DEARBORN, Mich.—Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic nominee for Senate, stood before the faithful in a packed mosque that has anchored Muslim life in this Detroit suburb for close to a century.

Invoking faith and moral obligation, the man who could become the nation’s first Muslim senator preached progressive policies and reiterated his criticism of U.S. support for Israel as he spoke at one of North America’s largest mosques. “We deserve to know that our money isn’t being wasted to make war, to do genocide, to backstop apartheid,” he said at the American Moslem Society.

The following weekend, almost 200 miles west, a middle-aged man stood near the stage at the start of another El-Sayed appearance and shouted a reference to the Quran and Bible. “His book says something different than my book,” he said, before police escorted him from a historic theater in Muskegon, Mich.

El-Sayed’s faith and the Middle East have taken center stage in the closing weeks of this middle-of-America campaign, as Republicans have stepped up criticism of his Muslim background, associations and progressive leanings on everything from Medicare for All to prior calls to defund the police.

When a Republican asked El-Sayed last weekend to denounce the Muslim Brotherhood, he did so—while also saying the question reflected anti-Muslim bias and a double standard. After the exchange went viral, El-Sayed released a straight-to-camera ad addressing his religion.

“I’m Abdul El-Sayed, man of faith,” he said. “That’s a good thing.”El-Sayed, 41, is quick on his feet, disciplined and social-media savvy. His bravado is also palpable, especially for someone never before elected to office. In a state President Trump won by 1.4 percentage points in 2024, El-Sayed has boldly predicted he will win by 7 points.

“I’m not proving anything except for just reminding us who we are,” he said in an interview, when asked about the role of his faith in the race. “America is big enough.”El-Sayed is arguably the most consequential figure on the ballot to influence the future of the Democratic Party. To his detractors, he represents an insurgent brand of far-left politics that is outside the mainstream. To his supporters, he is proof that progressive ideals have wider appeal than centrists acknowledge, and on Election Day he will show they can win in a presidential battleground.

He said he has received death threats this year, as he did in 2018, when he finished behind now-Gov.

Gretchen Whitmer by 22 percentage points in the Democratic primary for governor. El-Sayed faces Mike Rogers, a former GOP congressman, in what has become one of the most competitive and costly Senate contests this year.

Rogers, who in the campaign’s closing weeks has worked to show both loyalty to Trump and distance on issues like trade and the Iran war, is trying to become the first Michigan Republican elected to the Senate since 1994. Rogers, 63, is making overt appeals to both Black and Jewish voters, parts of the traditional Democratic base that El-Sayed has struggled to fully win over.

The Democrat, meanwhile, has spent at least part of his time in Republican-leaning areas with an “it shouldn’t be this hard” theme that blames Trump and the GOP for higher prices.

Former President Barack Obama is scheduled to appear with El-Sayed on Saturday evening to try to boost the candidate’s standing with Black voters, while Trump will be in Michigan on Sunday to promote Rogers and other Republicans. Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed is the son of a successful automotive engineer with a doctorate, who is now a university professor.

His birth mother works as a psychiatric nurse practitioner. Both his parents fled political oppression in Egypt. Their marriage was short-lived—El-Sayed calls himself their “one-hit wonder”—and his father later married a Michigan woman with deep American roots that include a claim to being a distant descendant of Abigail Adams, a former first lady.

Along with his father, she brought him up. Growing up in a leafy, upscale suburban area north of Detroit, El-Sayed enjoyed a mostly idyllic childhood.

But he did experience racism, he said, especially after the attacks against the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001. In his 2020 memoir, “Healing Politics,” El-Sayed wrote that the racism he endured after 9/11 inspired him to become a more faithful and actively practicing Muslim, saying the five daily prayers and studying the history of a religion whose message he distilled to, among other things, “Recognize that if God is greater, then everyone in the eyes of God is equal.”

At the University of Michigan, El-Sayed majored in biology and political science and played on the lacrosse team. The school is where he met his wife, who would go on to become a psychiatrist.

They share assets valued at about $700,000 to $2.1 million, including rental properties in Ann Arbor, Mich.; Bengaluru, India; and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, disclosure records show. El-Sayed proposed to his wife when she was a freshman and he was a junior. He told the campus newspaper at the time that he did so, in part, because of his faith. “Islamically, there are no premarital relations of any sort,” he said. “No touching, no nothing. Given that, the logical solution is to get married.”

Rogers and his allies have sought to link El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed has repeatedly denied he or his family members have any ties to the group, including in a Wall Street Journal interview.

Rogers’s campaign has highlighted 14-year-old online posts written by El-Sayed’s half-sister that suggest their mother was involved with the Brotherhood decades ago. “Had an amazing talk with my mom about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early ’70s when she was in college,” wrote the sister, Eman Abdelhadi, in June 2012. Abdelhadi, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, didn’t reply to voicemails and emails.

