USA13 September, 20263 min read
Tommy Tuberville Says Democrats Voted to Send a Terrorist to Washington After Abdul El-Sayed Win
This article is an automated aggregation of coverage from news outlets. Our editorials offer in-depth analysis curated by the NewsCord team.
Tuberville labeled Abdul El-Sayed a terrorist and claimed Democrats sent him to Washington. The episode illustrates rising Islamophobic rhetoric in US elections.
5 outlets told this the same way.
Tuberville’s “terrorist” claim
Within hours of Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s Democratic US Senate primary, Republican senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama declared that the party had “just voted to send a TERRORIST” to Washington. The Guardian frames the moment as part of a “wave of Islamophobic rhetoric” that looms over US midterm elections, with Saher Selod of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding saying, “It’s probably the worst of what we’ve seen.” The Guardian reports that ISPU’s 2025 Islamophobia Index, a 100-point scale built using common anti-Muslim stereotypes, rose from 25 in 2022 to 33 among the general public in 2025.
It adds that the Pew Research Center found in a survey this spring that 51% of US adults say Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence, up from just 25% six months after the 2001 attacks. In the same account, the Center for the Study of Organized Hate found Islamophobic posts naming El-Sayed rose by nearly 1,900% in the week after his win, from an average of 155 to more than 3,000 a day.
Policy and party attacks
The Guardian says the attacks are “also coming from the very top of the Republican party,” recalling that Donald Trump called in 2015 for a “total and complete shutdown” on Muslims entering the US and attempted to enact it via executive order in early 2017. It reports that this year Trump called El-Sayed a “jihadist” from the Oval Office and separately claimed—without naming anyone—that “jihadists” were being elected to office “all over the place”. In Michigan, Vice-president JD Vance called El-Sayed “very, very evil” at a rally and, separately, invoked his own late grandfather to attack comments El-Sayed made in 2022 defending a legal challenge to an Oklahoma anti-Sharia ballot measure.
The Guardian also quotes Senator Ted Cruz telling Fox News that El-Sayed and Mamdani were “Islamists” who “want Sharia law” and “hate Jews, they hate Christians, they hate capitalism, they hate America”. For Mobashra Tazamal of Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative, the shift is “shockingly noticeable,” saying, “It is almost as if the veil has been lifted.”
Academic on election strategy
In remarks to Al Jazeera, San Diego attack.. MSU political science professor Nazita Laghaivari (Nazita Lajevardi) said Islamophobia has not been absent from American election campaign calculations, adding that it remains “traditionally an influential factor in political campaigns when politically convenient,”.
She told Al Jazeera that Republican politicians found in its employment “a proven and guaranteed strategy” whose effectiveness has been demonstrated before.
Laghaivari said the midterm congressional elections approach in November and that Islamophobia was a “driving force” in motivating voters to go to the polls in the 2016 elections, with the message being invoked again today to urge some voters to participate.
She described a familiar context for the strategy’s formation, saying it came after the “Syrian refugee crisis,” and after a wave of attacks inside the United States carried out by “bad actors who hid behind being Muslim,” which she said made many people vulnerable.
Laghaivari also argued that the campaign’s racialized appeals “still are heard by the very people they target” in these elections, and she raised the question of whether “counter-mobilization” will arise among American Muslims.