In Michigan’s open Senate race, a progressive physician and a former FBI agent are fighting over Iran, gas prices and tariffs. They are also fighting over a question no Senate race has had to answer before.
In the last debate of Michigan’s Senate race on Wednesday night, Mike Rogers turned to his opponent and asked whether he was for America or for terrorist groups overseas. Abdul El-Sayed, a Michigan-born physician and the son of Egyptian immigrants, answered that the question was beneath him. “It’s really quite beneath you to call into question my loyalty to the Constitution,” he said.
Twelve days before the Nov. 3 election, that exchange captures what makes this race different. El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee, would be the first Muslim ever elected to the U.S. Senate. Rogers, a Republican former congressman and FBI agent, is trying to become the first Republican to win a Senate race in Michigan since 1994. The seat, open since Democratic Sen. Gary Peters retired, could help decide which party controls the chamber.
The polling is close. El-Sayed has led narrowly in most surveys since the summer, including a Marist poll taken Oct. 15-18 that had him at 50% to Rogers’ 48%. The RealClearPolitics average puts his lead at 2 points. Underneath those numbers is a harder question: how much a candidate’s religion, and his family’s history, should matter to the people deciding whether he can represent them.
The doctor
El-Sayed came to politics through public health rather than the state legislature. A Rhodes Scholar with medical training and a public health research career, he led Detroit’s health department in the years after the city’s bankruptcy and later served as Wayne County’s health director. His political message has stayed consistent: that people’s health depends on their wages, their housing and the air they breathe, and that government should do more about all of it.
He first ran statewide in 2018, for governor. That campaign drew national attention for his age, his faith and his plan for single-payer health care in Michigan, and it ended with a loss to Gretchen Whitmer in the Democratic primary. He came back this cycle with the backing of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a platform built on Medicare for All, and positions that include calling Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide and, earlier in his career, supporting abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The primary tested whether that platform could win in a swing state. It began as a three-way race with Rep. Haley Stevens and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who dropped out in July. On Aug. 4, El-Sayed beat Stevens 48.5% to 47.5%, overcoming more than $60 million in spending, most of it from pro-Israel groups, according to Al Jazeera. Stevens, McMorrow, Whitmer and Peters all endorsed him afterward. The margin was a reminder that half the party’s voters had picked someone else.
The agent
Rogers grew up in Livingston County, worked in a Michigan factory, served in the Army and became an FBI special agent before winning a state Senate seat in 1994. He spent 14 years in the U.S. House, where he chaired the Intelligence Committee, the post his campaign calls his greatest mark in Congress. He left in 2015 for the private sector.
He came close to a Senate seat once already. In 2024 he lost the race to succeed Debbie Stabenow to Democrat Elissa Slotkin, taking 48.3% of the vote. This time he entered with President Trump’s endorsement, and his campaign launch pitched him as the backup Trump needs in the Senate. That is a change for a man who was once a Trump critic.
In the closing weeks, Rogers has also put some distance between himself and the president. He has called for an end to the war with Iran and to the trade war with Canada, and at Wednesday’s debate he allowed that the Canadian tariffs may not have been well thought out. His ads lean on independence: he notes that he voted against the 2008 Wall Street bailout and for the auto rescue. His pitch to wavering Democrats is that El-Sayed is too far left for Michigan, on health care, immigration, taxes and the Middle East. “You have a home with us,” he told them from the debate stage.
Faith on the ballot
The sharpest line of attack in the race has nothing to do with policy. For weeks, Rogers and his allies have tried to tie El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement founded in Egypt in 1928, which the Trump administration designated a terrorist organization last year.
The case rests on a handful of specific items. In social media posts from 2012 and 2013, El-Sayed’s maternal half-sister, a University of Chicago professor, described their mother’s activism in the Brotherhood as a college student in Egypt in the early 1970s, according to the Washington Free Beacon, which first reported the posts. In 2012, El-Sayed signed an open letter with dozens of Egyptian American community figures supporting Mohamed Morsi, the Brotherhood leader then newly elected as Egypt’s president, which urged him to purge the media and police. Rogers has also pointed out that El-Sayed’s mother once worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency, which the Treasury Department designated in 2004 as supporting terrorism. And the Free Beacon has reported that several other signers of the 2012 letter donated to his campaigns.
