Abdul El-Sayed Makes History: First Muslim American Ever Elected to the U.S. Senate
Michigan made history in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Abdul El-Sayed defeated former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers to win the state’s open U.S. Senate seat — and when he is sworn in this January, the 42-year-old physician will become the first Muslim American ever to serve in the United States Senate. The Associated Press called the race at 2:27 a.m. Eastern.
Story: Associated Press race call and results; reporting from the Detroit Free Press, Reuters, USA Today and CNN.
El-Sayed was born in Michigan — in Rochester Hills, in metro Detroit — to parents who immigrated from Egypt, and he built his career in public health rather than politics. An epidemiologist with a medical degree from Columbia and a doctorate from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, he was appointed to run the Detroit Health Department in 2015, at 30 years old the youngest health officer of a major American city at the time. From 2023 to 2025, he directed Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services, serving a county of 1.8 million people. He had never held elected office before this race.
The seat was open because Sen. Gary Peters, a Democrat, is retiring after two terms. The race to replace him became the most expensive Senate contest in Michigan history — more than $400 million spent overall, per the Detroit News — and the money was not on El-Sayed’s side. Since the start of 2025, Rogers and the outside groups supporting him outspent El-Sayed and his allies by roughly three-to-two, according to Federal Election Commission disclosures.
The final weeks brought two storms at once. Outside attack ads targeted El-Sayed’s Muslim faith, describing him in terms the Detroit Free Press called unfair — including claims of extremist sympathies that he denied and that remained unsupported by evidence, per Reuters. Then, on Sunday, two days before the election, Rep. Haley Stevens — the fellow Democrat El-Sayed had narrowly beaten in the August primary — crossed party lines and endorsed Rogers, appearing alongside him at a Detroit church and announcing her support in a video. Party leaders condemned the move. It did not change the outcome.
El-Sayed declared victory to supporters in Detroit at about 1:30 a.m., telling the crowd: “Michigan, we did it.” Per the AP’s count, he finished with 2,480,577 votes to Rogers’ 2,154,946, with an estimated 96 percent of the vote counted.
From running Detroit’s health department to a seat no Muslim American has ever held — what does a night like this mean for every kid who has ever been told their name or their faith makes them an outsider in this country? Let us know in the comments.
