Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed defeated Republican Mike Rogers on Tuesday, becoming the most radical candidate elected to the upper chamber in U.S. history. El-Sayed bested Rogers after a tumultuous campaign in which he embraced noxiously antisemitic podcasters, clerics, and donors.
El-Sayed carried 52 percent of the vote to Rogers's 46 percent when the race was called early Wednesday morning. His win is a major boost to the Democratic Party’s increasingly powerful anti-Israel faction and is likely to give a megaphone to the antisemitic and anti-Israel activists on the far left, for whom El-Sayed is likely to become a leading figure.
El-Sayed’s victory caps a turbulent race in which his primary opponent, Democratic congresswoman Haley Stevens, threw her support to Rogers two days before the election. Stevens said she objected to El-Sayed’s campaign of "hate" after he refused to condemn a campaign ad produced by supporters of El-Sayed that blamed Israel for the price of groceries and suggested American taxpayers are underwriting the costs of health care in the Jewish state.
"Blaming Israel for the price of eggs and elevating Tucker Carlson are not the way to build trust or bring people together," Stevens said, referring to a second ad in which El-Sayed touted Carlson’s support for his campaign.
Stevens’s defection drew harsh condemnations from national Democratic leaders, and she was booted from the Michigan Democratic Party.
El-Sayed campaigned on a single-payer Medicare for All health care policy and made opposition to Israel—and its American supporters—a central focus of his campaign, stumping alongside Hasan Piker, a Marxist podcaster who has said "America deserved 9/11," called Jewish people "inbred," and praised Mao Zedong.
During the final days of the election, El-Sayed ran ads touting the support of Carlson, the former Fox News host who has favorably featured Holocaust deniers on his podcast.
Throughout the race, El-Sayed drew criticism for his personal and family connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and other terrorist groups.
In 2012, the Democrat signed a letter supporting the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt. El-Sayed’s mother worked for an American Islamic charity that was designated as a terrorist group for allegedly funding Osama bin Laden. His father sits on the board of a charity that was raided by the FBI for allegedly funneling money to Saddam Hussein, the Washington Free Beacon reported last week.
While El-Sayed told NBC News that his family had no connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, his half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, wrote in unearthed social media posts that her family "has long been" in the Muslim Brotherhood and her mother was an activist with the group while living in Egypt, the Free Beacon reported.
El-Sayed’s father-in-law, Jukaku Tayeb, also serves on the board of the Islamic Society of North America Founders Committee, which was an unindicted co-conspirators in the landmark terrorist financing case United States v. Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. Tayeb was one of the largest donors to a super PAC backing El-Sayed.
During his campaign, El-Sayed repeatedly declined to criticize the Iranian regime, arguing instead that Iran and Israel posed an equal threat to the United States
He privately told his communications staffers in March that he wanted to avoid commenting on Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei’s assassination, because "there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad" about his death, according to audio of the meeting obtained by the Free Beacon.