El-Sayed denies any tie to the group, calling it an organization he has never been part of, and has publicly disavowed it, including in a heated town hall exchange in Caro last weekend. He says he was 3 when his parents divorced, was raised by his father and stepmother, did not see his mother for years and does not know what she did in Egypt in the 1970s. He has not publicly explained why he signed the 2012 letter. He calls the attacks Islamophobic, and he has framed the core question as whether a Muslim American is presumed to hold divided loyalties. No reporting we reviewed has shown that El-Sayed himself belonged to the Brotherhood.
Rogers says this is about judgment and national security, not religion. Voters, he argues, are entitled to know about a Senate candidate’s associations, and he has said El-Sayed is casting himself as a victim to avoid answering. He has also argued that El-Sayed is losing ground with Jewish voters; at Wednesday’s debate he said some Jewish Democrats are literally afraid of his opponent.
That claim reaches into a real fault line. In March, a man drove a truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield in what authorities called a deliberate attack on Jews, injuring a security guard. El-Sayed condemned the attack, but he also said that hurt people hurt people and that violence is a cycle, a reference to the attacker having lost family in an Israeli airstrike. Critics, including Attorney General Dana Nessel, said that sounded like an excuse. In August, El-Sayed apologized to the state party’s Jewish caucus, saying he had tried to offer context when it wasn’t the time for it. Some Jewish Democrats called the apology credible. Republicans, including Vice President JD Vance, called it too late.
The polling suggests religion is shaping the race in ways the candidates can’t fully control. In a September Washington Post-Schar School poll of 803 likely Michigan voters, 45% said they would not consider voting for a Muslim for president, close to the 46% who said the same of an atheist and far above the 20% for a Jewish candidate and 7% for a Christian one. Among voters unwilling to back a Muslim president, El-Sayed ran six points behind the Democratic nominee for governor, Jocelyn Benson. The question was about the presidency, not the Senate. But it measured something real about the electorate El-Sayed is asking to trust him.
The price of gas
For most Michigan voters, the race comes down to cost. El-Sayed says drivers are paying nearly $5 a gallon, and in both debates the first big fight was over why. El-Sayed blames the war with Iran, which he says Rogers cheered on from the start, and he has tried to tie his opponent to Trump at every turn, inviting viewers on Wednesday to play “MAGA bingo” with Rogers’ answers. Rogers counters that a nuclear-armed Iran would send gas far higher, and he now says the war can end because Iran’s nuclear program and military have been badly degraded. Both men support pausing the federal gas tax.
Trade cuts closer to home. Michigan’s auto industry runs on supply chains that cross the Canadian border, and the tit-for-tat tariff fight with Canada has become one of the race’s central issues. El-Sayed wants narrower tariffs aimed at protecting auto jobs, and he has cited estimates of what the trade war has cost Michigan households. Rogers credits some tariffs with bringing work back to the state, including a third shift at Detroit Diesel, while calling for a deal to end the Canada dispute. He says he has talked with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about getting one done.
On health care, the gap is wider. El-Sayed’s Medicare for All plan would replace private insurance with a single public program; Rogers says it would push people off coverage they like and raise their taxes. On immigration, Rogers backs tougher enforcement and casts El-Sayed’s positions as too extreme for the state. They have also clashed over guns, artificial intelligence, Social Security and crime. On almost every question, El-Sayed is asking voters for a bigger federal government, and Rogers is asking them to trust a smaller one, with a promise to stand up to Trump when Michigan needs it.
What a first would mean
Muslims have served in Congress for nearly two decades. Keith Ellison of Minnesota became the first Muslim elected to the House in 2006, André Carson of Indiana followed in 2008, and Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who represents part of metro Detroit, were elected in 2018. No Muslim has ever served in the Senate, the chamber that confirms judges and cabinet secretaries and ratifies treaties.
A win for El-Sayed would change that, but it wouldn’t settle much else. Muslim Americans don’t vote as a bloc, and many in Dearborn and Hamtramck have split with Democrats over Gaza; his positions don’t speak for all of them. His election wouldn’t end the argument over U.S. policy in the Middle East, or the suspicion that the polling shows many voters still bring to a Muslim candidate. What it would show is that a Muslim candidate can win statewide in a swing state while openly practicing his faith and answering for his record like anyone else.
That last part is where the race has been hardest. El-Sayed has to defend his policies, his 2012 letter and his words after Temple Israel, the same way Rogers has to answer for his record and his shifts on Trump. Those are fair fights. The open question for Michigan voters is whether El-Sayed is also being asked to prove something no other candidate has to: that his faith doesn’t make him suspect.
Michigan voters give their answer on Nov. 3. Absentee ballots are already coming in.