What Abdul El-Sayed’s Wild, Historic Ride to the Senate Means to One Michigander

I’m just a Great Lakes boy, standing in front of his home state, asking for some clarity. And, perhaps, I’m a little closer to getting some.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan native fond of exercising the right to bare (his impressive) arms, has just won my home state’s messy Senate race by six points. This is a boon to Democrats’ legislative goals — and to my own mental health. Because, in an admittedly myopic move, I decided early on that he would be the one candidate to whom I’d pin all of my 2026 hopes. Not just because he’s a litmus test for non-coastal Americans’ appetite for progressive politics. Because I deeply needed to know if my complicated home state was capable of electing a loud, liberal, practicing Muslim to such a high office.

My doubts were not without merit. I spent my adolescence in deep red Livingston County, in a smallish town with exceptional public schools and a storybook Main Street that now has shops that sport trans pride flags in their widows and hosts an annual and very well-attended Gilmore Girls festival. Last December, mid-Hanukkah, that same Main Street was bombarded with white supremacists carrying signs that read “Happy Holidays, Heil Hitler” while reportedly spicing up their antisemitic campaign by calling passing holiday shoppers the n-word and the f-slur.

Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s MAGA-endorsed opponent, grew up in Livingston County as well. And he represented our town during his years in the Michigan State Senate before going on to represent those same constituents in the House of Representatives. My dad couldn’t stand him. Still can’t. And I vividly recall rolling my eyes under the brim of my marching band hat (it’s called a Shako!), whenever I had to watch Rogers gladhand the town’s Republican majority at football games as he made his leap to national politics. What I wouldn’t learn for another 25 years is that El-Sayed’s grandparents were helping to raise Abdul just a few miles away. Because Livingston County is also home to Jan and Judy Johnson, the newly famous TV stars whose series of campaign spots for their grandson epitomize the kind of Michiganders who I know and come from.

OK, that was arguably too much color about one random cluster of towns an hour’s drive west of Detroit. But if this much paradox can exist within this 15-mile radius, how can anything but an election like the one we’ve just had tell me where the majority of people’s heads and hearts are at? Because I didn’t grow up in the only culturally bipolar part of Michigan or any other state. This country is a real trip, and most of us realized that before 2016.

I’m back in Michigan a lot, just last week in fact, but I haven’t voted there for almost 20 years. Another thing I have in common with Mike Rogers is that I spend most of my time in another place. California, for me. And watching so much of this race from afar has been a tough hang. El-Sayed regularly had to endure a gun-toting pardoned Jan. 6 insurrectionist crashing his rallies. He had to navigate his proximity to the national sideshow that is Hasan Piker. His campaign was wildly outspent by the Rogers one, which blanketed the airwaves with some exceptionally racist content. And, on the eve of the election, El-Sayed’s primary opponent, Haley Stevens, distracted from the conversation with her left-field endorsement of Rogers that may have ejected her from the Democratic party and possibly a political career.

If it isn’t clear by this point, I am aligned with El-Sayed on many issues. I made a few modest donations to his campaign. I’ve been wearing a baseball cap with his name on it most weekends since before the primary. I sent his spoof of the So You Think You Can Leave sketch to everyone I’ve ever met. But, for me, I didn’t really need to know if Michigan was ready to go full liberal. I just wanted some assurance, in this grotesque circus of a race, that the majority of those in the complex and diverse place that I still consider home could recognize what I believe to be a good man in some slightly different packaging.

Everybody likes to invoke the whole “As [insert state here] goes, so goes the nation” thing. Wow, humble much? If that was ever even true on an electoral level, I don’t believe it is any longer. But it can be on a personal one. Because as Michigan goes, so goes my optimism for America’s future. And today, I feel a little bit better on that front.

This is part of The Hollywood Reporter’s ongoing midterm coverage. You can check out all of our pieces here.