Live Updates: El-Sayed and Rogers Clash in Another Fiery Michigan Senate Debate New York Times (Online) John Yoon Kellen Browning and Tim Balk The candidates in a bitter Senate race in Michigan feuded over the economy and the war in Iran on the debate stage Wednesday night, with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee, and Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee, trading personal attacks in their final scheduled face-off. They agreed right away that viewers would hear two very different visions for Michigan, then proceeded to disagree on nearly everything else. Asked about the affordability concerns frustrating Michiganders, Dr. El-Sayed blamed high prices of fuel and groceries on President Trump's war in Iran, and suggested that Mr. Rogers would enable the president and “stand hip to hip with Donald Trump on all of his worst policies.” Mr. Rogers suggested that Dr. El-Sayed's left-wing policy priorities would raise prices and be a burden on residents. Mr. Rogers also repeated attacks from the first debate about the background of Dr. El-Sayed, who would be the first Muslim senator if elected, suggesting that his Democratic opponent had ties to groups including the Muslim Brotherhood. Mr. Rogers, in a stark moment, questioned Dr. El-Sayed's loyalty to the United States. “Are you for America, or are you for these terrorist groups overseas?” Mr. Rogers said. Dr. El-Sayed, a progressive former public health official, has embraced the race as a test for his party's left wing. Mr. Rogers, a former representative, is trying to become the first Republican to win a Senate race in Michigan in more than three decades. The race is one of a few that could decide control of the Senate, and opinion polls indicate that it is tight. The first debate, two weeks ago, was an acrimonious affair: Dr. El-Sayed and Mr. Rogers unloaded a series of attacks — some quite personal — and regularly interrupted each other. Mr. Rogers questioned Dr. El-Sayed's medical credentials and tried to tie him to terrorism ; Dr. El-Sayed said Mr. Rogers would be a puppet of the Trump administration. In an interview later, Dr. El-Sayed said that he hoped “the next debate can actually be about policy.” Mr. Rogers was endorsed by Mr. Trump in the primary but has been trying to distance himself from the increasingly unpopular administration. Dr. El-Sayed, a forceful critic of Israel, is working to win over skeptical Jewish and Black voters. The candidates are running for the seat of Senator Gary Peters, a Democrat who is retiring. Here's what we're covering: How to watch : The debate, hosted by WXYZ-TV in suburban Detroit, is being held with less than two weeks until the Nov. 3 election. It is being streamed on WXYZ's website . Progressive test: Dr. El-Sayed has campaigned with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York progressive and potential 2028 presidential candidate, and received a financial infusion from her. If he wins, he suggested at a Manhattan fund-raiser with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, it would send a message about “what America really wants, needs and deserves.” Trump balancing act: Mr. Rogers, seeking victory in a state that is less conservative than many of this year's Senate battlegrounds, has broken with Mr. Trump several times. He has called for an end to the Iran war and the president's tariff fight with Canada, and he has opposed the president's deal with President Vladimir V. Putin to import Russian diesel. “We need to end this tariff war — now,” Mr. Rogers says in one ad that has appeared regularly on Michigan TVs. Focus on Israel: The first debate turned tense when the Middle East came up. Dr. El-Sayed says he does not support U.S. military aid to Israel; Mr. Rogers says support for the country is a matter of national security. Some Jewish Democrats in Michigan say they're torn. Dueling pitches: Dr. El-Sayed and Mr. Rogers made dueling appearances on Monday at the Detroit Economic Club. “I'll be damned if I'm going let Detroit become a democratic socialist city,” Mr. Rogers said during his appearance. Dr. El-Sayed, who has many allies who describe themselves as democratic socialists, told the audience, “I am a capitalist.” Reid J. Epstein The most robust policy discussion of the debate has come on the subject of health care. El-Sayed highlighted his support of the single-payer health care plan known as Medicare for all — a key pillar of his campaign platform — and attacked Rogers for voting against the Affordable Care Act. Rogers responded that El-Sayed's proposal would cost trillions of dollars, the typical Republican response to the proposal. Tim Balk El-Sayed said Rogers wanted to stand “arm in arm” with President Trump on immigration, and added that El-Sayed supported abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Rogers said El-Sayed supported “all of the things we know got us tens of millions of people running across the border.” Rogers said El-Sayed was “married” to a democratic socialist agenda. El-Sayed said that Rogers was throwing out buzzwords, and that some viewers had probably won “MAGA