Neither did her mother, Fatten Elkomy, who divorced El-Sayed’s father when he was 3. El-Sayed has said he was raised by his stepmother and has never discussed the matter with his birth mother.

As a medical and doctoral student in 2008 planning to become a neurosurgeon, he was named a Rhodes scholar and earned a doctorate in public health in England.

He later earned his medical degree from Columbia University in New York. To explain his belief that the government should play a more expansive role in the lives of Americans, El-Sayed occasionally turns to a woman he calls Martha. In the midst of a medical-school sub-internship in New York City more than a decade ago, El-Sayed says he met a homeless alcoholic patient whose head was bleeding after she slipped on subway steps.

An ER resident wanted to discharge her, but he argued to a supervisor that Martha needed a CT scan. It was negative, but she still spent two weeks in the hospital before refusing his efforts to place her in chemical-dependency treatment. El-Sayed later saw Martha passed out on a subway train.

That night, demoralized, he decided to end clinical work and pursue a public-health career. Among the lessons he derived from the episode: a firmly held belief that the government should be the dominant player in healthcare, that people without means are discriminated against, and that the state needs to spend more on social services.

He said he doesn’t know if Martha is still alive, but he plays down personal responsibility and puts the onus on the government to take a lead role in healthcare, a position that divides many in the country who celebrate self-reliance.

He suggested society failed Martha because, among other things, she had a mother with only a minimum-wage job, was abused as a teen by one of her mother’s boyfriends, and didn’t have enough welfare for herself and her five children. “For those of us whose life circumstances have created options A, B, C, D, E, F and G, she might have options A and B,” El-Sayed said of the anecdote, which couldn’t be independently verified. In 2015, El-Sayed was hired to be Detroit’s public-health director. He resigned that position in 2017 for his failed campaign for governor.

After the 2018 election, he mostly focused on writing his memoir and a book on Medicare for All, as well as launching a podcast where, among other things, he said essential drugs should be treated like public utilities. In 2023, he became director of the department of health, human and veteran services for the state’s largest county.

That job offered plenty of challenges for El-Sayed. One was Wayne County’s long-troubled Juvenile Detention Facility, which for years had been plagued by serious mistreatment of youth, sexual assaults, high staff turnover and injuries to security and detainees.

John Ezzo, then owner of a private security company contracted to help provide staffing, said El-Sayed didn’t attend any of the dozens of meetings involving his firm.

He said his company was critical in boosting staff levels so that services, such as more frequent showers and recreation, could be improved. “He didn’t get involved with the solution,” said Ezzo, a Republican who said he sometimes votes for Democrats.

El-Sayed said he stressed he didn’t want to manage a juvenile jail when he took the job, and it was later spun out of his department. Three weeks in, he declared a public-health emergency for the facility, which El-Sayed said allowed him to raise wages by 35% and get additional resources.

He dismissed Ezzo’s claim that he delegated some meetings to subordinates. Asked if the episode was fodder for those who are skeptical about more government, El-Sayed said he understands those concerns.

But he also said he made things better. “Yes, it failed,” he said. “Here’s a failure that’s completely outside of my area of expertise. But you know what? Doesn’t look like anyone else is running in, so let me go.”Severe problems persisted through 2023 and 2024, until the center closed and detainees were moved to a new complex, the Detroit News has reported.

By less than 1 percentage point, El-Sayed won a divisive August primary that encapsulated virtually every division unsettling the party: establishment vs. outsider; pro-Israel vs. anti-Israel; moderate vs. progressive. Long-simmering distrust between the Black and Muslim communities in the Detroit area has also translated into skepticism about El-Sayed among some Black voters. He has worked to create unity since then, but major fissures remain. Temple Israel, which is heavily guarded, isn’t far from where he grew up. The synagogue is one of this state’s largest and was thrust into the news this year when a man rammed his truck into it before killing himself in a gunfight with security guards in a Hezbollah-inspired act of terrorism.

While he condemned the Temple Israel violence, El-Sayed also referenced family members of the attacker killed in an Israeli airstrike the week prior, saying, “Hurt people hurt people.”

He later apologized for the comment, but scars remain among some Jewish people from the statement and other positions he has taken. El-Sayed has also refused to say whether Israel or Iran is a greater threat to America and has appeared with left-wing streamer Hasan Piker—who once said “America deserved 9/11”—actions that have also angered a faction of Jewish voters who account for about 1.3% of Michigan’s population and could be critical in a close election. Rabbi Aaron Starr, a frequent Democratic voter who leads a 1,000-family congregation in suburban Detroit, said El-Sayed’s rhetoric is dangerous.

“I can’t vote for someone who cannot affirm my most basic needs,” said Starr, also part of a group of spiritual leaders and others called Nonnegotiable Michigan. Jeremy Zeltzer, a Jewish Democrat who recently organized a house party for Jewish voters to ask El-Sayed questions, said he worries the campaign has created permanent division in the community. “I’ve been called every name in the book from my fellow Jewish Michiganders for supporting El-Sayed,” he said.