The first Muslim elected to the Senate in United States history stood on the stage early Wednesday in front of a Michigan flag and an American flag and introduced himself.
“My name,” he said, using the full, proper, guttural pronunciation, “is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.”
Hot, sweaty and packed shoulder-to-shoulder into the main space at Democrats’ ticket-wide election night party in downtown Detroit, the crowd let loose a roar of applause.
“Thank you,” he said. “You took a chance on the unlikeliest of candidates.”
Dr. El-Sayed, a Michigan-born Rhodes scholar and former public health official in Detroit and Wayne County, was not just an anti-establishment economic populist winning on what proved to be a beyond-their-wildest-dreams night for Democrats. He was all of that and the son of Egyptian immigrants.
And he didn’t merely beat former Representative Mike Rogers. He won after prevailing in a contentious primary election against Representative Haley Stevens — and then shrugging off her 11th-hour endorsement of Mr. Rogers. He won, too, after a general election that was among the ugliest, most racist, most Islamophobic campaigns in the history of American politics, with President Trump again and again calling him “a jihadist” and Mr. Rogers and his supporters all but painting him as a terrorist.
“As I was campaigning, some of you would come up and ask, ‘How come you don’t hit back? How come you don’t call them racist or hateful?’” Dr. El-Sayed told the partyers during his victory speech an hour before The Associated Press made its official call. “They weren’t targeting me. They weren’t just attacking me. They were targeting and attacking you. They were targeting and attacking the very idea of America.”
Hours earlier, before even the first polls closed, Rasha Basha, 56, stood near the stage. She wore an American flag bandanna tied around her neck. Atop her head scarf was a blue cowboy hat with white letters spelling out “ABDUL.”
“He’s like my son,” she said. “He grew up with my kids.”
“The last month — the bigotry, the hate — it actually reminded me a lot of the Sept. 11 attacks,” said Abe Basha, 37. “My name is Ibrahim, but I changed my name to Abe.”
Dr. El-Sayed’s election to the Senate “would be bigger than anything maybe we’ve ever experienced as Muslim Americans,” Mr. Basha said.
For months, polls had suggested it would happen. Still, the onslaught of insinuations and accusations, plus the recent soap opera of the decisions of Ms. Stevens, made the outcome feel uncertain.
On Tuesday night in a quiet, out-of-the-way corner, Mallory McMorrow, a state senator who ran against Ms. Stevens and Dr. El-Sayed in the primary, said in an interview that voters were “disgusted.”
“Mike Rogers’s message, if I could summarize it, was ‘Health care costs are too high, and that guy’s a Muslim,’” Ms. McMorrow said. “It’s going to backfire in a big way.”
Elsewhere as the evening progressed, Democratic Senate candidates kept winning. In North Carolina and Georgia and New Hampshire. In South Carolina and Texas and Kansas. In Iowa and Ohio and Minnesota and Maine.
In Michigan, which last elected a Republican to the Senate in 1994 but also was instrumental in sending Mr. Trump to the White House in 2016 and 2024, votes trickled in past midnight.
But at 1:29 a.m. Wednesday, to ecstatic chants and cheers, Dr. El-Sayed took the stage.
“All the kids who watched this last month, all the parents who struggled to explain why the president openly mocked someone for their name and how they pray, let them know tomorrow that the bad guys lost,” he said.
And then he named names.
Mike Rogers.
“Enjoy your retirement,” Dr. El-Sayed said. “You chose hate. And Michigan chose hope.”
Vice President JD Vance.
“There is this delicious irony in the fact that you’re constitutionally obligated to swear me in,” he said.
And President Trump, who had called him “Abdul Ramadan” and used his middle name as an epithet.
“I know you struggled with my name,” he said. “You can just go on and call me Senator.”
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