⬆️R-L: Ilhan Omar and Abdul El-Sayed.
The 3 November, 2026 United States midterm elections were preceded by nasty and ugly campaigns, especially by President Donald Trump and some of his Republican associates. Notable targets of the vicious political campaigns included Democratic party Somali-American House of Representatives member Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Democratic senatorial candidate for Michigan, Egyptian-American Abdul El-Sayed, both of whom are Muslims.
As politifact.com reported on 19 September, 2019, “President Donald Trump retweeted a post that falsely claimed U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., was out partying on the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks.” To the retweet, Omar responded as follows on 18 September, 2026: “This is from a CBC event we hosted this weekend to celebrate black women in Congress. The President of the United States is continuing to spread lies that put my life at risk.”
Moreover, on Fox News on 11 November, 2025, Trump said: “I look at somebody who comes from Somalia where they don’t have anything. They don’t have police. They don’t have military. All they have is crime. And she comes in and tells us how to run our country. ‘The constitution says this, the constitution says that.’ The whole thing is crazy.” In Ilhan Omar’s response to Trump, she said: “Unlike you, I can read and that’s why I know what the constitution says.”
In a 2 November, 2026 campaign speech in Dubuque, Iowa, President Trump said: “Somalia has ruined the State of Minnesota. … [Somalians] come from a country that’s a disaster. It’s a dead country. It’s got no government. … All it’s got is murder, carnage and filth, and we don’t want them in this country.” In the continuing brickbat between Trump and Omar, she remarked: “The leader of the Pedophile Protection Party is trying to deflect attention from his name being all over the Epstein files. At least in Somalia they execute pedophiles not elect them.”
Moreover, on 3 November, 2026, veteran actor Whoopi Goldberg referred to a scaremongering video in which Vice-President JD Vance said on 2 November, 2026 in Ohio: “I saw a story just in the last couple of days that there are illegal communities of illegal Somalis who are coordinating to flood polls and drown out your votes. Well, I happened to believe that we want American elections to be belong to American citizens.” To this, Goldberg remarked: “It is a shame that this is where you’ve taken us. But I’m thrilled to say that in my heart, I believe the American people are not falling for this BS anymore.”
As Goldberg predicted, Americans didn’t fall for the scaremongering. With 98% of the Senate votes for Ohio out, the Democratic candidate Sherrod Brown had garnered 50.0% of the votes in comparison to the Republican incumbent’s 45.2%, and the race had been called for the Democratic candidate by Associated Press. Moreover, the governorship race had been called for the Democratic candidate Amy Acton who polled 52.3% to the Republican Party’s billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy’s 44.4%.
More notably, Ilhan Omar won to retain her House seat with 76.48% of the votes of her Minnesota congressional district. This is in spite of the sustained denigration of her person and Somali heritage and the raid on her home by the Trump administration’s security operatives on 12 October, 2026, seemingly to distract her from her campaigns for the midterm elections of 3 November, 2026 in which she was seeking a fifth term in Congress.
In her victory speech on 4 November, 2026, Omar said: “They thought that if [they] attacked me and [they] silenced me, that my community wouldn’t show up and vote. And in Minnesota, we have shown people that we can vote and we can vote big. But I also want to give a shout out to every community that [Trump] has attacked, that has responded with a resounding rejection of his candidates. … Because what we are seeing tonight is about telling this administration, it’s about telling the bigot in the White House and his friends, that we are not going to be a pawn in their game. So, thank you Minnesota.”
Abdul El-Sayed, contesting to become the first Muslim senator in U.S. history, has also been subjected to vicious bigotry. He was intensely derided for his faith and name. The cerebral medical doctor with a PhD in Epidemiology, Rhodes Scholar and Oxford Graduate has however proved to be a match for his traducers. For instance, on 9 August, 2026, on Truth Social, Trump placed a picture of himself and First Lady Melania Trump beside the photograph of El-Sayed and his hijab-wearing wife, Dr. Sarah Jukaku, a psychiatrist, with his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, written above the photo, and with the post captioned “Two VERY DIFFERENT Americas”. The xenophobic and Islamophobic insinuation here was that the Trump couple were the ‘true’ Americans and the El-Sayed couple were the ‘out-of-place’ Americans, with the dog-whistle being: Don’t vote for the outsider El-Sayed.
El-Sayed responded: “Yeah, he’s right. [There are] two very different Americas. One in which your overlords are two people who don’t like each other, but join in the interest of making billions of dollars off of you – or two people who genuinely love each other, enjoyed some pancakes together, want to come together to build the kind of America where they can raise a family and know that that family is going to have the good things.” El-Sayed continued: “So yes, you’ve got two different visions of America. … Donald Trump’s vision is the one you’re living in right now. Can you afford your gas? Can you afford your groceries? Do you believe, when you look your kids in the eye, that they’re going to have a better future than you did?”
