Abdul El-Sayed, pictured with his wife, Sarah Jukaku, said ‘praise be to God’ in Arabic in his victory speech

Benedict Smith, Poppy Wood – The Telegraph Nov 4, 2026

Abdul El-Sayed appeared to have the last laugh as he addressed supporters in Michigan in the early hours of Wednesday.

He had survived an ugly election contest, during which he was smeared by the president, his opponent Mike Rogers and the Republican establishment with claims of being a jihadist supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood who approved of 9/11.

Even his former Democrat rival for the Michigan senate race, Haley Stevens, endorsed Dr El-Sayed’s Maga rival in a bombshell announcement on the eve of the vote.

After that, the first Muslim senator in US history was probably entitled to a celebration, but a midterm elections victory speech supposedly meant to thank his supporters seemed calculated to rile his enemies instead.

Dr El-Sayed said: “Up until right about now, you might have noticed I always say ‘inshallah’ or ‘God willing’ whenever the outcome of this race was mentioned. But today – tonight, we can turn that, inshallah, into an ‘alhamdulillah’ [praise be to God].”

Speaking Arabic after a campaign marred by baseless claims about his religion seemed like a move designed to provoke his political opponents.

Fox News pundits, inflamed by the speech, were quick to pile in, with Joel Pollack, the California Post opinion editor, saying: “You don’t start your speech with a kind of message to your Muslim supporters at first. I thought that was really grating.”

Dr El-Sayed is acting like a man permanently in campaigning mode. And in a sense, who could blame him? He has won the fight of his life, and it’s hardly as if the Maga movement has ever been a magnanimous one.

However, it means that he, and other like-minded Democrats, risk handing their opponents the tools of their destruction at the moment of what seems total triumph.

Triumph is giving way to triumphalism after a series of crushing wins by Democrats, seizing Republican strongholds where they had been a footnote for decades – for almost a century, in the case of Kansas.

They saw one blue wave and decided it was time for a beach party.

In doing so, Democrats are making it easier for their opponents to caricature them.

The reason they won back the House and Senate by decisive margins was because, for the most part, they did not act like the “radical Left lunatics” that Mr Trump complains they are.

James Talarico in Texas, who became the first Democrat to win a Senate election in the Lone Star state since 1988, recognised that.

His politics was doggedly centrist and speeches swaddled in religious and homely language, about “loving thy neighbour” and securing the border with a “welcome mat out front and a lock on the door”. Despite this, he was cast by the White House as a vegan liberal pervert in the ranching heartlands of the country.

Attack ads centred on his 2021 Texas floor debate, in which he claimed God was “non-binary”, while JD Vance offered unsubtle insinuations about his sexuality and his interest in transgender children.

The former teacher, who eats meat but has a vegan girlfriend, brushed off the remarks as “cringey”. At a dour Republican election party in Detroit, this stale brand of Maga politics was on display.

“He’s a freak! Talafreako!” one woman shouted, using the president’s nickname for Mr Talarico. “What the f— is wrong with people! Do people want socialism?”

At Mr Talarico’s watch party in Texas, his supporters chanted “U-S-A, U-S-A” – hardly signs the new governor was a harbinger of Marxism.

Taking to the stage after his shock victory over Mr Trump’s handpicked candidate, Ken Paxton, whose campaign was supported by Elon Musk to the tune of $160m, Mr Talarico proclaimed: “Tonight, we defeated Goliath!

Delirious Democrats ran around taking selfies, and hugging their friends. “I’m ecstatic … it feels unbelievable, I’m not going to lie,” said Iris Romero, a 30-year-old tech engineer.

In Ohio, Sweet Caroline belted out after Amy Acton defeated Vivek Ramaswamy, the erstwhile presidential candidate and brief architect of the ill-fated Doge project. The Republican’s popularity nosedived after airing an attack ad about his opponent’s sexual abuse, featuring her estranged mother.

After being roundly rejected by voters, he said he had attempted to offer his concession to Ms Acton, but his call had gone to voicemail. Mr Ramaswamy said: “We left her a message. It’s a tough night for us here in Ohio.”

However, the message from voters was loud and clear: they want a candidate, not a culture warrior.

Even Mr Trump offered a rare conciliatory tone, conceding that the Democrats had done a “good job” and he would accept the results. Republicans also acknowledged their shortcomings.

Trumpism obituaries being written

At Butterworth’s, Maga’s bistro of choice, the party quickly turned into a funeral. Staffers bolted out of the room once results started coming in.

A party organiser told Vanity Fair after Mr Paxton lost Texas: “I’m not trying to crash out. But we nominated Hitler with Down Syndrome. And guess what!? He lost! He lost! And now we lose a Supreme Court Justice. It is a f—ing disaster.”

The obituaries are already being written for Trumpism.

The Democrats, though, would do well to remember why they succeeded, having refused to play Mr Trump at his own game, unlike during recent failed campaigns.

And yet.

Ro Khanna, the Democratic congressman, was one of the first out of the blocks early on Wednesday, lauding midterm wins as a victory for the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes that the Trump administration has sought to dismantle.

In a video on social media, Mr Khanna said: “Tonight, DEI is back as America celebrated diversity and inclusion. Likely three black governors: the first Latina governor in Texas, the first Muslim American senator, the first gay senator. I love this America.”

That will be music to the ears of the Democratic socialists entering Congress for the first time,

But this is comfortable territory for Maga. One charge often levelled at administration officials, such as Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, is that they have nothing to talk about except the culture wars.

If Democrats insist they want to keep fighting this battle, like the Japanese holdouts who continued fighting the Second World War decades after it ended, they will lose as they did in 2024.

Mehdi Hasan, a Left-wing commentator who broadcast from Dr El-Sayed’s election night party, shouted himself hoarse as he exulted in the Democrat’s victory and reeled off a lengthy list of perceived political enemies.

“I just want to say to Donald Trump, and Mike Rogers, and Elon Musk, and JD Vance,” he said, not even a quarter of the way through his enemies’ list. “Abdul Al-Sayed, a Left-wing Muslim anti-Zionist, is heading to the United States Senate. And so, for all of you, I have two words. Two words: cry more.”

Some of this may be a simple sugar rush experienced by Left-wingers finally witnessing wide-scale blue victories after so many disappointments.

Some is probably more cynical. Clever politicians, such as Dr El-Sayed and Mr Khanna, who is rumoured to be considering a 2028 presidential run, have learned from Mr Trump and know they can raise their own profiles by stoking social media outrage.

Dr El-Sayed has already learned the pitfalls of this strategy. His angry confrontation with James Matthews, a US correspondent for Sky News, outside a Detroit voting centre, was widely shared online on Wednesday.

“I do not care what you think,” the Oxford University Rhodes scholar told the British journalist.

He then put his hands on Mr Matthews’s shoulders and said: “You know how many votes I want to get in the UK? Zero. I am never running for office in the UK.”

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