With the 2026 midterm elections two months away, Republicans have been ratcheting up their verbal assaults on Democratic candidates of Muslim faith. While these attacks have most notably come against Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, they may be emblematic of a larger GOP campaign against Islam.
What are Republicans saying about Muslims?
El-Sayed has become a lightning rod for a host of anti-Muslim sentiment, including from the Trump administration. The Senate candidate is part of something “very, very evil” that is “on the rise in the United States,” Vice President JD Vance said during a speech in the Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights. President Donald Trump has referred to Democratic candidates as “jihadists” and also called El-Sayed a “communist who hates Jews and Israel.” El-Sayed has disavowed accusations of antisemitism.
Republicans in Congress have recently been pumping up similar attacks against Islam as a whole. “Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a Trojan horse” and a “threat to both national security and our republic,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) said on X. A similar sentiment was echoed by Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.). “The enemy is at the gates,” Tuberville said on X in response to a photograph of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is also Muslim. In Tuberville’s own state of Alabama, Muslims “make up less than half a percent of the population,” said Reuters.
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Why is this the new GOP tactic?
Anti-Muslim rhetoric has “quickly become a central aspect” of the Republicans’ strategy to win the midterms, as “Muslim and Arab American political power is growing across the country,” said The New York Times. The “number of Muslim Americans running for — and winning — local, state and federal elections has steadily increased over the past decade.” There are currently 255 Muslim elected officials across 26 states, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
There has been an “escalation of messaging designed to raise alarm about Muslim Americans and Muslim candidates,” said NBC News. The Islamophobia in politics is nothing new, as it “began cropping up more pointedly 25 years ago, in the aftermath of 9/11, and it hardened as Trump began his rise.” Since then, the “undercurrent of concern and fears raised by politicians around Muslim Americans has remained steady.”
Critics say the “rhetoric unfairly targets Muslims, while Republicans say they are raising legitimate concerns about security, extremism and the role of religion in public life,” said Reuters. “If you can wrap yourself in the flag and you can criticize Muslims and Islam that means you don’t really have to deal with the issues,” Aaron Hughes, a religious studies professor at the University of Rochester, said to Reuters. These attacks come even though many Muslims have beliefs that “dovetail with Republican orthodoxy, such as opposition to some abortion procedures and same-sex marriage.”
Others feel that Republicans “may have trouble with anti-Islam messaging heading into the midterms,” said Spectrum News. If any “candidate in the midterms wants to engage in questionable campaign behavior and make outlandish statements, this may not be something that voters are going to go for, even in a relatively conservative area,” Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha, a professor of political science at the University of North Texas, told the outlet. Voters “care about core issues like cost of living, and social wars probably aren’t going to fly in a 2026 midterm election with a Republican president in office.”
