He credited a movement built over a year and a half of campaigning in Michigan’s biggest cities and smallest towns, and said voters gave him strength in his lowest moments.
His opponent and detractors, including Donald Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance, led a largely Islamophobic campaign against him, often pointing to his name and faith, including the president alleging he was a “jihadist” and that he would need to walk through a metal detector to get into the Senate.
El-Sayed said his denigrators chose to be divisive rather than address the cost of gas and groceries because they didn’t have an answer to the problems he said they created.
Abdul El-Sayed and his wife, Sarah Jukaku, on stage after his victory in the US midterm elections. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters
“They want an America that is too small for some of us,” El-Sayed said. “We know that America is big enough for all of us.”
Addressing Vance, he noted: “JD, habibi, there is this delicious irony in the fact that you’re constitutionally obligated to swear me in January.”
Rogers, a former congressman who was endorsed by Trump and ran as his close ally, previously lost the 2024 Senate race to Elissa Slotkin by roughly 0.3 percentage points.
This time he ran against El-Sayed, a former Wayne county health director who upset the Democratic establishment favourite Haley Stevens in the primary earlier this year. He advocated for the Medicare for All proposal for universal healthcare and called for an end to US military aid for Israel.
Schumer needs very much to be held to task over his hand-picked Michigan Senate candidate, Stevems, and her uncertain endorsement BS. Schumer can really pick losers, and that needs to be said and then reemphasized. He's part of the problem, not part of any solution.
