Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive Democrat with a background in public health, has defeated former Representative Mike Rogers in Michigan’s open Senate race on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, making him the first Muslim elected to the United States Senate. 

His victory keeps the seat in Democratic hands, denying Republicans one of their best opportunities to blunt the Democratic wave that has defined this year’s midterm elections. The retirement of Senator Gary Peters, a Democrat, at the end of the current Congress had set up one of the country’s most competitive Senate contests in Michigan, a perennial battleground that President Trump carried by two percentage points in 2024.

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The election of El-Sayed, 42, the son of Egyptian immigrants who was born and raised in suburban Detroit, represents a milestone in American politics and a potentially consequential shift within the Democratic Party. An outspoken critic of Israel who has championed an ambitious progressive agenda, he joins a growing contingent of left-wing Democrats who have prevailed in elections this year. But unlike other prominent progressive victories in reliably Democratic districts, El-Sayed’s came in a closely divided statewide race where both parties have spent years competing for the support of working-class voters, suburban moderates, and an increasingly diverse electorate.

His win also offers Democrats a striking counterpoint to the argument, advanced by some of the party’s more moderate figures, that progressive candidates are too politically vulnerable to compete in battleground states. El-Sayed, who rejects the socialist label, prevailed despite a bruising campaign that exposed deep divisions among Democrats over Israel, drew millions of dollars in spending from pro-Israel groups, and culminated in an extraordinary rupture with his former primary opponent, Representative Haley Stevens, who endorsed Rogers just two days before the election.

Read more: Trump Invites Haley Stevens to Join GOP as Democrats Condemn Her ‘Betrayal’

A campaign marked by personal attacks

The campaign had turned strikingly ugly in its closing weeks, with Trump and other prominent Republicans invoking Islamophobic stereotypes to portray El-Sayed as a threat to American security. He faced considerable heat for campaigning with Hasan Piker, the incendiary anti-Israel streamer who said that “America deserved 9/11” and that the U.S. was responsible for more terror than Al Qaeda. Some Jewish voters accused El-Sayed of trafficking in antisemitic rhetoric through criticism of Israel and his suggestion that American military assistance to the country had come at the expense of domestic priorities. (El-Sayed has rejected allegations of antisemitism, arguing that his criticism of the Israeli government should not be conflated with hostility to Jewish people). The accusations and counteraccusations reverberated across Michigan’s large Muslim and Jewish communities, turning an election already fraught with national implications into an unusually personal and painful contest. 

At a rally in Michigan nine days before the election, Trump baselessly described El-Sayed as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood—an Islamist political movement—and warned that his election would bring terrorists into the country. “If Abdul and the Democrats win, they will open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadis to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas,” Trump told thousands of supporters. The President also repeatedly called El-Sayed by his middle name—Mohamed, which critics described as a dog whistle—and told supporters that he wanted El-Sayed to go through a metal detector to enter the Capitol. The night before the election, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “Abdul El-Sayed Hates Jews and Hates Blacks. Don’t feel bad, he also Hates Whites.” The rhetoric underscored the extent to which El-Sayed had become a national target for Republicans this cycle.

Rogers, 63, a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, also raised baseless allegations about El-Sayed’s family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed has publicly disavowed the movement and denied allegations that he or his family has ties with itWhen Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, called El-Sayed a “terrorist,” Rogers responded on social media that Portnoy was “exactly right.” 

For El-Sayed, the attacks recalled doubts he had encountered long before entering politics. In an interview with TIME in May, El-Sayed recounted a conversation with former President Bill Clinton after delivering a student commencement address at the University of Michigan in 2007. Clinton, who had also spoken at the ceremony, suggested that the young graduate might consider running for public office one day. El-Sayed remembered laughing at the idea. “I don’t know if you saw my name,” he recalled telling Clinton. “It’s not going to work out for me.”

Nearly two decades later, El-Sayed has made history in a state where the political influence of Muslim Americans has grown considerably. His path to the Senate was hardly conventional. A graduate of the University of Michigan and a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, El-Sayed earned his medical degree from Columbia University but did not practice medicine. Instead, he became an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia before taking leadership positions in public health in Detroit and Wayne County. In 2018, he mounted an unsuccessful campaign for governor of Michigan, drawing comparisons to former President Barack Obama with his charismatic public speaking.

El-Sayed sought to make his election for Senate a referendum on Trump, whose approval rating had fallen sharply in Michigan since his narrow victory there two years earlier. A New York Times/Siena University poll conducted in September found that just 34% of likely voters approved of the President’s performance. “Michigan knows Trump is on the ballot on Nov. 3,” El-Sayed said in the closing days of the campaign, arguing that voters would reject Rogers as a loyal supporter of the President.

