El-Sayed defeats Rogers in Michigan, becoming the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate

Democrat Abdul El-Sayed has won Michigan's open U.S. Senate seat, defeating Republican Mike Rogers$ in a race that drew more than a quarter of a billion dollars in disclosed spending and became a proxy fight over Israel, Islam and the direction of the Democratic Party. The Associated Press called the race shortly after 2:25 a.m. ET on Wednesday. At that point, with roughly 85% of the expected vote counted, El-Sayed led 51.9% to 46.1%, the Washington Examiner reported. AFP put his lead at nearly six points when the networks made their calls. Final certified totals will take days.

El-Sayed, 42, will be the first Muslim elected to the Senate. He keeps in Democratic hands a seat the party has held since 1979 and that retiring Sen. Gary Peters$ is vacating. Rogers, 63, a former House Intelligence Committee chairman, loses his second Senate race in two years. As of publication, no concession statement from Rogers had been reported by the outlets reviewed for this story, and his campaign had not responded to requests for comment from several of them.

What the numbers say so far

The margin, if it holds, is a sharp change from 2024. That year Rogers lost to Democrat Elissa Slotkin$ by 0.34 points, or 19,006 votes, while Donald Trump carried the state by about 1.4 points, according to the Washington Examiner's summary of the official results.

Sources: Washington Examiner for the 2026 partial count and the 2024 figures. The 2026 row is a partial count at the time of the AP call, not a final result.

The result landed near the center of the final polling. Every public poll released in the last two weeks of the race showed El-Sayed ahead, by margins of 1 to 11 points, and 270toWin's average put the gap at 5.9 points, as 567politics reported on Election Day. A 2-point John Zogby Strategies poll and a 1-point Trafalgar result were the outliers on the low end; a New York Times/Siena survey showing an 11-point lead was the outlier on the high end.

Michigan was one of several Democratic holds and flips that gave the party control of the Senate. The AP projected the Democratic majority just after 11:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday, after flips in Texas, South Carolina, Kansas, Ohio, Iowa and North Carolina. 567politics' overview of the Senate results covers the national picture.

What El-Sayed said

El-Sayed claimed victory before a crowd of supporters in Detroit early Wednesday. "Michigan, we did it!" he said, according to AFP. "I am so proud and honored to stand here as your senator-elect from the great state of Michigan."

He addressed Trump directly, Al Jazeera reported: "Donald – I know you struggled with my name." He added that after Vice President JD Vance swears him in in January, Trump can "just go on to call me Senator." To parents, he said: "To all the parents who struggled to explain why the president openly mocks someone for their name or how they pray, let them know tomorrow that the bad guys lost."$

He also framed the result as a test of money in politics. "We showed that in a battle between the money and the many that the many can win," he said. He repeated his core platform: lower costs, getting money out of politics, Medicare for All and an end to funding foreign wars. He criticized spending tax dollars on "dropping bombs on somebody else and their kids."

How the race was fought

The contest was expensive even by Michigan standards. Bridge Michigan reported more than $270 million in disclosed spending as of October, not counting money from groups that do not disclose their donors. The 2024 Rogers–Slotkin race, by comparison, drew $217 million in disclosed spending. El-Sayed raised $30.7 million in the third quarter, which Bridge described as a Michigan record, against $9.7 million for Rogers. Outside groups had spent nearly $95 million to boost Rogers and $42 million for El-Sayed as of mid-October, according to the same report.

Pro-Israel groups were a major part of that outside money. Responsible Statecraft, a publication of the Quincy Institute, which favors a restrained foreign policy, reported that the main AIPAC-affiliated super PAC spent $30.6 million in the Democratic primary to defeat El-Sayed, and cited Sludge's reporting that AIPAC-linked super PACs spent at least $12.7 million against him in the general election. 567politics has not independently verified those figures against Federal Election Commission filings. Neither candidate's profile on this site yet carries a verified FEC funding snapshot, so no career or cycle funding totals are stated here.

Three disputes shaped the final weeks:

Israel and Gaza. El-Sayed called the war in Gaza a genocide. "If you can't call it what it is, which is a genocide, then how are you going to stand up to Donald Trump?" he said, Time reported. In an ABC News interview released on Election Day, he said, "I think it's time for us to realize that Israel is actually not our friend," according to Israel Hayom. Asked whether Israel or Iran posed the greater threat to the United States, he said, "Both of them have proven dangerous in their own way," the Washington Examiner reported. State Rep. Noah Arbit, founder of the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus, criticized the "not a friend" remark.

