Abdul El-Sayed wins Michigan Senate seat, the first Muslim elected to the US Senate

Abdul El-Sayed has won Michigan's US Senate race, beating Republican Mike Rogers for the seat left open by retiring Democratic Senator Gary Peters, and his reported win makes him the first Muslim elected to the US Senate, ProPakistani reported on Wednesday. CBS News projected the result and ARY News reported his victory speech, in which he told supporters he was "so proud and honored to stand here as your Senator-elect for the great state of Michigan."

The Michigan call came at about 12pm PKT on Wednesday 4 November, hours after networks had already projected that Democrats would take both the House and the Senate. Our US midterm results page has every race.

The count so far

Those figures, carried by ProPakistani from the count at the time, covered about 77.6% of the expected vote, with roughly 1.1 million ballots still to count. NBC News estimated that Rogers would need about 58.7% of what was left to catch up, which is why the networks called the race.

Who Abdul El-Sayed is

• Background: an Egyptian-American Muslim, born in Michigan.
• Doctor and epidemiologist: a medical degree from Columbia University and a doctorate from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar; he later taught epidemiology at Columbia.
• Public health record: head of the Detroit Health Department from 2015 to 2017, and of Wayne County's Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services from 2023 to 2025.
• Politics: he first ran in Michigan's 2018 Democratic primary for governor. This year he beat Representative Haley Stevens in the Democratic Senate primary before facing Rogers.
• Platform: universal healthcare (he co-wrote Medicare for All: A Citizen's Guide), lower everyday costs and support for unions. He points to a medical debt relief scheme that he says cleared $700 million of debt for Michigan residents.

"One of the ugliest campaigns"

In his speech El-Sayed said he had faced racist and Islamophobic attacks, calling the effort against him "one of the ugliest campaigns we've seen in our lifetimes", and described Rogers's advertising as "an astroturfed, corporate-funded advertising campaign built to deceive and distract", ARY reported. He also noted that President Trump had struggled to pronounce his name, and told him he could now call him "Senator".

Why it is being watched in Pakistan

Muslim voters in Michigan, one of the largest Arab and Muslim communities in the US, around Dearborn and Detroit, have been at the centre of US arguments over the Gaza and Iran wars. A Muslim senator from the state gives that community a seat in the chamber that confirms ambassadors and votes on foreign aid and war powers, and the new Democratic majority there takes office in January.

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