Moreover, when Trump obviously deliberately mispronounced his name in order to mock him, El-Sayed wittily remarked: “The only time Trump knows how to pronounce names like mine is when he’s begging the Qataris for a jet, or begging the Saudis to invest in his son-in-law’s private equity firm. My name and my faith are not the reason we can’t afford our gas and our groceries. Their insane policies are the reason.” El-Sayed then declared: “Look, however he wants to say my name, we’re going to force him to say it with the word “Senator” in front of it in November.”
Furthermore, when on 25 October, 2025 Trump called El-Sayed a member of the Islamic Brotherhood, a jihadist, and a potential terrorist who would require passing through a metal detector in order to enter the senate chambers if elected senator, El-Sayed responded on 29 October, 2026: “Here’s the deal, Donald. Listen. I’ll go through a metal detector, if you’ll sit for a lie detector. Simple. I got nothing to hide. You’ve got so much to hide. My first question, Epstein. Second question, did you win the 2020 election? So, that’s the deal. I’ll go through a metal detector every day. You sit through a lie detector one time.”
Looking at President Trump’s brutal campaigns against El-Sayed, the respectable Senator Bernie Sanders remarked on 30 October, 2026: “Mr. President, instead of slandering Abdul and his family, why don’t you explain to the American people why you started an illegal and unconstitutional war in Iran?” Former President Barack Obama also declared that he empathised with El-Sayed, having himself been the target of President Trump’s sustained bigotry in the past; and former President Bill Clinton admonished against seeing diversity as an excuse for hatred.
In spite of the intense and unrelenting Trump-led xenophobic and Islamophobic attacks on Abdul El-Sayed and the humongous quantum of funds pumped into stopping him from winning, El-Sayed won the Michigan senatorial seat with 52.5% to his Republican rival Mike Rogers’ 45.5%. In this regard, the Majority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, remarked: “The wealthy, the well-off, and the well-connected tried to buy this election. The American people responded in a resounding way and made clear that America is not for sale.”
El-Sayed started his victory speech by reminding his supporters of his three simple campaign slogans: “Money out of politics;” “Money in your pockets;” and “Medicare for all.” He then declared: “Alright, friends. … Michigan, we did it! My name is AbdurRahman Muhammad Sayed. And I am so proud and honored to be your senator-elect from the great state of Michigan. Up until right about now, you might have noticed I always say ‘in shaa Allah’ or ‘God willing’ whenever the outcome of this race was mentioned. But today, tonight, we can turn that ‘in shaa Allah’ into ‘Alhamdulillah’ [which] just means ‘Praise be to God.’”
El-Sayed assured his supporters: “Michigan, I cannot wait to serve you with the same big-heartedness, open-mindedness, grit, and earnestness that you’ve shown me. … Thank you for your trust and your belief and your kindness.” He then addressed Mike Rogers whom he defeated: “See, you chose hate and Michigan chose hope. … May we never have to see the likes of you in this state again.” To Vice President JD Vance, he said grinning: “JD, Habibi [‘My friend’], there is this delicious irony in the fact that you’re constitutionally obligated to swear me in in January.” To President Trump, he said sarcastically: “Donald, look, I know you struggled with my name. So, after JD swears me in in January, you could just go ahead and call me ‘Senator’.”
President Trump is a huge source of materials for bigots across the world. But many who have hitched their wagons to his bigotry have turned out losers. In fact, as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis put it, “what happened [on November 3] is close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country.” Moreover, according to the famous political journalist Mehdi Hasan, the victory of Abdul El-Sayed tells Republicans that “the playbook of Islamophobia doesn’t work; that Americans are rejecting hate and bigotry.”
There is something redemptive about the U.S. midterm elections results, because people around the world were beginning to see Trump, in the 17 May, 2026 words of Reverend Paul Raushenbush of Interfaith Alliance, as the quintessential American who “wields politics and faith like a bludgeon against their opponents.” Presciently, Reverend Raushenbush noted: “In Minneapolis and cities and states across the country, people are choosing to be in community and to love their neighbors of every race, religion, immigration status, or gender. We are choosing to be in community with one another and to be morally and spiritually responsible for and to one another. And when people commit to that, authoritarians fall.”
The Ilhan Omar and Abdul El-Sayed victories and the Republicans’ loss of the control of Congress are therefore a loud and clear signal to the world that demagoguery doesn’t pay.