bingo.” Reid J. Epstein Rogers made a remarkable attack against El-Sayed, questioning his loyalty to the United States: “If you are going to go to the United States Senate, we need to know: Are you for America, or are you for these terrorist groups overseas?” Tim Balk El-Sayed, discussing the Iran war, used a favored attack on Rogers, a longtime foreign policy hawk: “He's got a war for everything.” Rogers in the spring called the Iran war a “win-win-win,” but he released an ad last month calling for an end to the war. Reid J. Epstein El-Sayed was asked if Iran posed a threat to U.S. national security, and he dodged the question by saying that Iran “had posed” a threat in the past. Then he pivoted to attacking Rogers for supporting the current war in Iran. Rogers, when it was his turn, said that Iran “absolutely” now poses a threat to the United States. Tim Balk Mike Rogers, asked whether President Trump's tariffs had helped or hurt America, said they've been a “mixed bag” and added that the president's tariff war with Canada was “not well thought through.” The ad his campaign has most heavily invested in during the general election, according to the media tracker AdImpact, shows him denouncing the president's trade fight with Canada. Reid J. Epstein It did not take long for Rogers to invoke El-Sayed's background . During an exchange at the end of a back-and-forth about economic policy, Rogers said El-Sayed had “lied about being a member of an organization that should give us all pause” — a clear reference to the accusations that El-Sayed had connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed has disavowed the group, though he did once sign an open letter to the Egyptian president who was from a party that represented the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Reid J. Epstein The first question for El-Sayed is about how to bring down costs. His standard answer, as he delivered again here, is saying that he would seek to end the Iran war before pivoting to blame Rogers for initially supporting the war. Rogers has since called for the war to end. Reid J. Epstein Abdul El-Sayed, in his opening statement, repeated what he said at the beginning of their last debate: that Rogers would attack him, while El-Sayed would try to speak about the things that concern Michiganders. Tim Balk In his opening statement, Mike Rogers made a point of casting Abdul El-Sayed as being “aligned” with the Democratic Socialists of America. El-Sayed has said he is a capitalist, but many of his allies describe themselves as democratic socialists. Reid J. Epstein The Michigan Senate debate has begun. Mike Rogers is going first on the opening statements. Tim Balk Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate, took a bus tour last week deep into conservative parts of the state . El-Sayed, trying to win over disenchanted Trump voters, was joined by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York on parts of the trip. His Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, announced plans for his own bus tour this afternoon at an event in Sterling Heights, Mich. Reid J. Epstein Just in the last few days, the focus of the Michigan Senate race has increasingly centered on Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's Muslim faith and what he and his family members have said about the Muslim Brotherhood. A video El-Sayed's campaign shared on Saturday of his being asked about the Muslim Brotherhood by a Republican operative went viral, and both sides of the race are now airing advertisements about El-Sayed's religious ties. Former Representative Mike Rogers stoked the discussions about El-Sayed's family ties in the last Michigan Senate debate two weeks ago. Then he invoked El-Sayed's mother, who separated from El-Sayed's father when the candidate was 3 years old and did not raise him. Tim Balk Heading into tonight's second debate in the Michigan Senate race, the campaign of the Republican nominee, Mike Rogers, said he planned to highlight what he considers a challenge for his Democratic opponent, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: a fractured Democratic base. Some Jewish Democrats are skeptical of El-Sayed, a fierce critic of Israel. On social media, State Representative Noah Arbit, founder of the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus, posted a video yesterday of El-Sayed telling ABC News that Israel was not a “friend” of the United States. Arbit wrote that “what happens in Israel matters deeply to Jews everywhere” and added that any “threat to Israel is a threat to Jews everywhere.” Tim Balk Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official running on a progressive, anti-establishment platform, is the Democratic nominee in the Senate race in Michigan, a test of the left's ability to win a marquee race in a swing state. Here are five things to know about Dr. El-Sayed, 41, of Ann Arbor, Mich., who received a medical degree from Columbia University but went into public health instead of becoming a practicing physician. If elected in November, he would become the first Muslim senator. Dr. El-Sayed faces Mike