El-Sayed Makes History by Defeating Republican Rogers in Michigan, Becoming First Muslim US Senator

Democrat Abdul El-Sayed has made history by defeating Republican Mike Rogers in Michigan's US Senate election. He is set to become the country's first Muslim senator. The Associated Press has called the race for him.

El-Sayed declared victory early on Wednesday at the Michigan Democrats' headquarters in Detroit. He said voters had welcomed him into their homes, their churches and their synagogues. He credited a movement built over a year and a half of campaigning in Michigan's biggest cities and smallest towns.

El-Sayed, 42, is a former public health official who ran the health departments in Wayne County and the city of Detroit. He first arrived on the political stage in 2018 with an unsuccessful bid for governor.

El-Sayed galvanised young and infrequent voters by focusing on passing single-payer healthcare — Medicare for All — and curbing the influence of corporate money in politics. He has also called for an end to US military aid for Israel.

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.'

In the primary, El-Sayed narrowly defeated Representative Haley Stevens by about 1 percentage point, despite Michigan heavyweights including Governor Gretchen Whitmer and retiring Senator Gary Peters backing his opponent. In the general election's closing days, Stevens reversed course and announced she was endorsing Rogers.

El-Sayed succeeds Gary Peters, who has held the seat since 2015. Democrats have held this Michigan Senate seat since 1979.

Rogers, a former congressman, ran as a close ally of Donald Trump, who had endorsed him. He lost his first bid for the Senate in 2024 to Elissa Slotkin by roughly 0.3 percentage points. In the campaign's closing weeks, he broke with the president on the tariff policy and the US-Canada trade war and called for a swift conclusion to the Iran war.

Throughout the campaign, El-Sayed's opponents, including President Donald Trump, were accused of running a largely Islamophobic campaign against him. Trump called him a 'communist' and a 'jihadist' and falsely alleged he was a member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed said his denigrators chose to be divisive because they had no answer on the cost of gas and groceries, saying: 'They want an America that is too small for some of us. We know that America is big enough for all of us.'

The pro-Israel lobby Aipac, through its Super Pac United Democracy Project, spent roughly $30 million in the primary trying to stop El-Sayed, a record for a single race. More than $220 million in total ad spending had been poured into the general election by mid-October by both parties, according to AdImpact.

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.

El-Sayed's victory adds to the Democratic majority in the Senate after the party wrested control of the upper chamber on Tuesday.