Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed wins in Michigan next month, he will become the first Muslim to serve in the upper chamber. But as has happened with other firsts, El-Sayed will have to defeat a shameless and frankly dangerous attempt to otherize him based on his identity.

His opponent, former Congressman Mike Rogers, has disingenuously claimed that attempts to link El-Sayed to a terrorist group aren’t about his Muslim faith. But there is no other way to understand what Rogers and his GOP allies are doing. The quiet part is being said out loud from the biggest platforms. El-Sayed, locked in a very tight race with Rogers, will have to double down on his rebuttals of these craven attacks over the next two weeks.

President Donald Trump has taken to calling El-Sayed “Mohammed” and baselessly called him a “jihadist.”Senator Ted Cruz, who is exploring a run for the White House in 2028, baselessly suggested that El-Sayed would share classified information with terrorists were he to become a Senator.

“I believe this man is Muslim Brotherhood,” Cruz said in a Fox News interview Tuesday night.

El-Sayed has disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood several times, but campaign ads backing Rogers call that denial a lie.

At issue is a tweet from 2012 from El-Sayed’s half-sister in which she referenced an “amazing talk with my mom about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college.”El-Sayed was born in Michigan in 1984 and was not raised by his mother, facts that he should reiterate every chance he can. Early in his campaign, he released an ad featuring his White step-grandparents, a strategic play to combat the fears that the GOP is happily fomenting.

In another video, released after a GOP operative asked him to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, El-Sayed smartly challenged the underlying assumptions and stereotypes that are driving the Islamophobic attacks on his candidacy. He likened the suggestions of dual loyalty to questions surrounding President John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism.

“You’re asking the question because implicitly you assume that I’ll have dual loyalties, right?”El-Sayed said. “You assume that somehow I wouldn’t disavow, or that I’ll have some higher-order allegiance than the Constitution.”And in a new campaign ad, El-Sayed highlights his faith without naming it, instead describing it in terms of rituals and beliefs that will be familiar to many Christian and Jewish voters.

“My name is Abdul. It means ‘servant.’ I pray every day. I reflect on my role in this life, on this Earth,” the epidemiologist and former public health official says in the 30-second ad. “How we leave it better than we found it. To serve God, to serve our neighbors.”The ad humanizes El-Sayed in an environment where the GOP is trying to paint him as an outsider and a threat.

“This race has turned to explicit racial appeals to try to galvanize voters, but also to bring about hesitation about Abdul El-Sayed,” said Nazita Lajevardi, political science professor at the University of Michigan and author of. “There are the powerful Islamophobic tropes that, as a country, we have heard, uttered either quietly and now, unfortunately, much more explicitly, in our day-to-day lives and also by our political leaders. These are strategic political actors.”And unfortunately, these sorts of attacks work.

A Washington Post/Schar School poll from September found that 45% of Michiganders wouldn’t support a Muslim for president. Nevertheless, the GOP’s attacks might backfire. Muslims make up about 2% of the Michigan population with about 200,000 registered voters and are energized by the prospect of one of their own going to the Senate. Black voters will also be critical. Rogers, who earned 12% of this demographic in 2024, has been making direct appeals in Black communities, where Black Muslims have long-standing roots.

Yet the sort of profiling that Rogers and his GOP allies are doing with El-Sayed isn’t likely to land well with Black voters familiar with such identity-based targeting.

Former President Barack Obama will appear in Michigan with El-Sayed on Saturday as early voting starts. Obama’s presence in the closing weeks recalls his own campaign and the vitriol spewed at him. But back then, his opponent, Senator John McCain, had enough guts to confront his own supporters who said they were afraid of an Obama presidency because he was supposedly palling around with domestic terrorists.

“I have to tell you that he is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States,” McCain said at a Minnesota town hall, as the audience booed. Another claimed Obama was Arab and therefore couldn’t be trusted.

“No ma’am. He’s a decent family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign’s all about,” McCain responded in October 2008.

Now, given the climate of Islamophobia stoked from the very top, McCain’s morally-centered response feels like it’s from an entirely different era.

Obama and El-Sayed should bring this powerful and brave moment back to the fore to defeat Rogers and his allies, whose quest for power, no matter the cost to the body politic, threatens America’s highest ideals.