El-Sayed’s campaign test: Can he win over Black and Jewish voters?

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DETROIT (RNS) — During a town hall meeting last week at the Shrine of the Black Madonna, U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed acknowledged the tensions between the city’s Black residents and its Arab Americans — a tension rooted in economic inequities, race and class.

If elected the first Muslim U.S. senator on Nov. 3, El-Sayed said, he will work to heal the rifts between the two groups. 

Then he made his plea: “I also ask that I am judged by the content of my character, not the color of my skin,” he said at the Sept. 14 event, echoing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and winning instant applause from some 100 people seated at tables in the church’s fellowship hall. 

The church, associated with the Civil Rights Movement and affiliated with the United Church of Christ, is one of several Black congregations El-Sayed has visited. He hosted his first campaign launch rally on May 3 at Detroit’s Historic King Solomon Baptist Church.

Detroit, where 75% of 650,000 residents are African-American, is the Blackest city in America. El-Sayed can’t win a Senate seat without strong Black voter turnout. Church town halls, like this one, could make the difference in what is turning out to be a very tight race against the Republican candidate, former congressman Mike Rogers. October surveys show El-Sayed with a small lead, generally between 1 to 3 percentage points. 

On the campaign trail, El-Sayed stressed that he understands the plight of Black Americans and will advocate on their behalf. He highlighted his campaign slogans — “money out of politics” and “Medicare for all.”

The question is whether he can overcome skepticism from this and other religious and ethnic groups.

Black and Jewish voters in and around Detroit both aligned behind Haley Stevens, El-Sayed’s challenger, in the August primaries. He lost in Detroit by 28 percentage points. Now he must win over these two key Democratic constituencies.  On Saturday, Barack Obama is scheduled to stump for him in Detroit. This past week, Sen. Raphael Warnock spoke from the pulpit of a Black church in Flint Michigan, church, saying, “We stand with our brother. Are you with me? We stand with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.”

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El Sayed is running at a time of rising Islamophobia. There have been 255 Muslim Americans in elected office in the U.S., according to a new report by the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers Law School. But despite those historic electoral gains, Muslim Americans running for office consistently face “disproportionate political fearmongering and scapegoating,” the report found. There has never been a Muslim elected as a U.S. Senator.

President Trump has repeatedly slurred him as “Mohammed El-Sayed.” Rogers has tried to link him to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement whose militant offshoots such as Hamas have engaged in armed conflict or terrorism. 

At another town hall meeting recently, a Republican operative heckled El-Sayed, asking: “Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?”

After responding, “Sure. Yeah, absolutely,” El-Sayed then pivoted to questioning the underlying implication — that he had dual loyalties to the U.S. and the Islamist movement. 

He received a warmer welcome at the Shrine of the Black Madonna. Kandia Milton, associate pastor at the church and also chair of a political action group, Black Slate Inc., said the group supports El-Sayed because he “had established some street credibility within our community.”

“He’s not new to us,” Milton said, referring to the doctor-turned-politician’s years of work as director of Detroit’s Health Department and later the Wayne County Department of Health, Human & Veterans Services.

Still, tensions between Black and Arab Americans have existed for decades. After Arab and Chaldean entrepreneurs stepped in to buy up neighborhood gas stations and liquor stores in Detroit, Black customers complained they put up bulletproof glass in some stores and treated them disrespectfully. They also abandoned the city for the suburbs, taking their profits with them rather than investing it in Black neighborhoods.

“A lot of Detroiters just don’t trust Arab Americans because they do business here, but they don’t live here,” said Al Williams, president of the African American Leadership Institute in Detroit.

Just last month, a mob of about 70 people who appeared to be mostly of Arab descent verbally ambushed an injured Black woman whose car was hit by another driver. They shouted anti-Black and sexist slurs at her, according to reports in the Detroit Free Press.

Michigan has never elected a Black candidate to the U.S. Senate, and some Black voters might begrudge an Arab-American…