Rogers, a former representative, in the general election. Dr. El-Sayed has generated a deep well of left-wing support . He supports universal health care, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and ending U.S. aid to Israel. He is a vocal critic of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He was backed in the primary by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and other left-wing leaders. Last week, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez transferred $1 million to a political account to help him get elected and joined him at several town hall-style events in Michigan. Dr. El-Sayed has separated himself from some of his progressive supporters by saying he is a capitalist, not a socialist. But he has embraced framing his swing-state race as a test for the progressive movement. “What does it say about what America really wants, needs and deserves if our state bucks all of the pundits and all of the pontificators who think that this is not possible?” Dr. El-Sayed said at a fund-raiser this month with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez in New York. Dr. El-Sayed, a former podcaster and CNN commentator, is a smooth communicator. He often refers to Mr. Rogers as “habibi,” an Arabic term of affection, and appears with some regularity on Fox News. He said in one speech in August that Mr. Rogers's last name was fitting “because that's his answer every time a corporation or Donald Trump tells him to do something.” “'Mike, we need you to put a data center in the backyard.' 'Roger!,'” Dr. El-Sayed said. (Mr. Rogers has said regulating artificial intelligence would be among his top priorities if he is elected.) Dr. El-Sayed tried to use a similar message that year, and he was also backed by Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. But he was handily defeated by Gretchen Whitmer, a moderate Democrat who went on to win the general election. In an interview, Dr. El-Sayed said his message in 2018 was “a little bit premature for most folks.” That message, he added, was that President Trump's victory in 2016 was not a “cosmic mistake” but a natural backlash to a political system “rigged” against Americans. Dr. El-Sayed made campaign appearances during the primary with the streamer Hasan Piker, a critic of the Israeli government who has made incendiary comments . Jewish organizations and some Democrats have accused Mr. Piker of antisemitism (he rejects the claim), and some Democrats assailed Dr. El-Sayed for campaigning with him. Since then, Dr. El-Sayed has resisted pressure to publicly disavow Mr. Piker, but he has said he has no plans to campaign with him before the Nov. 3 election. He also said that he disagreed with many of the streamer's opinions. Dr. El-Sayed was born in Michigan, and his first language was Arabic. As a youth, he struggled to fit in. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he was called anti-Arab slurs. On the campaign trail, he speaks of America's promise and flaws. “I know what America can do for somebody,” he said at one rally. “I just know that too often America does not do that for too many of her kids.” John Yoon Mike Rogers, a former congressman with a background in law enforcement and national security, is the Republican nominee for Senate in Michigan, where he faces a progressive Democrat in a closely watched race that could decide who controls the chamber. Mr. Rogers, 63, has walked a fine line on his support of President Trump while vying for an open seat in the critical battleground state against Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. Mr. Rogers has received Mr. Trump's backing, but has distanced himself from the president to appeal to voters who have grown frustrated with him. If elected, Mr. Rogers would be the first Republican from Michigan to win a Senate seat in more than 30 years. Here are five things to know about the candidate. Before entering politics, Mr. Rogers served as an officer in the U.S. Army from 1985-89. He spent the next five years as an F.B.I. special agent based in Chicago, where he specialized in countering organized crime and public corruption. He served in the Michigan State Senate from 1995 to 2000 then spent 14 years in the U.S. House. In Washington, he was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee during his last four years in office, overseeing the nation's $70 billion intelligence budget. After leaving Congress in 2015, he built a lucrative career in the private sector as an adviser, board member and investor in defense and cybersecurity firms. He has also worked as a talk-show host for CNN and Westwood One, a national radio network. Mr. Rogers first tried in 2024 to capture a Michigan Senate seat. He narrowly lost that race to Elissa Slotkin, 50, a Democrat. He is now trying to replace Senator Gary Peters, 67, a Democrat who is retiring. Mr. Rogers used to be a vocal critic of Mr. Trump. After the 2020 presidential election, he consistently rebuked Mr. Trump's efforts to overturn the election results, called his leadership style “chaotic” and blamed him for provoking the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Mr. Rogers became a staunch ally of the president upon beginning his first Senate campaign, repeating some of the president's unproven claims of voter fraud and promising to support some of the president's top agenda items, including global tariffs. Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Rogers for both campaigns. But Mr. Rogers has, on some issues, distanced himself from Mr. Trump as Election Day nears. He said in August that he supported a one-year moratorium on new data center developments in Michigan, contrary to Mr. Trump's full-throated support for building up artificial intelligence infrastructure. After previously speaking in support of the president's authority to continue the war in Iran , Mr. Rogers said in a video posted on social media last month that it “needs to end and end quickly” to lower rising energy costs. He also backtracked on Mr. Trump's tariffs, saying in a campaign event last month that some of them were hurtful for Michigan . In a new ad released in October, he called for an end to the “tariff war.” He joined two rallies with Mr. Trump during the summer. But when asked by The Times in September whether he would be open to campaigning with the president before the election, his campaign did not comment . Mr. Rogers has opposed the “Medicare for all” plan supported by Dr. El-Sayed, just as he opposed the creation of the Affordable Care Act while serving in Congress. He has defended the Trump administration's focus on immigration enforcement, curbing illegal immigration and securing the border, while Dr. El-Sayed has called for overhauling the immigration system and securing the border in another way. Mr. Rogers has opposed abortion, supporting the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade . He said the next year, though, that he would not try to change the 2022 amendment to Michigan's Constitution protecting legal access to abortion, saying the matter should be left to the states. Dr. El-Sayed favors codifying Roe v. Wade into federal law . Mr. Rogers has also described Dr. El-Sayed as being overly focused on Gaza and condemned his criticism of Israel. Dr. El-Sayed's arguments regarding Israel — one of many issues in his broader platform — have caused friction among some Jewish voters. Dr. El-Sayed has faced hurdles in unifying the Democratic base in Michigan, a swing state that went narrowly for Mr. Trump in 2024, after winning a divisive primary against a moderate Democrat. To leverage the fissures among Democrats, Mr. Rogers has reached out to voters who typically vote Democratic and have been disaffected by Dr. El-Sayed's campaign, including Jewish and Black voters. He created a “Democrats for Mike Rogers” coalition in August, appealing to voters willing to cross party lines. Reid J. Epstein While tonight's debate is likely to cover topics like the economy and the Iran war, Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee, may want Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate, to talk about his faith, as well as his past statements and family connections to political groups in the Middle East. How all this will play with Michigan voters remains to be seen. Muslims make up about 2 percent of Michiganders, a relatively small slice of the electorate but one that is well-organized and has more political power than Muslims just about anywhere else in the country. Tim Balk The Republican nominee, Mike Rogers, has been seeking distance from the unpopular President Trump. The ad his campaign has most heavily invested in during the general election race, according to the media tracker AdImpact, shows him denouncing the president's trade war with Canada . “Here in Michigan, we know that Canada is not our enemy,” Rogers says in the commercial . “We need to end this tariff war — now.” Tim Balk The Senate debate in Michigan tonight comes as former Representative Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee, and Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee, are both trying to appeal to Black voters, a constituency that is typically loyal to Democrats. Some Democratic leaders acknowledge they're worried about how El-Sayed will perform with the group. Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who is Black, campaigned with El-Sayed yesterday. The Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist, said in an interview that El-Sayed had spoken “candidly” with him about the challenge, which Sharpton attributed to “religious bias” and deeper “tension in Detroit with Black and Arab communities.” Sharpton said that he had told Black leaders in Detroit that El-Sayed shouldn't be blamed for those tensions. Theodore Schleifer and Jennifer Medina The country's leading pro-Israel lobby has quietly made a major last-minute donation to support Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate for Senate in Michigan. His opponent, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, is a vocal critic of Israel whom the group spent heavily to try to defeat in the Democratic primary. The group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has almost