The Republicans best chance of flipping a Senate seat is in Michigan.

The incumbent Michigan Senator Democrat Gary Peters is not seeking a third term.

Michigan is a swing state. Biden won in 2020 by 2.8%. Trump won in 2024 by 1.9%.

The Democratic nominee for Senate is Abdul El-Sayed. His parents are immigrants from Egypt, but he was born and raised in Michigan. He graduated from the University of Michigan. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford where he earned a doctorate in public health. He has a medical degree from Columbia where he taught. He was Director of Public Health for Wayne County (Detroit) Michigan, resigning last year to run for the Senate. If elected, he would be the first Muslim member of the Senate.

Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee, was born, raised, and educated in Michigan, graduating from Adrian College, a small, Methodist-affiliated college. He was in the army and then in the FBI. After serving in the Michigan legislature, he was elected to the House of Representatives seven times. He ran for the Senate in 2024 and narrowly lost. He has been characterized as a moderate Republican.

This campaign has issues that can be found elsewhere—affordability, healthcare, housing, and tariffs, especially those on Canadian goods. El-Sayed tries to tie Rogers to Trump and as a candidate bought and paid for by corporate donors. El-Sayed, who is not a Democratic Socialist but espouses policies similar to the DSA, supports Medicare for all and other progressive measures that Rogers says will exacerbate affordability issues.

El-Sayed attacks the war in Iran. Rogers defends it. They differ on immigration enforcement, with El-Sayed calling for the elimination of ICE.

Of all the Senate candidates nationwide, El-Sayed has been the most vocal critic of Israel, calling the country a rogue state. He says that Israel should be a secular nation. He seeks to end United States military aid for Israel. Rogers defends Israel although he has tried to distance himself from AIPAC, the powerful Jewish-American lobbying group. Two percent of Michigan voters are Jewish.

This is the only race that has a focus on the Muslim Brotherhood. The day after El-Sayed won the Democratic primary on August 4, Rogers said that El-Sayed had “pledged his support to the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The Society of Muslim Brothers was founded in Egypt in 1928 as a pan-Islamist movement opposing British colonial rule and promoting social, economic, and political development with the goal of establishing a caliphate, or Islamic State under sharia law. After the fall of Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood won parliamentary elections in Egypt. Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Brotherhood, became Egyptian president. In 2012, El-Sayed signed an open letter from Egyptian Americans supporting the “revolutionary decisions taken” by Morsi.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a decentralized movement. It spans dozens of countries, and different branches vary widely in the way they operate, including in their use of violence. The Tunisian Brotherhood, for example, has been nonviolent and has peacefully won elections. On the other hand, Hamas has been seen as a Brotherhood offshoot and several countries including Egypt and Jordan have outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood. And the Brotherhood’s views on social issues, including opposition to gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights, are seen by many as “highly problematic” and inconsistent with universal human rights.

In addition to El-Sayed’s own comments fifteen years ago in support of the Brotherhood, claims have been made that his biological mother and half-sister have supported the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed’s parents divorced when he was three, and he was raised by his father and stepmother. His mother worked for a charity that the U.S. government said supported terrorist groups. The charity closed in 2004. The mother was a low-ranking member of the charity’s staff. She says she worked there to support orphans, which the charity did. However, the executive director of the charity went to jail for sending money to Iraq in violation of sanctions. The half-sister, born to El-Sayed’s mother after the divorce, made statements in support of the Muslim Brotherhood a decade ago.

Mike Rogers, during a recent debate, also said that el-Sayed’s “biggest funders are from a group that supports the Muslim Brotherhood. He gets money from people who support openly Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda.” The claim is based on donations El-Sayed has accepted from individuals affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group, and the Islamic Society of North America, which provides a number of programs and services to North American Muslim communities in North America. The two organization were named as unindicted co-conspirators in a 2007 terrorism financing case against Hamas. The organizations were not charged, deny wrongdoing, and deny allegations they are terrorist groups or are affiliated with terrorist groups.

The Republican governors of Texas and Florida have designated CAIR a terrorist organization. The federal government has not. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has filed federal lawsuits challenging the designations.

On the other hand, with all the focus on the Muslim Brotherhood, it is seldom mentioned that when El-Sayed made those statements in support, back in 2012, no Muslim Brotherhood organization had been designated a terrorist organization by our government. That did not even happen in Trump’s first term, but only in November of last year when the Brotherhoods of Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, but not from other countries, were so designated.

As we have seen elsewhere, when estranged mothers are brought into it, campaigns are ugly. Increasirngly, opponents avoid talking about Trumpian policies and actions, and instead ask whether El-Sayed is a loyal American. Rogers has asked, “Are you for America or are you for these terrorist groups overseas?” Trump refers to el-Sayed by his middle name, Muhamad. El-Sayed responds, “My name is not the reason you can’t afford gas.” Instead, he proudly claims that he is a person of faith, prays daily (suggesting some politicians do not), and suggests that Congress needs more people of faith. Trump has gone further and said that if El-Sayed wins, he will “invite hordes of jihadis to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have Christmas.” Trump has labeled the Democratic nominee “a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member” and praised Rogers as “apple pie.”

But the attacks may be working. El-Sayed narrowly leads in the poll averages, but that advantage may be shrinking. Michigan is rated a tossup by the Cook political reports.