A victory declared in Detroit

Abdul El-Sayed claimed victory in the Michigan Senate race early on Wednesday, speaking to supporters at the Michigan Democrats' headquarters in Detroit after Tuesday's vote.

He credited a movement built over a year and a half of campaigning that took him across Michigan's biggest cities and smallest towns. In his victory speech, he turned to the attacks that had dogged his candidacy: "They want an America that is too small for some of us," he said. "We know that America is big enough for all of us."

Thanking the people who carried him to office, El-Sayed told the crowd: "You welcomed me in your homes, your churches, your synagogues."

What the result means for the Senate

The win adds to a decisive Democratic majority in the Senate, after the party wrested control of the upper chamber on Tuesday. El-Sayed and Rogers were running to succeed Gary Peters, the outgoing Democratic senator who has held the seat since 2015.

The road past Rogers and the attacks

Rogers, a former congressman endorsed by Trump, came into the race after losing the 2024 Senate contest to Elissa Slotkin by roughly 0.3 percentage points. Trump and other detractors ran a largely Islamophobic campaign against El-Sayed, pointing to his name and faith, with the president alleging he was a "jihadist" and would need to walk through a metal detector to enter the Senate.

El-Sayed said his denigrators chose divisiveness over addressing the cost of gas and groceries because they had no answer to the problems they created.

• •Rogers opposed the Affordable Care Act, defended the Trump administration's immigration enforcement and repeated Trump's false 2020 election claims

The money and the platform behind the win

Aipac, through its Super Pac United Democracy Project, spent roughly $30m in the primary trying to stop El-Sayed, a record for a single race. More than $220m in total ad spending had been poured into the general election by mid-October, according to AdImpact.

El-Sayed, a former Wayne county health director who upset the Democratic establishment favorite Haley Stevens in the primary, campaigned on Medicare for All and a call to end US military aid for Israel. In his speech, he framed the agenda in his own terms: "We want our taxes spent here, for schools here, and healthcare here, and infrastructure here. We don't want our money sent to do apartheid, or genocide, or war."

The result hands Democrats their decisive Senate majority won on Tuesday, with El-Sayed succeeding Gary Peters, who has held the seat since 2015.