DETROIT — Democrat Abdul El-Sayed is projected to win the open U.S. Senate seat in Michigan, marking a potentially pivotal moment for his party after an ugly election cycle.
Progressives nationally bet big on El-Sayed, arguing for months that a candidate on the left could win in a swing state like Michigan by focusing on economic issues with a boisterous political and personal style. His victory gives his ideological allies — including dedicated endorsers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) — a potent claim on where the Democratic Party goes from here.
El-Sayed called himself the “unlikeliest” of candidates and said Rogers ran “one of the ugliest campaigns we’ve seen in our lifetimes” at his watch party in Detroit.
“The opposition decided to try to divide us,” El-Sayed said. “At first, they pointed to my name and my faith, as if to say, ‘You know, he’s a little different’ … but we all know my name and my faith aren’t the reason you can’t afford your gas.”
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The seat was expected to be key in deciding control of the Senate, but by the time the race was called Democrats had long since won control, making El-Sayed’s win more of a buffer than a linchpin for Democrats.
A tired but ecstatic crowd at El-Sayed’s party on election night cheered as the Michigan Democrat proclaimed victory from the stage shortly before 2 a.m. ET, before the race had been called. Members of the United Auto Workers, an influential labor union in Michigan that backed El-Sayed, hugged after he left the stage.
The campaign was caught up in drama in its final days, as Rep. Haley Stevens, who lost to El-Sayed in the Democratic Senate primary, announced a surprise endorsement of Mike Rogers, the Republican in the race — a reversal from her previous support for El-Sayed.
Her shift drew fury from other Democrats, who had largely rallied around El-Sayed in the months after the primary and were incensed that the primary’s loser could help hand the seat to Republicans. El-Sayed’s campaign pulled in a record $2.4 million in fundraising on the same day of Stevens’ announcement.
“It’s a betrayal of everything that she said that she believes in,” Curtis Hertel, chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, told The Sun on Sunday. “At the end of the day, the betrayal to the party is one thing. The betrayal to her constituents is a much bigger deal.”
El-Sayed will be the first Muslim U.S. senator.
The race was among the most competitive — and nastiest — in this year’s midterms. President Donald Trump, who was backing Rogers, called El-Sayed a “jihadist,” while Rogers and others accused him of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed has disavowed the group.
El-Sayed and Rogers loudly and regularly attacked each other personally, whether it was El-Sayed questioning Rogers’ masculinity or Rogers comparing El-Sayed to a “glitchy AI chatbot.”
Stevens, in endorsing Rogers, focused on the fact that El-Sayed had disinvited her from his campaign events.
El-Sayed, a former public health official who won a grueling primary, focused much of his messaging on expanding Medicare coverage for all Americans and keeping corporate interests out of politics.
He was buoyed by public frustration over the affordability crisis and Trump, especially as gas and diesel prices rose to near record highs in Michigan. Rogers sought to distance himself from some of the president’s policies. He objected to new tariffs on Canadian goods and called for an end to the Iran war.
“He’s going to make this about him and me,” El-Sayed said of Rogers during their first debate, in October. “But really, it’s about you and whether you can afford your gas and your groceries.”
El-Sayed won his primary by only 1 percentage point against Stevens in a race dominated by an intraparty split over strategy and U.S.-Israel relations.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its affiliated groups spent a record $30 million supporting Stevens in the primary. AIPAC announced in late October that it planned to spend as much as $9 million more to defeat El-Sayed in the general election.
Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) threw themselves into campaigning for El-Sayed during the primary, giving him national progressive shine and helping to push him to victory.
Susan Fabrick, the Democratic Party chair in Muskegon County, told The Washington Sun that although there was division in her swing county during the primary, most voters were able to come together to support El-Sayed in the general election.
“The Black community here was fairly strongly behind Haley Stevens,” she said. “But I had people come in the day after the primary and say, ‘We’re going to make sure Abdul wins.’ These were people who had supported somebody else.”
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