Moments after Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won his Michigan Senate primary, Republicans released their first general election attack ad against him — this time, using his full name.
Ahead of El-Sayed’s November matchup against Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and other GOP officials began to draw attention to the Democrat’s full name: Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.
The NRSC had almost exclusively referred to El-Sayed, who could become the country’s first Muslim senator, by the shorter version of his name until this week. Using his full name, the committee’s debut ad slammed him as “the most radical Senate candidate in America” and connected him to the Muslim Brotherhood’s Egyptian branch, which the State Department recently classified as a terrorist group.
Other examples immediately started piling up, from the Republican National Committee casting El-Sayed by full name as a “terrorist supporter” to NRSC Vice Chair Jim Banks’ comments saying Michigan’s union Democrats wouldn’t “want to vote for a guy like Abdulrahman El-Sayed.”
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Emphasizing El-Sayed’s full name and casting him as a terrorist follows a familiar strategy of using Islamophobic rhetoric to target Democrats of color: Conservatives often invoked — and, sometimes, continue to invoke — former President Barack Obama’s middle name, Hussein, as a derogatory reference despite his not being Muslim. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani encountered Islamophobic comments during and after his campaign, while former Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison faced repeated attacks over his faith as the first Muslim to serve in Congress.
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“That’s the only play they got. They’re gonna point at me, they’re going to point at my name, like, ‘Wow, he’s different,’” El-Sayed said in a news conference Wednesday. “You can’t actually talk about what you want to do? My name is not raising your gas prices. My name is not taking us to war. My name is not the reason you can’t afford your groceries.”
“This is the best place in the world to be Abdul,” he added.
Targeting candidates based on their Muslim faith or perceived connection to the religion is commonplace, said Dawud Walid, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Michigan chapter. But this behavior is rarely admonished in public, he added.
“Islamophobia is the accepted form of bigotry in American politics,” Walid said.
Republicans are framing the attacks on El-Sayed as a response to his denunciation of Israel’s actions in Gaza, a campaign issue that has loomed over many of Michigan’s elections this year The NRSC’s first general election attack ad called out his connection to left-leaning streamer Hasan Piker, with whom the Michigan Democrat has campaigned this year. El-Sayed says he supports “equal rights to peace, dignity and self-determination for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike.”
“And to all of my sisters and brothers of the Jewish faith or any faith or no faith at all,” El-Sayed said Wednesday, “I want you to know that my commitment to your safety — my commitment to Jewish safety — is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.”
Beyond using his full name, many Republicans are characterizing the progressive candidate as everything from a “terrorist” to a “radical” to a “communist.” Rogers called El-Sayed an “extremist” and linked him to the Muslim Brotherhood in a statement Wednesday.
“I spent years hunting terrorists and bringing Osama Bin Laden to justice. Never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11,” misattributing Piker’s words to El-Sayed, who has never made those comments.
The NRSC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
An RNC press release used El-Sayed’s name as wordplay, saying, “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Is A Terrorist Sympathizer Who Wants To Take A Sledgehammer To America, Believes America Deserved 9/11, And Let Terrorists Run The Show.”
After El-Sayed was declared the winner on Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson warned against communism, part of an emerging conservative talking point meant to dissuade moderates from supporting progressive candidates.
“We must take a stand and FIGHT to protect the greatest nation in the history of the world from being overrun by Mini Mamdanis,” he said on social media.
President Donald Trump, who prominently promoted “birther” conspiracies against Obama and frequently references his predecessor’s middle name, accused El-Sayed of being a “hater of Jews and Israel” as he veered into an extended riff on communism during an economic rally speech.
“Abdul El-Sayed. Can you believe this? This could only happen to me,” Trump said on Wednesday, over-enunciating the Michigan Democrats’s name to boos from the audience. “Abdul El-Sayed, lovely gentleman — he’s a man of hate.”
Michigan holds some of America’s largest Muslim and Arab-American populations — though El-Sayed’s primary win shows a wide percentage of people outside of those communities didn’t hold his religion “against him,” Walid said.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), who backed El-Sayed ahead of the primary, said the “name-calling” is distracting from policy issues.
“It’s ugly,” Warren told reporters Wednesday. “I wish it wouldn’t happen in America, but at the end of the day, I don’t think they’re going to work. I think people see through that now, and they want to hear how their candidate for Senate is going to make their lives better.”
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