns. Non-Muslims stressed that Muslims and Arab Americans were woven into their daily lives, pointing to friends, neighbors, colleagues and physicians in their communities.
“I grew up around all nationalities,” said Pamela Johnson, a 72-year-old Catholic, after voting for El-Sayed. “We all matter, regardless of color, race or whatever.”
But Dearborn residents said the rhetoric carried real-world consequences, fueling safety fears.
Imad Soofi, a business owner who immigrated from Yemen two decades ago, said he had seen a rise in anti-Muslim hostility since Trump began targeting El-Sayed, including remarks directed at women wearing hijabs in public.
A three-time Trump voter, Soofi, 49, said he might have backed Rogers had the candidate distanced himself from Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric. Instead, he voted for El-Sayed.
Alabas Farhat, who represents parts of Dearborn and Detroit in the Michigan House, said the campaign recycled anti-Muslim tropes Arab Americans in the region had encountered for years.
“There has been this constant questioning of how American can you be as a Muslim? How American can you be as an Arab American?” Farhat said in an interview. “It happens, but time and again, we show how American we are.”
(Reporting by Nathan Layne in Dearborn, Detroit, Warren, and Harrison Township, Michigan; editing by Paul Thomasch and Howard Goller)
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