What's going on: From Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D-NY) to Rep. Lateefah Simon (D-CA), Muslim politicians are rising to prominence in the Democratic Party. Last week, Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary; if he wins the general election, he’ll be the first Muslim Senator in US history. Now, many Republican politicians are doubling down on Islamophobia. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) called El-Sayed a “terrorist” while Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said Mamdani and El-Sayed “hate Christians” and want “Sharia law.” President Donald Trump said on Monday that “we have jihadists being elected all over the place.” Many Republicans have started using El-Sayed’s full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, a longstanding tactic to frame nonwhite politicians as outsiders. (El-Sayed’s response: “My name is not the reason you can’t afford your groceries.”) It’s the latest example of what The New York Times describes as “anti-Muslim rhetoric [becoming] increasingly normalized in the ranks of the GOP.”
This isn’t entirely new: Just ask Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), who have been frequent targets of Islamophobia from their fellow Congress members and from Trump. While some solidly blue areas have embraced their elected Muslim politicians (New York magazine’s current cover story is titled “Habibi City”), the US public as a whole has gotten more Islamophobic in recent years. The Council on American-Islamic Relations measured higher Islamophobia in 2025 than in any year since it began tracking data in 1996 — as in, worse than post-9/11. Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, told PBS earlier this year that, at least back in 2001, then-President Bush and some elected officials publicly condemned Islamophobia… even as they enacted policies that placed Muslim residents on watchlists and under surveillance.
