The GOP’s midterm backup plan: Bigotry

This is an adapted excerpt from the Aug. 6 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”

On Tuesday, voters in Tennessee had their first election under a new congressional map that was pushed through by state Republicans in May, after the Supreme Court gutted what was left of the Voting Rights Act.

It is one of the most extreme Republican gerrymanders in the country, one that took the state’s last majority-minority congressional district, in Memphis, and split it into three pieces. The goal was to make a map that favors the GOP in all nine of the state’s House seats. Just like President Donald Trump wanted: Let the party pick their voters instead of the other way around.

This is how Republicans plan to win the midterms: first and foremost, rig the board with gerrymandering, then sabotage and subvert fair elections through any means at their disposal. 

But they also have a backup plan. It’s not to make people’s lives better or to bring down prices — it’s to flood America with pure hate and demagoguery.

The masks are off. As more candidates emerge from these primaries, you are seeing that hatred play out among Republicans and on right-wing media. They’re spewing the most vile demagoguery they can muster, particularly the disgusting anti-Muslim bigotry and hateful rhetoric that is being whipped up at levels that are through the roof. 

The vitriol they beta-tested against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is now all being brought to bear on one candidate in particular: Abdul El-Sayed, who won Michigan’s contentious Democratic Senate primary this week.

El-Sayed is a native-born U.S. citizen, a Rhodes scholar and an epidemiologist who is the child of two engineers from Egypt. Since his victory on Tuesday, he has become target No. 1 for Republicans. Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance have launched racist attacks against the Democrat. On Wednesday his Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, put out a statement saying he was “running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11,” which is a malicious lie. The National Republican Senatorial Committee called El-Sayed “the most radical candidate in America” and referred to him by his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, something it had not done in any previous press releases.

It is a torrent of hate. It is beyond anything I can ever remember in the post-9/11 era of Islamophobia.

It is also toxic. How do you think these messages of irrational fear and hatred sound in the ears of the remaining MAGA faithful, the people who gleefully held signs that said “Mass Deportations Now” at the last Republican National Convention? What Trump and other Republicans are doing is to provide their base with a permission structure for ghastly levels of racism. 

If you are wondering about the effect this rhetoric is having on the people that Trump and his allies are targeting the most, we got two incredible examples this week. 

One came at the president’s rally in Las Vegas on Wednesday, one day after the shooting death of a local police officer, a 30-year-old Marine veteran named Austin Abdelnabi. Before Trump spoke, the Republican governor of Nevada, Joe Lombardo, tried to honor Abdelnabi with a moment of silence. Instead, he was met with boos from the MAGA crowd. Just his name was enough to elicit boos. You can’t stop that hatred once you’ve unleashed and weaponized it. 

And it’s already affecting Republican races in the most surprising of ways. Take Michigan’s 8th Congressional District, which Trump won in 2024. In this week’s primary, Trump endorsed a Republican named Amir Hassan for that seat. He is a Flint native and a Navy veteran. He was a Muslim but converted to Christianity, and now he is anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant. He also got endorsements from House Speaker Mike Johnson and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott.

Hassan’s main competition in the primary came from Tom Smith, a small-business man whose campaign page on Facebook had 95 followers. Smith had raised less than $2,000 for the race.

We know that because it is written in his last campaign filing with the Federal Elections Commission, which Smith hand-wrote and snail-mailed. It read, “Dear FEC Inspector: This is to notify you that Tom Smith for Congress was a late entry into the race … P.S. I could not file this form electronically because I have had no success logging in and have not been able to get a response from the help desk.”

Last month, Smith cut a 15-second video saying he was dropping out of the race and endorsing another candidate who had gathered petition signatures to get on the ballot.

From there should have been clear sailing for Hassan — except that a lot of Trump’s followers assumed Hassan was Muslim and wondered why the president had endorsed him. The disinformation and hatred got so bad, Hassan felt compelled to address it in a selfie video filmed in his car.

Then, on Tuesday, Hassan had his day at the polls — and lost. Hassan was defeated by nearly 20 points by Smith, the guy who raised less than $2,000 and dropped out of the race.

There is one — and only one — explanation for why this happened: The Republican Party’s reason for being is now utterly organized around open bigotry. 

We’ve seen some of this before with the so-called Muslim ban and with Trump’s abuse of prominent Muslim, Arab American and Asian American politicians. But now it’s kicked into overdrive. Republican elected officials, from the president to Congress to statehouses across the country, are engaging in a racist project to make everyone with a last name like El-Sayed or Hassan or Abdelnabi feel like they are not really American, like they don’t belong here. 

And the reason they are doing this is to turn all the pent-up anger and rage and frustration at Trump’s corrupt failure of an administration toward our Muslim neighbors. 

It’s already ugly, and as we approach the midterms, it’s going to get even uglier. 

Allison Detzel contributed.

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