The Temple Israel attack. After a truck-ramming attack at a synagogue preschool in West Bloomfield in March, El-Sayed made remarks that many Jewish voters took as explaining the attack away. He later apologized, mainly for the timing. Jordan Acker, a Democrat on the University of Michigan Board of Regents, told the Times of Israel: "For a lot of Jewish Michiganders, 'Hurt people hurt people' was an unforgivable way to talk about us."

The Stevens endorsement. Rep. Haley Stevens, who lost the August primary to El-Sayed by about one point, endorsed Rogers on Sunday, November 1, after a church service in Detroit. 567politics covered the endorsement when it happened. On X she wrote: "Our Democratic nominee for Senate said I was no longer welcome in his campaign and that I should stay away. And he's right. And that's why I am endorsing Mike Rogers for the United States Senate today," Al Jazeera reported. She had demanded that El-Sayed condemn an ad by Rebellion PAC, an independent group, that tied U.S. military aid to Israel to grocery prices. El-Sayed said his campaign did not make the ad and that he disagreed with its message, and that Stevens "seems intent on relitigating a primary that ended three months ago," CBS News reported.$

The endorsement's effect is hard to measure. Most final polls finished interviewing before it. Rep. Debbie Dingell told CBS on Monday that it was "galvanizing many communities" behind El-Sayed, and his campaign said it raised more than $2.4 million on the day of the endorsement, a figure that has not been independently verified. Rogers told NewsNation the endorsement showed El-Sayed was "angry and divisive." The result does not settle the question, since no poll isolated the endorsement's effect and the final margin was close to the pre-endorsement polling average.$

Religion and rhetoric

Trump's attacks on El-Sayed's faith were a recurring theme. At a Michigan rally nine days before the election, Trump called El-Sayed a Muslim Brotherhood member and warned that his election would "invite hordes of jihadis to our shores," Time reported. Time described the Muslim Brotherhood claim as baseless. Israel Hayom reported that Trump called him "a jihadist" at a Sunday rally and joked that he would have to pass through a metal detector before entering the Senate. Trump repeatedly used El-Sayed's middle name, Mohamed. The night before the election, Trump posted on Truth Social that El-Sayed "Hates Jews and Hates Blacks," according to Time.

Rogers raised questions about El-Sayed's family's ties to organizations linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, which Time also described as baseless, and said Dave Portnoy was "exactly right" after the Barstool Sports founder called El-Sayed a "terrorist." El-Sayed answered the name attacks at his own event: "I'll be Senator Mohamed to you, bro," per Israel Hayom.

Some voters said religion decided their vote. Bridge Michigan quoted a first-time voter at Michigan State University who backed Rogers: "I come from a Christian background. I just personally can't get behind someone with a Muslim faith." Others cited El-Sayed's health care platform or, on the other side, his record on antisemitism.

Rogers, for his part, tried to put distance between himself and parts of Trump's agenda. He called for an end to the war with Iran and the trade fight with Canada, and ran an ad saying "Canada is not our enemy," per Time. He had earlier adopted some of Trump's claims about election fraud. In October 2025 he said, without evidence, that a van had delivered ballots to a Detroit counting site to swing the 2024 result against him; official results and a state audit confirmed his loss, and he had conceded at the time without raising fraud claims, the Detroit News reported.

Who El-Sayed is

El-Sayed was born and raised in suburban Detroit, the son of Egyptian immigrants. He graduated from the University of Michigan, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and earned a medical degree from Columbia, though he never practiced medicine, according to Time. He taught epidemiology at Columbia, then ran Detroit's health department after the city's bankruptcy and later Wayne County's health and human services department. He ran for governor in 2018 and lost the Democratic primary to Gretchen Whitmer.

His platform centered on Medicare for All, higher taxes on the wealthy and limits on corporate money in politics. He is not a democratic socialist, as NPR's report noted, but he campaigned with Bernie Sanders$ and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez$ and had the backing of prominent figures on the party's left. Barack Obama also campaigned for him. Trump, Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson$ campaigned for Rogers.

What it means in Washington

El-Sayed arrives in a Senate where Democrats will hold the majority for the first time since January 2025. His positions on Israel, on a single-payer health system and on ending the war with Iran put him to the left of most of his new colleagues. The AP's Election Day survey found about six in ten voters nationally said the United States made the wrong decision in taking military action against Iran, a finding covered in 567politics' report on the 2026 exit polls. That does not mean a majority of Michigan voters backed El-Sayed's specific foreign policy positions; no representative poll measuring Michigan opinion on his Israel stance was available for this story.

