{"id":3447,"date":"2026-10-28T17:04:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-28T12:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=3447"},"modified":"2026-10-28T17:04:00","modified_gmt":"2026-10-28T12:04:00","slug":"michigan-senate-race-a-test-of-attacks-on-muslim-candidate-progressive-agenda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=3447","title":{"rendered":"Michigan Senate race a test of attacks on Muslim candidate, progressive agenda"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Michigan\u2019s tight race for an open US Senate seat will help determine control of the chamber while testing two broader questions: whether identity-based attacks on a Muslim candidate can succeed in a \u200bbattleground state, and how willing Democratic voters are to embrace the party\u2019s progressive wing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Republican Mike Rogers has sought to portray Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, who would be the nation\u2019s first \u200cMuslim senator if he wins the November 3 election, as sympathetic to Islamist extremism, which El-Sayed denies and supporters say is Islamophobic. Rogers has also argued that El-Sayed\u2019s support for universal healthcare and other progressive policies places him outside the political mainstream.<\/p>\n

El-Sayed, a former public health official, has focused his campaign on lowering costs for working-class Americans while seeking to tie Rogers to President Donald Trump, even as Rogers has broken with the president on some issues in the campaign\u2019s closing weeks.<\/p>\n

Trump has falsely accused El-Sayed of \u200bbeing a Muslim extremist, while Rogers has tried to tie him to the Muslim Brotherhood. Branches of the Brotherhood, one of the Arab world\u2019s oldest and most influential Islamist movements, were designated as terrorist organizations by the Trump administration this year.<\/p>\n

El-Sayed has disavowed the group and denied any connection with it. pollsters and political strategists say the attacks are aimed at \u2060dissuading Jewish and Black voters in the Detroit area who backed his primary opponent, Representative Haley Stevens, from voting for him.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s a Muslim-American and so Rogers is attempting to do his best to portray El-Sayed \u200bas an outsider who\u2019s dangerous,\u201d said Jonathan Hanson, a political scientist and public policy lecturer at the University of Michigan.<\/p>\n

Michigan\u2019s Senate seat is critical to both parties\u2019 efforts to control the chamber. Republicans hold a 53-47 \u200bSenate majority heading into Tuesday\u2019s election.<\/p>\n

Independent analysts rate the race a toss-up. The RealClearPolling average shows El-Sayed ahead by 2.5 percentage points in a state Trump carried by 1.4 points in 2024.<\/p>\n

El-Sayed campaign spokesperson Cole Wozniak accused Rogers of resorting to \u201cdesperate, bad faith attacks\u201d and said the Democrat was focused on \u201chis plans to bring down costs and stand up to the chaos and corruption in Washington.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abby Ronson, a spokesperson for the Rogers campaign, pointed to Rogers\u2019 appearance on Sunday on NBC News\u2019 \u201cMeet the \u200bPress,\u201d where he said he was not criticizing Islam but what he described as El-Sayed\u2019s adherence to a \u201cradical Islamic agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a>Identity attacks<\/h3>\n

Advocating policies to curb corporate influence and expand the social safety net, El-Sayed, 41, has \u200bemerged as one of the Democratic Party\u2019s most prominent progressives. He describes himself as a capitalist and rejects the socialist label, but a victory on Tuesday would likely be seen as a boost for the party\u2019s left wing as it \u200cseeks greater \u2060influence ahead of the 2028 presidential election.<\/p>\n

But the margin of any victory will matter, said Michigan State University political scientist Matt Grossmann.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf El-Sayed wins by a couple of points but trails Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jocelyn Benson by a wide margin, that won\u2019t be a very convincing argument,\u201d Grossmann said. \u201cAnd if El-Sayed were to lose, then it would be a mark against that faction of the party.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rogers, 63, has cast himself as a pragmatic conservative focused on lowering costs, boosting manufacturing and strengthening border security. With Trump\u2019s popularity sagging, he recently called for an end to the war in Iran and the trade dispute with Canada, while avoiding direct criticism of the \u200bpresident.<\/p>\n

But portraying El-Sayed as a national security threat has \u200balso become a central feature of Rogers\u2019 closing \u2060message. Rogers has based that claim in part on a 2012 group letter signed by El-Sayed and other Egyptian Americans in support of then-newly elected Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, who was backed by the Muslim Brotherhood. The letter called on Morsi to purge the media and security services of holdovers from the dictatorship toppled during \u200bthe Arab Spring.<\/p>\n

The El-Sayed campaign did not immediately respond to a query about the letter.<\/p>\n

Earlier this month Rogers agreed with a social media post calling El-Sayed \u200ba terrorist. He also appeared \u2060with Trump at a rally on Sunday where the president likened El-Sayed to the September 11 attackers and said his goal was to keep a \u201cjihadist\u201d out of the Senate.<\/p>\n

The rhetoric prompted a rare rebuke from the NAACP, the nonpartisan civil rights organisation, which does not typically intervene in political races.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe blatantly racist attacks surrounding the Michigan Senate race are unacceptable and disgusting,\u201d NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement. \u201cIt\u2019s the same ugly, divisive tactics we\u2019ve seen used \u2060during the darkest \u200bchapters of the South\u2019s history.\u201d<\/p>\n

A poll by Michigan State University\u2019s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research found that 38% of \u200bMichigan voters were less likely to support a Muslim candidate.<\/p>\n

John Clark, a political science professor at Western Michigan University, said the attacks on El-Sayed were aimed in part at depressing Democratic turnout but could work against Rogers by angering and boosting turnout among Michigan\u2019s \u200bsizable Arab American communities in Dearborn and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe this helps with some voters, but it has the potential of backfiring with others,\u201d Clark said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michigan\u2019s tight race for an open US Senate seat will help determine control of the chamber while testing two broader questions: whether identity-based attacks on a Muslim candidate can succeed in a \u200bbattleground state, and how willing Democratic voters are to embrace the party\u2019s progressive wing. Republican Mike Rogers has sought to portray Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, who would be the nation\u2019s first \u200cMuslim senator if he wins the November 3 election, as sympathetic to Islamist extremism, which El-Sayed denies and supporters say is Islamophobic. Rogers has also argued that El-Sayed\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english"],"gutentor_comment":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}