In 2024, Husham Al-Husainy, an Iraqi American imam in Dearborn, Michigan, backed Donald Trump for president. So did many other Arab and Muslim voters in the state, in a coordinated protest against the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. On election night, Al-Husainy recalled, Trump thanked Arab and Muslim Americans for their support.

Now, Al-Husainy said, “there’s no thanking; there’s attacking.”This year, Al-Husainy is supporting the Senate campaign of a Democrat Trump has baselessly branded a “jihadist” and “a member of the Muslim Brotherhood”: Abdul El-Sayed, who would be America’s first Muslim senator if elected in November. Al-Husainy, who described El-Sayed as “peaceful,” told MS NOW that most of the local Muslim voters he knows who backed Trump in 2024 plan to vote for El-Sayed over Republican Mike Rogers.

People feel like “ changed,” he said of Republicans. “ didn’t.”Trump won nearly half the vote in Michigan’s majority-Arab precincts in 2024, research suggests, while Green Party candidate Jill Stein siphoned off a sizable share from Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. These voters make up a small but significant number of Michigan’s population, with most of the estimated 400,000 concentrated in metro Detroit.

But two years later, Arab and Muslim strategists in the state say, Republicans aren’t courting those voters in a high-stakes Senate race; they’re alienating them with Islamophobic attacks — many aimed at El-Sayed.

Such broadsides are nothing new for El-Sayed, or for prominent Muslim candidates generally. But coming from a party trying to win votes in a swing state weeks before the midterms, they’ve puzzled some longtime observers.

“I don’t understand Republicans when they do this — it’s not expanding their base, it’s actually inflaming their existing base,” said Jim Zogby, a prominent Democrat who leads the Arab American Institute, a Washington-based advocacy group.

Republicans have found common ground with Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan before. In 2000, George W. Bush lost the state but won its Arab American vote. In 2022, some conservative Muslims in Dearborn joined a right-wing push to remove books with LGBTQ themes from school libraries.

“In some ways, the Republicans have seen them as a lost cause, but they are a decisive voting bloc that can swing elections,” Nura Sediqe, an assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University, said of the state’s Arab and Muslim voters. “With the margins this thin, there was an opportunity to court the business owners and those that have historically voted Republican.”But local leaders, including Nizarko and Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, say Republicans haven’t tried to win over their communities.

“There has been no authentic outreach to the Muslim community because they do not believe that the Muslims should be at the table within the party,” said Hammoud, the city’s first Arab American and Muslim mayor.

He pointed to Trump’s first-term travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries, as well as recent comments from Rep. John James, Michigan’s Republican nominee for governor. In a Newsmax interview this summer, James called Shiite Muslims in Dearborn marching to commemorate Ashura, a Muslim holy day, “extremists.”After the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned the remarks, James doubled down, calling CAIR “a radical extremist group.”

“This is the language of the candidates that are arising out of this party,” said Hammoud, a Democrat. “They do not view Muslims as human beings, as equals, as folks that they wish to partner with. They love their vote from time to time, but that’s about it.”Then there are Trump’s own recent moves, which threaten to whittle away whatever goodwill he still has among some Arab and Muslim voters. Last December, he called Somali immigrants — most of whom are Muslim — “garbage” and said they should leave the country.

This week, Trump endorsed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for re-election — a move that flies in the face of the Michigan voters who backed him over Harris to protest the Biden administration’s support of Israel.

Bishara Bahbah, chairman of the group formerly known as Arab Americans for Trump, called Trump’s endorsement of Netanyahu “a major betrayal of the Arab and Muslim Americans who voted for the president in 2024” in a post on Bahbah, who is based in Arizona, renamed his group Arab Americans for Peace last year after Trump said he would “take over” the Gaza Strip.

“A lot of people tell us that we’ve been fooled, that we’ve been used, that we got him to the presidency and we got nothing in return,” he told MS NOW on Tuesday.

In an interview, Bahbah characterized Trump’s attacks on El-Sayed as “astounding,” “unacceptable” and “crossing red lines.”He said he expects it will impact Arab and Muslim voters both this year and in 2028.

Republicans reject the charge that their attacks on El-Sayed are Islamophobic, or that the party has abandoned Arab and Muslim voters.

“There has been a concentrated effort by our campaign to speak to every single group,” said Abby Ronson, a spokesperson for Rogers, adding that the Republican’s campaign has spoken to Muslim voters who believe El-Sayed is “too extreme for them.”Ronson also said the campaign’s position is that El-Sayed has “dismissed, not disavowed” the Muslim Brotherhood — even though he did so when asked in a viral exchange at a town hall this past weekend.

State Sen. Jim Runestad, who is also chair of the Michigan Republican Party, said Rogers specifically asked the state party to attack El-Sayed’s faith or mock his name — a request Ronson confirmed.

“It’s very important that the Republican Party be engaged in the Muslim community,” Runestad told MS NOW, though he added that some groups representing those voters are unwilling to even meet with Republican candidates. Asked if that may be due to the rhetoric from Trump and other high-ranking Republicans, he demurred.

“Everyone who knows the president knows he says what he says when the teleprompter’s shut off,” Runestad said.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which has called El-Sayed “the most radical Senate candidate in America,” has spent $1.5 million on an ad that describes him as “a real threat to our national security and our values.”

“Abdul El-Sayed and his family’s ties to designated terrorist groups have raised so many red flags that even the mainstream media can no longer ignore them,” Samantha Cantrell, regional press secretary for the NRSC, told MS NOW. “El-Sayed has serious questions to answer, and it should alarm every single Michigander that he continually refuses to do so.”

El-Sayed has confronted the attacks directly. In a recent interview with ABC News, he described the focus on his name and religion as attempts to “distract us from the fact that we can’t afford our gas and we can’t afford our groceries.”Polling suggests the race is tight. If El-Sayed wins, the question is whether Republicans will change how they engage with the voters who helped make both his victory and Trump’s possible — voters like Al-Husainy.

If Rogers wins, Nizarko said, it would be “a legitimization card for Islamophobia going forward.”

“That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to keep showing up and continuing to push our values and our voices in the electoral space,” he added, “but it’s concerning.”