Republicans swiftly rolled out attack ads against Abdul El-Sayed after the Democrat won Tuesday’s U.S. Senate primary election in Michigan. And those attack ads are racist as hell.
An ad released by the National Republican Senatorial Committee opens with an ominous-sounding soundtrack and calls El-Sayed, a former Wayne County health director, by the unshortened version of his first name and includes his middle name — “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.” Notably, the politician uses neither “Abdulrahman” nor his middle name in his public life, and the NRSC did not refer to him that way in its press releases before he won the primary. In the way that President Donald Trump uses “Barack Hussein Obama” to emphasize Obama’s Muslim heritage and insinuate he is a dangerous foreigner, the NRSC is using El-Sayed’s full name to do the same.
The voiceover in the spot goes on to describe El-Sayed as “the most radical Senate candidate in America” and shows him saying, “I’m pretty damn dangerous.” That’s a clip from El-Sayed at an event describing himself as a left-wing political threat — in this case to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and his leadership of the Democratic establishment. But then the ad charges past innuendo, and ludicrously and falsely says he “pledged support for the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, a designated foreign terrorist group.” If you read the 2011 HuffPost op-ed the ad cites to justify that claim, El-Sayed said nothing of the sort.
There’s a long history to the commingling of attacks on minorities and left-wing ideology.
Rep. Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent in the Senate race, also posted a scaremongering video on X about El-Sayed, and he captioned it, “You are who your friends are, and Abdul El-Sayed’s are radical leftists who hate America.” Among other things, the video shows clips of left-wing Democratic politicians, all of them people of color, edited to portray them as violent anarchists. Especially egregious is a clip of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., saying she “took a terrorism class.” She was, obviously, referring to a college course on the ideology behind terrorism that she took while earning a political science degree from North Dakota State University.
El-Sayed has called Jews a “light unto the world,” but Trump said on his social media site that El-Sayed “hates Jews,” and said El-Sayed only has a shot at winning in Michigan because Wayne County — home to Detroit and the country’s highest concentrations of Arab Americans — is “strictly Third World!” Right-wing media personalities have descended into another round of rank racism as well, with a Newsmax anchor falsely labeling El-Sayed an immigrant, mocking his name and saying El-Sayed looks like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. (He doesn’t.)
This is all so tiring and repugnant. The apparent strategy to portray El-Sayed as a foreigner in his own state and country is an admission from those Republicans that they don’t want to fight El-Sayed on the merits of his political views.
“That’s the only play they got,” El-Sayed said at a Wednesday news conference when asked about Islamophobia in the election. “They’re gonna point at me, they’re gonna point at my name, like, ‘Wow, he’s different.’ That’s the best you got? You can’t actually talk about what you want to do? My name is not raising your gas prices. My name is not taking us to war.”
Still, the question remains: Could a reliance on racism and Islamophobia work?
Mamdani’s opponents tried a similar playbook, to no avail. But Mamdani was running for mayor of New York City, a bastion of diversity and cosmopolitanism. Attempts to render El-Sayed as “the other” might go further in Michigan. Michigan as a whole is less diverse and more conservative than New York City, and mainstream conservatism in the U.S. has increasingly become xenophobic and Christian nationalist.
There’s a long history to the commingling of attacks on minorities and left-wing ideology. The use of Islamophobia against El-Sayed and Mamdani echoes the way right-wing nationalists have long pushed the myth that communism was a secret Jewish plot to destroy Western nations. And unfortunately it can be potent.
There is one thing El-Sayed should do, though, to make his opponents’ jobs harder. He should cut ties with left-wing livestreamer Hasan Piker. El-Sayed has campaigned with Piker, who has a large audience online and has been increasingly involved in progressive political messaging. But Piker’s job has long been to entertain and say provocative things in front of the camera to keep people watching him for up to eight hours every day. He has a large following, but as a professional attention seeker with some simplistic and retrograde views, he’s clearly a liability.
Piker said in a 2019 livestream that “America deserved 9/11,” and that clip has been featured in the attack ads against El-Sayed, who has so far refused to disavow Piker’s past incendiary comments. He has called scrutiny of them a “gotcha game.” (Piker has expressed regret for the remarks and said they were meant to be satirical.) Inflammatory Piker clips — of which there are many more, and probably many more to be dug up — does the right’s work for them. El-Sayed might think that distancing himself from Piker looks weak, but I think it’s just common sense.
El-Sayed’s race has already emerged as one of the most high-stakes electoral tests of 2026. For the left, the question is whether a bold progressive can succeed in the Rust Belt. For some of El-Sayed’s opponents on the right, there’s a far darker question: Can they defuse the threat of left-wing politics by attacking his race and religion?
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