“Donald … Call Me Senator”: Abdul El-Sayed Wins by 7 in Triumph Over GOP Bigotry

Abdul El-Sayed walloped his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, in Michigan on Tuesday, marking a massive triumph over the strategy of flat-out Islamophobic bigotry that Donald Trump, the GOP, and even many liberals embraced in the months of fierce campaigning against the progressive pro-Palestine senator-elect.

“They went all in on one of the ugliest campaigns we’ve seen in our lifetimes,” said El-Sayed in his victory speech early Wednesday morning. “They weren’t just attacking me. They were targeting and attacking you. They were targeting and attacking the very idea of America.”

With over 95 percent of votes counted, El-Sayed had 52.5 percent of the vote compared to Rogers’s 45.5 percent — matching the exact margin that El-Sayed predicted he would win back in May.

This is despite Trump and Republicans making him one of their primary targets this midterm cycle, with Trump spewing Islamophobic hate and incitement to violence against El-Sayed nearly every time he spoke at a rally or with the media. At a rally in Michigan in late October, Trump said El-Sayed is a “jihadist” and that the Senate should install a metal detector just to screen him.

He and others like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) suggested that El-Sayed was violent with no evidence, pointing only to his faith. After winning the primary in August, Rogers’s first statement suggested that El-Sayed was a terrorist. “I spent years hunting terrorists and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice,” he said.

Liberal pundits and politicians, too, joined in on the bigoted pile-ons; El-Sayed’s AIPAC-backed primary opponent, Haley Stevens, used hateful tropes against him during the bitter primary race, and she ultimately issued a surprise endorsement of Rogers two days before the election.

El-Sayed often spoke out against the hate, hammering people like Trump and Vice President JD Vance. He also kept a laser-focus on his agenda: Medicare for All, banning corporate money in politics, and opposing further assistance to Israel.

On Wednesday night, El-Sayed said that his win was for “all the parents who struggled to explain why the president openly mocked” people like him.

“Mike, enjoy your retirement…. You chose hate, and Michigan chose hope. May we never have to see the likes of you in this state ever again,” he said.

“JD, habibi. There is this delicious irony that you’re constitutionally obligated to swear me in in January,” El-Sayed went on, to raucous cheers from the crowd. “Donald, I know you struggled with my name. So after JD swears me in in January, you can just go on and call me senator.”

El-Sayed also spoke out against the pro-Israel lobby, with AIPAC pouring a record amount into the election to defeat him. He espoused the “love” that he has for the Palestinian people, drawing a sharp contrast to the hatred levied against him.

“To AIPAC who spent $42 million against us: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to beat you twice,” he said. “They try to call you hateful if you believe that Palestinian kids should get to grow up in the land of their forefathers, to not be murdered by our tax dollars. If you believe in equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination, that’s not hate, it’s love.”

The corporate media waged an all-out attack on El-Sayed, in part due to his stances on Israel. Outlets like The New York Times ran stories about him losing Jewish voters and accusing him of antisemitism, without evidence. Corporate outlets also spread a narrative that he had “struggled to win over Black voters” in the state, as Politico wrote on Sunday, or that many Democrats were peeling off from him to vote for Rogers.

But Tuesday’s result shows that these narratives were overblown. Exit polls suggested that Jewish people overwhelmingly went for El-Sayed, and data from VoteHub finds that El-Sayed won majority-Black districts by a whopping 81-point margin. The “Democrats for Mike Rogers” PAC, which poured millions into the race, was revealed by Truthout in October to be a Republican front group.

Progressives in the movement for Palestinian rights also notched several wins across Michigan on Tuesday. Progressive activist William Lawrence, a cofounder of the Sunrise Movement, won his race for U.S. House 51 to 48, unseating the Republican incumbent.

Lawrence won in the face of massive spending by the GOP. According to a progressive booster, AdImpact data shows that Republicans spent $23 million against Lawrence, marking the biggest spend against a Democratic House candidate this cycle.

Democratic Socialist Donavan McKinney, who has called for an arms embargo to Israel, won his race to represent Detroit in the U.S. House by a landslide.

Attorney Amir Makled, who represented pro-Palestine student protesters in their case against University of Michigan, won his election to the university’s Board of Regents in a blowout.

And Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), the only Palestinian American in Congress, easily won her reelection, 76 to 21 — a 55-point margin.