Rogers had sought to establish some distance from the Trump Administration on issues that have proved unpopular in Michigan, including tariffs on Canadian goods and the ongoing war with Iran. In one campaign advertisement, the Republican declared that “Canada is not our enemy,” a notable departure from the President’s confrontational approach toward the neighboring country, whose economy is closely intertwined with Michigan’s automobile industry.

But Rogers struggled to escape the broader political environment confronting Republicans. His defeat suggested that the backlash against Trump had extended into a state that had helped return him to the White House, even as the President devoted considerable attention to the Senate contest.

A progressive platform and divisions over Israel

El-Sayed campaigned on an expansive progressive platform that included Medicare for All, higher taxes on the wealthy, and a challenge to the influence of corporate money in American politics. His campaign cast the rising cost of living and the power of wealthy donors as interconnected problems, arguing that the political establishment had become more responsive to powerful financial interests than to the economic concerns of ordinary Americans. He will also arrive in Washington as one of the Senate’s most outspoken critics of Israel. 

The Detroit suburbs are home to some of the country’s most established Muslim and Jewish communities, whose members have long played important roles in Democratic politics. Those communities have experienced the past several years very differently, particularly since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza. In 2024, Arab and Muslim activists in Michigan helped organize the “Uncommitted” movement, encouraging Democratic primary voters to withhold their support from President Joe Biden in protest of his Administration’s backing of Israel. The campaign exposed tensions within the Democratic coalition that continued into the general election, when Trump carried Michigan. Two years later, El-Sayed’s candidacy gave many of those same voters a chance to elect a senator who shared their opposition to American support for Israel’s military operations.

El-Sayed has described the war in Gaza as a genocide and argued that American assistance to Israel should instead be directed toward domestic needs, including schools and health care. His positions placed him at odds with much of the Democratic establishment and made him a principal target of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the influential pro-Israel lobbying organization that spent tens of millions of dollars opposing him during the Democratic primary and continued its efforts in the general election.

El-Sayed told TIME in May that Israel has evolved into a kind of moral Rorschach test for American politicians. “If you can’t call it what it is,” he said, “which is a genocide, then how are you going to stand up to Donald Trump? How are you going to stand up to pharma CEOs?”

The same campaign that energized Muslim voters also unsettled many Jewish Democrats, some of whom believed El-Sayed’s rhetoric had contributed to an increasingly hostile atmosphere for their community. Those concerns were especially acute after a violent attack in March at Temple Israel, a synagogue in West Bloomfield, where a man drove a truck into the building, narrowly missing classrooms occupied by young children. El-Sayed condemned the attack but sparked outrage when he suggested in a social media video that “hurt people hurt people,” referring to the attacker’s loss of relatives in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon. He later apologized for the comments, but the episode remained a source of anger among Jewish voters who believed his remarks had appeared to rationalize an act of antisemitic violence.

A Democratic rift over Israel

Lingering tensions complicated El-Sayed’s efforts to consolidate Democratic support after his narrow primary victory over Stevens, a more moderate Democrat who had received substantial backing from pro-Israel donors and party establishment figures. The two appeared together at a unity breakfast shortly after the August primary, but their relationship deteriorated over the following months. Stevens accused El-Sayed of failing to adequately confront antisemitism among his supporters and demanded that he condemn an advertisement produced by an allied political action committee that linked American support for Israel to rising grocery prices. El-Sayed eventually denounced the advertisement, but he also accused Stevens of trying to reopen their primary fight

As the dispute intensified, he publicly made clear that he did not want her joining him at a planned church appearance in Detroit on the final Sunday before the election. The next morning, Stevens stunned Democrats by arriving at the church alongside Rogers and announcing that she would vote for the Republican. “I’m here with the person who I am voting for for United States Senate and that is Mike Rogers,” she told reporters after the service.

The endorsement was an extraordinary act of defection by a sitting Democratic congresswoman, particularly in a race that both parties regarded as potentially decisive to control of the Senate.

El-Sayed sought to minimize the controversy, telling reporters that “none of this matters.” But the episode revealed the difficulty he faced in bringing together a coalition whose members held profoundly different views about Israel and the direction of the Democratic Party.

His election now raises questions about how the Democratic Party will accommodate a growing progressive faction whose positions on foreign policy, economic inequality, and the influence of wealthy donors increasingly challenge those of its traditional leadership.

For a Democratic Party still debating how to rebuild its coalition and confront Trump, El-Sayed’s victory is likely to become a touchstone in the argument over what kind of party Democrats want to become.