never backed a Republican in a competitive general election race. But it has started contributing in recent days to a pro-Rogers super PAC, and plans to give as much as $9 million, according to two people with knowledge of the plans who shared them under condition of anonymity because the spending was not meant to be immediately disclosed. The donation comes after initial skepticism from the Rogers campaign about tying itself to AIPAC, whose support became an explosive issue in Democratic primary elections this year. At a debate on Oct. 8, however, Mr. Rogers opened to door for AIPAC's engagement by responding to a question that he would “take all of that help.” The donation went to the Great Lakes Conservatives Fund, a group exclusively focused on supporting Mr. Rogers, and was made after an Oct. 14 deadline that would have required it to be disclosed before Election Day. On Friday, the super PAC disclosed that it was making a $4.6 million media buy in Michigan. AIPAC declined to comment on its spending in the race. The Rogers super PAC did not respond to a request for comment. Several of the super PAC's new spots target the Muslim background of Dr. El-Sayed, raising questions about his loyalty to Egypt and whether he has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group with ties to extremists. He has denied any ties and dismissed the suggestion as part of a series of Islamophobic attacks . AIPAC faces growing animosity in the Democratic Party — and even among some Republicans — for its staunch support of Israel at a time when a growing number of Americans object to the war in Gaza. Dr. El-Sayed turned the group's support of his primary opponent, Representative Haley Stevens, into a central campaign issue. The New York Times reported in August that Mr. Rogers had some reservations about AIPAC again spending heavily to defeat Dr. El-Sayed, worrying that it could backfire with voters. AIPAC's super PAC has made disclosed expenditures of less than $300,000 in the last three weeks in Michigan, sending pieces of direct mail to Jewish voters in the state. Separately on Wednesday, AIPAC announced some changes around the edges of its political operations. The group will no longer offer direct endorsements or donations from its federal PAC. It will continue to operate United Democracy Project, the super PAC that has spent about $85 million in congressional elections this cycle. Though AIPAC backs many Democrats , the group's strongest supporters and donors see Dr. El-Sayed's candidacy as a major threat to Israel's backing in Congress and support within the Democratic Party. Dr. El-Sayed has said he opposes Israel's right to exist as an explicitly Jewish state, angering many Jewish leaders. The day after Dr. El-Sayed's primary win, Bernie Kaminetsky, AIPAC's president, wrote to supporters that the group maintained a “principled opposition to the dangerous policies El-Sayed wants to bring to the U.S. Senate.” Reid J. Epstein Brian M. Rosenthal and Michael Kruse In the final weeks of Michigan's closely watched Senate race, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's ethnicity, religion and family have come under renewed attacks and scrutiny. His Republican opponent, former Representative Mike Rogers, invoked Dr. El-Sayed's mother during their first debate, trying to draw a connection between her and Al Qaeda. President Trump has mocked the pronunciation of Dr. El-Sayed's name and has started referring to him by his middle name, Mohamed. And Republican ads have suggested that Dr. El-Sayed has ties to terrorist groups or to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist political movement. Dr. El-Sayed has forcefully responded to the questions about his identity. Over the weekend, a nearly five-minute exchange at a town-hall event with a man who asked him to “disavow the Muslim Brotherhood” went viral on social media. This week, in a brief, testy interaction with a reporter from Newsmax, he said, “I clearly disavow” the movement. And in a new video , Dr. El-Sayed says that he prays daily and calls himself a “man of faith.” Now Dr. El-Sayed, who would be the first Muslim senator if he wins, finds himself confronting both ugly attacks and pointed questions about family members — particularly his mother and a half sister — and their past comments and personal histories. Republicans have pushed to make those questions a main story line in the final days of a Senate race that could determine control of the chamber. The focus on Dr. El-Sayed's identity, religion and family comes at the end of a campaign defined by its emotional and bitter clashes over Israel and the United States' role in the Middle East. Dr. El-Sayed has cast himself as a leader of the Democratic Party's march away from support for Israel, arguing that the longtime U.S. ally should not exist as an explicitly Jewish state and calling for an end to its American military support. As he approaches a second and final televised debate with Mr. Rogers on Wednesday, Dr. El-Sayed is appealing to voters who are not Muslim to see him as a person of faith whose experience reflects America's history