Nabeela Syed election: 27-year-old wins Illinois Senate seat with 57%
Nabeela Syed, a 27-year-old Muslim Democrat, beat Republican Darby Hills for an Illinois state Senate seat. Who she is and why the race cost $6.5 million.
Nabeela Syed, a 27-year-old Democrat and one of the few Muslims ever elected to the Illinois legislature, has won a seat in the Illinois state Senate. She took about 57% of the vote in the 26th District on election night, Tuesday 3 November, unseating Republican Darby Hills.
Her name became one of Pakistan’s top Google searches on Wednesday, alongside the wider wave of Muslim and South Asian winners in the US midterms. One thing to clear up first: this is a state Senate seat in Illinois, not the US Senate in Washington. The national first belongs to Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, which we covered earlier today.
Who is Nabeela Syed?
Syed grew up in Palatine, a suburb north-west of Chicago, and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2021. Her parents moved to the United States from Hyderabad, India, in the 1980s.
She entered politics in 2022 at 23, winning the 51st District seat in the Illinois House of Representatives. That made her the youngest woman ever elected to the Illinois General Assembly. She held the seat in 2024 with about 55% of the vote, and this year she moved up to the Senate.
In a 2022 interview she said her parents never imagined she would run for office, and that her mother told her: “if I didn’t do it, who would?”
Why was the race so expensive?
The 26th District covers parts of Cook, Lake, McHenry and Kane counties. Hills, 50, a former prosecutor and village trustee, had been appointed to the seat after Senator Dan McConchie resigned, so Democrats saw a chance to flip it.
About $6.5 million went into the contest, which Illinois campaign-finance watchers called one of the most expensive legislative races in the state’s history. Syed raised at least $4.7 million, more than $3 million of it from the Democratic Party of Illinois and the Senate Democrats’ fund controlled by Senate President Don Harmon. Hills raised about $1.8 million. A new committee set up last month to oppose Syed was funded with $500,000 from a single local donor.
What the campaign was about
Syed ran on affordability and access to healthcare. Hills focused on public safety, lower taxes and spending limits. Both said they want tighter oversight of data centres being built in the area.
The final weeks turned personal. Hills called Syed “too extreme” and raised her age and experience. Syed said she had heard hateful and intimidating remarks while knocking on doors. “This is the district that I grew up in, and I shouldn’t have to prove that I was born in this country,” she said.
After the result, Hills criticised the money spent against her and accused Democrats of “sleazy tactics”.
Why Pakistanis are searching for her
South Asian Muslim candidates had a strong night across the US, and readers in Pakistan have been following each result. Syed’s win is at state level, but at 27 she now sits in a chamber that writes Illinois law on taxes, healthcare and schools, and she is likely to be watched as a rising name in the Democratic Party.
The new Illinois Senate term starts in January.
