Abdul El-Sayed, son of Egyptian immigrants, becomes the first Muslim elected to the US Senate
He lost a race for governor in 2018 and won his Senate primary by less than a point. On Tuesday he beat Mike Rogers to hold Michigan for the Democrats.
Detroit — Abdul El-Sayed, the son of Egyptian immigrants, has won Michigan's open US Senate seat and will be the first Muslim elected to the chamber.
The 42-year-old Democrat defeated the Republican former congressman Mike Rogers, with the Associated Press calling the race early on Wednesday. Early counts had him at about 52.5% to 45.5%. He succeeds Gary Peters, who is retiring.
"My name is Abdul Rahman Mohammed El-Sayed," he told supporters at a rally, according to the BBC.
An academic start
El-Sayed grew up in the Detroit suburbs, where his father was a mechanical engineering professor and an imam. He studied at the University of Michigan, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and took a medical degree at Columbia University, where he later taught epidemiology.
In 2015, aged 30, he was appointed to run the Detroit Health Department. He left in 2017 to run for governor and came second to Gretchen Whitmer in the 2018 Democratic primary, with about 30% of the vote. He then returned to public health as head of health, human and veterans services in Wayne County, a job he left in April 2025 to run for the Senate.
The narrowest of primaries
He won the August primary against Representative Haley Stevens by less than a point, 48.4% to 47.6%. National Democrats had questioned whether a progressive could win in a state that voted for Donald Trump twice.
He campaigned on Medicare for All, higher taxes on the wealthy and limits on corporate money in politics, and he framed the contest around Trump, whose approval in Michigan stood at 34% in a September New York Times/Siena poll. "Michigan knows Trump is on the ballot on Nov. 3," he said in the closing days.
A bitter campaign
Time described the race as unusually personal and bitter, divided in part over Israel. Trump warned at a rally that El-Sayed's election would "open the floodgates" to "hordes of jihadis", and accused him of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed denied the claim, and Time described it as baseless. Two days before the vote, Stevens endorsed Rogers.
He will be sworn in when the new Senate meets in January.
Source: Time, CBS News, BBC via Yahoo News, Fox News, Wikipedia, November 2026.