of religious pluralism. “A lot of people question whether or not I can win this race because of my name,” he said during a speech this month in Cadillac, Mich. “I've been a guy named Abdul Mohamed El-Sayed in Michigan almost my entire life. I would say I'm pretty good at being named Abdul in Michigan.” The questions that Mr. Rogers is pushing about Dr. El-Sayed's ties to the Muslim Brotherhood relate in part to an open letter he signed in 2012 . That letter, which Dr. El-Sayed signed while he was in medical school, asked Mohamed Morsi, who was then the new Egyptian president from a party that represented the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, to “purge the media and police” of supporters of the dictatorship that had been toppled during the Arab Spring. (Mr. Morsi, Egypt's first democratically elected president , established good working relations with the United States.) Dr. El-Sayed's campaign denied that he had any connection to the Muslim Brotherhood. When asked recently by reporters, he has disavowed the group. His campaign aides declined to answer questions about the 2012 letter. Many of the Republican attacks on Dr. El-Sayed focus on his mother, Fatten Elkomy, an Egyptian immigrant. Dr. El-Sayed's parents separated when he was 3 years old. He was raised in Missouri, Florida and Michigan by his father and stepmother, a Michigan-born descendant of Abigail Adams. He has featured his grandparents in advertisements, including one that began airing on Tuesday in which they declared, “We're Presbyterians.” After the separation, Ms. Elkomy lived in Egypt at first and later in Missouri, where she worked for a charity that was designated by the U.S. government as a supporter of terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda. The charity, the Islamic American Relief Agency, was founded in 1985, raised at least $20 million and funded social services for children in Africa and Asia, according to federal records. It closed in 2004 after the terrorism designation. The group and several leaders ultimately pleaded guilty — not to supporting terrorism, but to a lesser charge of transferring more than $1 million to Iraq in violation of federal sanctions. Its executive director, Mubarak Hamed, was sentenced in 2012 to nearly five years in prison. This month, five people involved in the case said in interviews that they did not remember Ms. Elkomy because she was a low-ranking employee and was never accused of wrongdoing. “She didn't have anything to do with anything,” said Charles Swift, a lawyer who represented the group. Among the 945 exhibits cited by prosecutors in a court filing during the case were 13 that pertained to Ms. Elkomy, a detail Republicans have seized on. Most of the exhibits were letters she sent documenting financial transactions between 1999 and 2001. (Records do not include the letters themselves or any information about whether the transactions were illegal.) Evan Kohlmann, a counterterrorism consultant who was an expert witness in the case, said the charity was so small that all of its employees most likely knew about its activities. He added that the group was part of a global network whose leaders had been found to have previously sent money to Osama bin Laden. “It was no secret that they were doing this,” he said. The Missouri charity had 14 employees, according to its last tax filing in 2003. Ms. Elkomy, who now works as a psychiatric nurse practitioner in Missouri, addressed the criminal case years ago in a newspaper interview . She said she had worked at the charity between 1999 and 2004 to serve orphans and had never seen any ties to terrorism. An even older chapter of Ms. Elkomy's life has also drawn scrutiny because of years-old posts on social media by her daughter from a marriage after her divorce from Dr. El-Sayed's father. The daughter, Eman Abdelhadi, who is now a professor at the University of Chicago, posted in 2012: “Had an amazing talk with my mom about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college #respect.” Ms. Elkomy has said she graduated from medical school at Alexandria University in Egypt in 1983. Dr. Abdelhadi has also made other posts suggesting that family members in Egypt were part of the Muslim Brotherhood. None have mentioned Dr. El-Sayed. Dr. El-Sayed's campaign pointed to his past remarks about his complex family dynamics. He wrote in one of his books that his father left Egypt to escape the country's political oppression and that he had little relationship with his mother. His aides said that any suggestions that he had connections to overseas terrorist groups were racist and Islamophobic. Dr. El-Sayed's mother and half sister, with whom he also did not grow up, did not respond to requests for comment. His aides declined a request for an interview with him for this article, and declined to talk in detail about his family or religious practices. “I was raised here in Michigan, went to the University of Michigan, rebuilt the health department in this city, led the health department in this county, and you want to ask me about what was happening in Egypt in the 1970s?” Dr. El-Sayed, a