Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, and former Representative Mike Rogers, his Republican rival, spent most of their first televised debate rushing to unload a campaign’s worth of attack lines and opposition research.
Family members were invoked. Insinuations about ties to terrorists were made. Accusations of corruption abounded. And here and there, policy was discussed.
The debate comes as both candidates wrestle for a foothold among swing voters, with polls showing a tight race. The contest could be critical for determining Senate control and has been among the most expensive in the country. A second and final debate is scheduled for Oct. 21 in Detroit.
Here are five key moments from the debate:
‘Go ahead and say it’: A sharp exchange over terrorism.
Perhaps the most contentious moment came during an exchange over Flock Safety cameras, which Dr. El-Sayed said should be regulated by the federal government.
Mr. Rogers said the cameras were useful for catching people suspected of being terrorists. “Why would that bother you?” he seemed to wonder aloud. “Well, if you have someone in your family that might be on the, on the watch list …”
Dr. El-Sayed, who is of Egyptian descent and would become the country’s first Muslim senator if elected — and who has faced racist and Islamophobic attacks on the campaign trail — seemed to suggest in his response that Mr. Rogers was accusing him of being tied to terrorism.
“Go ahead and say it,” Dr. El Sayed said. “You’ve been tiptoeing around it the whole time.”
Throughout the debate, Mr. Rogers had repeatedly brought up terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and Hamas, suggesting that Dr. El-Sayed was supported by people who backed such organizations. Dr. El-Sayed either ignored or parried the claims, and his campaign denied them, pointing to articles that said they were false or misleading.
They dodged questions about Israel.
Dr. El-Sayed is a fierce critic of Israel, Mr. Rogers is a staunch supporter, and the issue has loomed over the race in Michigan, which has many Jewish and Arab American voters.
Mr. Rogers initially declined to say whether there was “any action by the Israeli government” that would cause him to oppose U.S. military aid for the country, calling it a “pretty hypothetical question.” Then he said American support for Israel was a matter of U.S. national security.
Pressed again, Mr. Rogers said Israel would lose his support if the country was “talking about using nuclear weapons.”
Dr. El-Sayed, for his part, refused to answer a question about whether Iran or Israel was a greater threat to the U.S., calling it “a ridiculous hypothetical.”
“I think both of them have proven dangerous in their own way,” Dr. El-Sayed said when asked again, after saying Israel was responsible for pushing the U.S. into the Iran war. “One at risk of attacking us, one getting us into wars we have no business fighting.”
They sparred over data centers and A.I.
The candidates also traded blows over artificial intelligence.
Mr. Rogers said local governments needed to determine whether data centers that power A.I. should be built in their communities. He has backed a temporary pause on data center construction, but he expressed hesitancy about federal regulations on them.
Dr. El-Sayed has not backed such a moratorium, though he supports strong federal guardrails for data centers.
On artificial intelligence, Dr. El-Sayed defended his proposal to put A.I. companies under public control. He has said that more than half of board members at leading A.I. companies should be publicly appointed or democratically elected, rather than chosen by shareholders.
“If the corporations and their C.E.O.s are right that this is going to take nearly 50 percent of our white-collar jobs, I think it’s important for the public to have a real stake,” he said.
It got very personal: ‘You going after my mom?’
The candidates attacked each other at every opportunity, with jabs about Mr. Rogers’s Florida property, Dr. El-Sayed’s medical credentials and much more.
One moment epitomized this.
“Let’s do this. Let’s — let’s open up this can of worms,” Mr. Rogers said in the middle of their heated exchange about terrorism. He then started to talk pointedly about his own mother, and went on to make a dark insinuation about Dr. El-Sayed’s mother’s ties to groups working in the Middle East.
Dr. El-Sayed responded, “You going after my mom?”
The debate even continued during a commercial break.
One comment from the moderator, Rick Albin, a local political reporter, encapsulated the animosity: The candidates were still needling each other out of sight of TV viewers.
“I want to take a quick aside and tell you that in 30 years of doing debates, I’ve never seen it continue during the commercial,” the exasperated moderator said. “But it did.”
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