The Final, Electric Days of Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate Campaign

The New Yorker · Eliza Griswold ·

Abdul El-Sayed fears that high-profile attacks have compromised his safety—but he also argues that they’ve given him “one of the biggest and best platforms.” Eliza Griswold reports.

Hate has played an arresting role in the late stages of Michigan’s Senate race, in which El-Sayed is facing the former U.S. congressman and Donald Trump ally Mike Rogers. At a rally in Port Huron early this week, Trump announced, “I’m here to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a U.S. senator.” In August, Vance said, “There’s something about Abdul El-Sayed that is very, very evil and on the rise in the United States of America today”; he claimed that El-Sayed sees himself “as fighting for one group at the expense of others.” El-Sayed replied, in part, by calling Vance a “sock puppet.” On the campaign bus, he told me, “Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, because they’re fools, built me one of the biggest and best platforms of any incoming United States senator.”

Many recent polls show El-Sayed leading Rogers by only a few points, within their margins of error. “You need every vote here,” El-Sayed’s wife, Sarah Jukaku, told me. “It’s not like California, which is a huge state but you can take things for granted a bit.” A little-known part of his strategy is to run up a lead on the Upper Peninsula, which is home to only three hundred thousand people, or three per cent of Michigan’s population. El-Sayed performed particularly well there in the primary—in which he lost Detroit and Flint to the establishment candidate Haley Stevens—and the latest figures from the Detroit News show that he continues to be a favorite there, putting him nearly six points ahead of Rogers in the U.P. and northern Michigan.

“If you want rural, working-class communities to be in play, you’ve got to come to the Upper Peninsula,” Chloe Kannan, a local organizer and a member of the Sault tribe, said. We met on a blustery afternoon at a protest that she was leading in the city of Sault Ste. Marie, outside a red brick local hospital that had been bought several years ago by a larger health-care provider. In the distance, a white double-humped steel bridge spanned the St. Marys River. Ontario was on the other side.

Read the full story at The New Yorker · All coverage of this story