former public health official, said in a recent interview with NBC. “Are you serious?” When the general election began, Mr. Rogers accused Dr. El-Sayed of being too far left politically for Michigan. He made a play for disaffected Democrats and described the El-Sayed campaign as “filled with anger, divisiveness, calls for violence and views that are out of touch with your values.” It was a predictable line of attack against a progressive Democrat who had campaigned with the provocative streamer Hasan Piker during the primary race. Then came the debate this month. Mr. Rogers attacked Dr. El-Sayed's mother and suggested his rival had ties to terrorists. “Well, if you have someone in your family that might be on the, on the watch list —” Mr. Rogers said, before Dr. El-Sayed cut him off. “You going after my mom?” he asked. Mr. Rogers stopped, but his allies did not. Mr. Trump began calling Dr. El-Sayed by his middle name, Mohamed, and mocked the number of syllables in his given name. Ads emerged on television saying that Dr. El-Sayed had “ties to the Islamist movement.” On CNN, Mr. Rogers said his rival had “a long history of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.” Republican allies of Mr. Rogers stepped up efforts to scrutinize Dr. El-Sayed's political allies and donors. This push came to a head on Saturday night when, at a town hall in Caro, a small town in northeast Michigan, a man who was reportedly a Republican operative asked Dr. El-Sayed if he would disavow the Muslim Brotherhood. Dr. El-Sayed's campaign was so pleased with his response — “Sure, yes, absolutely,” followed by a colloquy about the Constitution and his loyalty to it — that it posted the exchange on social media , where it spread widely. Republicans argued that Dr. El-Sayed had bullied the questioner, and kept pushing the discussion about the candidate's faith. On Monday, Dr. El-Sayed posted a video that showed images of churches and a menorah while portraying himself as another religiously observant person. “I pray every day,” he said. “We need a few more people of faith in Washington. I'm Abdul El-Sayed, man of faith.” From the start, Dr. El-Sayed had few illusions about the role his faith and ethnicity would play in his Senate campaign. Many other Muslim candidates for lower-profile offices had faced baseless accusations of mixed allegiances or ties to terrorist groups. “We kind of all knew where this was headed,” Dr. El-Sayed said in an interview after his campaign event this month in Cadillac. Dr. El-Sayed wrote in his 2020 memoir, “Healing Politics,” that he was “raised in a conservative Muslim household.” He went to Sunday school, fasted during Ramadan and refrained from eating pork. And in interviews, he has said he attends a mosque, prays five times a day and does not drink alcohol. At Michigan, he was president of the Muslim Students Association and married his wife while they were undergraduates. “I believe in an Islam that emphasizes God and my responsibility in his creation,” he wrote. “The Islam I practice doesn't judge people; it seeks to empathize with and empower them.” For a while during his Senate race, Dr. El-Sayed ran advertisements stressing his guy-next-door bona fides. He was captain of his high school football team and gave a commencement speech upon graduating from the University of Michigan. For other Muslim elected officials, Dr. El-Sayed's experience in recent weeks is reminiscent of what they have gone through in their campaigns. Sam Rasoul, a Palestinian American who has been in the Virginia House of Delegates since 2014, was asked during a televised debate when he ran for lieutenant governor in 2021 if campaign donations he received from Muslims meant he would be loyal to all of Virginia. Four years later, a different Muslim candidate, Ghazala Hashmi, was elected as Virginia's lieutenant governor after facing similar attacks. She said she had texted with Dr. El-Sayed during his Senate campaign to offer encouragement. “There's such a heightened level of anti-Muslim rhetoric that has grown over the past couple of decades,” said Ms. Hashmi, who is now one of two Muslims who hold statewide office in the United States. “Islamophobia is something that is a part of the political system here.” Onstage at campaign events, Dr. El-Sayed often stands not in front of signs with his campaign logo, as he frequently did during the primary, but in front of a giant American flag. He proactively talks about what Mr. Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Mr. Rogers and others are saying about him. “They think my name and my faith are enough to get people to stop paying attention to the issues,” he said this month in Ionia. “My name is not the reason you can't afford gas. My name's not the reason you can't afford your groceries.” Susan C. Beachy contributed research. An earlier version of a picture caption with this article referred incorrectly to Mike Rogers. He is a former congressman, not a current one. We acknowledge mistakes in our reporting with corrections. If you spot an error, please let us know at corrections@nytimes.com . Learn more .