Abdul El-Sayed first Muslim US senator; Nabeela Syed wins Illinois
Abdul El-Sayed beat Mike Rogers in Michigan to become the first Muslim elected to the US Senate. Who is he, and who is Nabeela Syed?
Abdul El-Sayed has won Michigan’s US Senate seat, making him the first Muslim ever elected to the United States Senate. The Associated Press called the race for the 41-year-old Democrat at 2:27 a.m. Michigan time on Wednesday, 4 November, with El-Sayed about six points ahead of Republican Mike Rogers and roughly 85% of ballots counted.
A few hours earlier and a few hundred miles away, Nabeela Syed, a young Muslim state lawmaker first elected at 23, took a Republican-held seat in the Illinois state Senate. Both names shot up Google searches in Pakistan overnight.
“Michigan, we did it”
El-Sayed did not wait for the official call. He walked on stage in Detroit at about 1:30 a.m. and told supporters, “Michigan, we did it.” He said his volunteers had “built something bigger than a bank account” and, turning to the campaign against him, added: “You chose hate, and Michigan chose hope.”
That last line was aimed at Rogers and the outside groups backing him. Through the autumn they tried to link El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood, a claim many Democrats and local religious leaders called anti-Muslim. Rogers and his allies also outspent him by roughly three to two in what became the most expensive race in Michigan’s history, with more than $270 million in disclosed spending by October.
Who is Abdul El-Sayed?
El-Sayed was born in the Detroit area to parents who came to the US from Egypt. He won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford as a medical student and later earned his medical degree at Columbia, though he never did a residency, so he is not a practising doctor.
In 2015 Detroit’s mayor made him the city’s health director at just 30, the youngest health chief of any major US city at the time. He left in 2017 to run for governor and lost the 2018 Democratic primary to Gretchen Whitmer by more than 20 points. He later ran health and veterans’ services for Wayne County, where a medical-debt programme he started cleared more than $95 million of residents’ debt.
This was his first win at the ballot box. He ran on single-payer “Medicare for All”, higher taxes on the rich, getting money out of politics and a hard line on AI companies and data centres, and he campaigned alongside Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The rival who switched sides
The seat opened up when Democratic senator Gary Peters retired. In August, El-Sayed beat four-term congresswoman Haley Stevens in a close Democratic primary, by about 15,000 votes. Two days before polling day, Stevens endorsed Rogers, a public break that angered many in her own party. Rogers, a former congressman, had lost Michigan’s other Senate race to Elissa Slotkin by a whisker in 2024.
Who is Nabeela Syed?
Syed, an Indian American Muslim from Inverness in Chicago’s north-west suburbs, was elected to the Illinois House in 2022 at 23, one of the youngest members of the state legislature and one of its first Muslim members. On Tuesday she beat Republican Darby Hills for the 26th District state Senate seat, which Republicans had held for years. The AP called it at 11:15 p.m., and she had about 57% of the vote in unofficial counts. She raised at least $4.7 million against Hills’ $1.8 million, according to Illinois’ campaign-finance records, in one of the costliest legislative races the state has seen.
Why it matters here
Both wins came on the night Democrats took control of Congress, as we reported in our US midterm results story. For Muslim and South Asian families in the US, including a large Pakistani community in Michigan and around Chicago, El-Sayed’s win is a first that took 237 years of Senate history to arrive.
He will be sworn in when the new Congress meets in January. Syed must give up her Illinois House seat when she moves to the state Senate in January 2027.