Michigan's place early in the 2028 presidential nominating calendar gives El-Sayed a platform within the party. The question of whether his approach is a model for Democrats or a liability is already contested, as the Differing perspectives section below shows.

What people are saying online

567politics reviewed the hot listings of r/politics, r/Conservative, r/neoliberal and r/moderatepolitics on the morning of November 4 through a read-only mirror, because Reddit's own site was not reachable from our tools. Comment threads could not be opened, so only post titles, scores and comment counts are reported. X could not be opened directly during this run, so X posts are quoted only as reported by named publishers. None of this is a measure of public opinion; it shows which stories drew attention on these forums.

Scores and comment counts were read at about 7 a.m. ET on November 4 and change constantly. Links: r/politics thread, r/Conservative thread, r/moderatepolitics thread.

On r/Conservative, earlier threads in the same listing had framed the race around El-Sayed's association with the streamer Hasan Piker and around an Arab American PAC supporting him; those were among the subreddit's most-commented posts of Election Day. On r/neoliberal, the race drew less attention than Texas and South Carolina, where Democrats flipped Republican seats.

On X, the prediction market Kalshi posted that El-Sayed's contract had reached a record 85% on Election Day. That is a contract price, not a poll. The Times of Israel described a Southfield law firm conference room used as an election day "war room" by Jewish volunteers supporting Rogers; one of them, Shimon Levy, said, "I do not think I can look at a Jewish American Abdul voters the same way after these elections."

Among supporters at the Detroit victory party, AFP quoted Trunetta Roach, 75: "We are sick and tired of being sick and tired." Eboni Taylor of Higher Heights, a group that supports Black women candidates, said El-Sayed had "gone places where I just would not expect to see him."

What remains unknown

Several facts were not available when this story was published. The final vote count, including the share of absentee ballots in the late count, has not been certified. Rogers had not issued a public concession in the reports reviewed. The full picture of outside spending will come only when post-election FEC reports are filed in December. And whether the Stevens endorsement moved votes in either direction cannot be answered from the data now available. 567politics will update this story when the count is certified. For background on the seat, see the Michigan U.S. Senate race page, and for how this site handles polls, see the methodology.

Differing perspectives

Should Democrats treat El-Sayed's platform on Israel, health care and money in politics as a model for the party after his Michigan win?

Each position is summarized as its supporters make it, with equal weight and in alphabetical order. A summary is not an endorsement; the evidence for each is weighed in the story above.

• Focus on unity and affordability, settle the policy fight later

  Who holds it: Rep. Debbie Dingell and other Michigan Democratic leaders who backed the nominee without endorsing his Israel positions

  Dingell and party leaders argue that the immediate lesson is about coalition and turnout, not any single policy. She said the Stevens endorsement was "galvanizing many communities" behind El-Sayed, including Black pastors who asked who said Stevens spoke for them, and urged colleagues not to "make more drama" over the split. In this view Democrats should bank the seat, keep the focus on costs and health care that united their voters, and work out internal differences on Israel through debate rather than public breaks.

  In their words: CBS News, quoting Rep. Debbie Dingell ↗

• No: his Israel rhetoric alienates Jewish voters and the center

  Who holds it: Rep. Haley Stevens, some Michigan Jewish Democrats including Regent Jordan Acker and State Rep. Noah Arbit

  Stevens and other Michigan Democrats argue that El-Sayed's language about Israel and his response to the Temple Israel attack crossed into antisemitism and drove away voters the party needs. Stevens said she could not "stand with hate" or with the streamer Hasan Piker, called an outside PAC ad linking aid to Israel with grocery prices antisemitic, and said she was endorsing Rogers because the nominee told her she was no longer welcome. They say a win in a strong Democratic year does not prove the approach is safe elsewhere, and that it leaves lasting damage inside the party's coalition.

  In their words: Al Jazeera, quoting Stevens's X posts and CNN interview ↗

• Yes: the result shows the platform can win a swing state

  Who holds it: Abdul El-Sayed, his campaign, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and allied progressive groups

  El-Sayed and his allies argue that he won a state Trump carried in 2024 while running openly on Medicare for All, ending funding for foreign wars and getting corporate money out of politics, and while facing tens of millions of dollars in outside spending against him. In his victory speech he said the race showed that "in a battle between the money and the many that the many can win." They point to his record fundraising from small donors and to large crowds in conservative areas as evidence that voters respond to a direct message on costs and corruption rather than to caution.

  In their words: Al Jazeera, quoting El-Sayed's victory speech ↗