A bitter battle for an open US Senate seat in Michigan has exposed deep religious and political rifts across the state, as Republican nominee Mike Rogers aggressively courts Jewish voters while targeting Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, who would become the first Muslim member of the chamber if elected on Nov. 3.
The contest between Rogers, a former congressman, and El-Sayed, a former public health official, has placed Michigan’s Jewish and Arab American communities at the centre of the campaign. Tensions were already heightened across suburban Detroit following the outbreak of the war in Gaza after the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas.
Rogers has sought to appeal to Jewish voters in vote-rich Oakland County by portraying El-Sayed as an extremist. The Republican candidate has endorsed an online post describing his opponent as a terrorist, laughed when a visiting senator claimed El-Sayed slept in an Osama bin Laden jersey, and asserted that El-Sayed is linked to supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood. President Donald Trump later claimed El-Sayed was a member of the group, an accusation unsupported by evidence and dismissed by El-Sayed as hearsay.
Lori Goldman, a Jewish Democratic activist in the area, accused Republicans of exploiting community anxieties. “It’s spreading and it’s not spreading slowly,” she said. “It’s spreading insidiously and widely and effectively.”
Internal divisions within the Democratic Party have complicated El-Sayed’s campaign. While US Representative Haley Stevens, who lost to El-Sayed in a primary where groups affiliated with AIPAC spent roughly $30 million on her behalf, endorsed him, she has not campaigned alongside him. Other local figures, including Jewish state Senator Jeremy Moss, have withheld their endorsements.
To address lingering concerns, El-Sayed's supporters have conducted targeted outreach, holding house gatherings across the state. Former US Representative Andy Levin, who is Jewish and backs the Democratic nominee, explained the effort to engage undecided voters: “We don’t take a hard sell approach at all,” Levin said. “It’s more like a bunch of Jews coming together and saying, ‘OK, let’s all talk about our fears, our hopes, our anxieties.’”
Meanwhile, in neighbouring Dearborn, home to a large Arab American population, community leaders have expressed rising frustration with Republican attacks on El-Sayed. Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud warned that rhetoric directed against Muslim officials has grown increasingly problematic, adding fresh friction in a city where Trump had won by six percentage points two years earlier.
