Nadene Goldfoot
His importance is that he is a young progressive Democrat, El-Sayed defeated U.S. representative Haley Stevens in the 2026 Michigan Democratic Senate primary. Dr. Abdulrahman Mohamed "Abdul" El-Sayed born October 31, 1984) is an American epidemiologist, public health administrator, academic and politician who is the Democratic nominee in the 2026 United States Senate election in Michigan. He faces Republican nominee Mike Rogers in the general election. If elected, El-Sayed would be the first Muslim member of the U.S. Senate. Born and raised in southeast Michigan, El-Sayed graduated from the University of Michigan and was a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, where he earned a doctorate in public health. He then earned his medical degree from Columbia University and became an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. He was the executive director of the Detroit Health Department from 2015 to 2017, and from 2023 to 2025 he served as director of the Wayne County Department of Health, Human & Veterans Services.
In 2026, El-Sayed said the US should not fund foreign militaries at all, and in particular he identified Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.
Does he have a good chance?
The more mature Michael Joseph Rogers (born June 2, 1963) is an American politician and former FBI agent who served from 2001 to 2015 as the U.S. representative for Michigan's 8th congressional district. A member of the Republican Party, he chaired the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence from 2011 to 2015. Rogers is a longtime supporter of Israel and was aligned with AIPAC during his congressional tenure. In August 2025, he defended Israel's right to defend itself and criticized opposition to its conduct in the Gaza war. Rogers has longstanding ties to pro-Israel lobbying groups, including AIPAC, and attended four AIPAC-hosted fundraisers in Los Angeles in August 2026 while his allies explored ways for the organization and its donors to support his campaign without publicly highlighting AIPAC's involvement.
Israel
In 2026, El-Sayed was widely described as "a fierce critic of Israel". He has criticized US military funding to Israel, AIPAC, and Israeli influence in US politics. El-Sayed has said that his criticism of Israel should not be conflated with hostility toward Judaism or the Jewish people, whom he "love[s] and revere[s]" based on his experience with Jews in Michigan.
On a January 2024 podcast, El-Sayed called the war in the Gaza Strip a genocide and called for a ceasefire. In a May 2026 TIME interview, he asked: "If you can't call it what it is, which is a genocide, then how are you going to stand up to Donald Trump? How are you going to stand up to pharma CEOs?" In April 2026, El-Sayed said in a CNN interview: "Killing tens of thousands of people makes you pretty damn evil. It's not how evil is this one versus that one. Hamas: evil. Israeli government: evil. We can say both."
El-Sayed has said he recognizes Israel's right to exist, but not its right to be an explicitly Jewish state. He has called Israel an ethnostate, saying, "I don't believe in ethnostates, and I certainly don't believe that our country is responsible to sustain ethnostates."El-Sayed supports "self-determination for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike".
Jews have gone through art least 3,000 years of distrust of those around us who were not Monotheist, but Poly-
They would not accept us as full citizens, putting us in the 2nd class or worse.
Iran war
El-Sayed has attributed the 2026 Iran war to AIPAC's influence in US politics. AIPAAC stands for American-Israel-Public Affairs -Committee. Jews here and in Israel are like those long ago living in Babylon and Palestine at the same time; we have this Jewish connection; like our navel. Call one a name and it hurts all of us. He called Israel a "rogue state" and said the U.S. should "stop funding the Israeli military unilateral blank checks".
In October 2026, El-Sayed discussed the war in interviews with Fox News and NBC News. He called the war illegal and said it did not increase American security and had prevented the U.S. from transporting oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz. El-Sayed also said that Israel had dragged the U.S. into a war aimed at expanding Israel's borders. He said the U.S. had paid $2.8 billion to buy 2,000-pound bombs for a foreign government in September and that he would prefer to spend the money on American schools and infrastructure.
El-Sayed was born and raised in southeast Michigan, and lives in Ann Arbor with his wife, Sarah Jukaku, whom he married in 2006, and their two daughters. He is Muslim. His father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, is a nephrologist, and is tied for the top individual donor to the main PAC supporting El-Sayed's Senate campaign, having given $300,000; according to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Tayeb Jukaku served as president of Michigan's chapter of the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) and he remains on its board of directors as of 2026,
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