The convergence of historic Muslim electoral achievement and an unprecedented surge in anti-Muslim rhetoric represents more than a fleeting political episode. It tests fundamental American assumptions about who belongs in public life, how far surveillance infrastructure can stretch, and whether electoral incentives truly drive the inflammatory language coming from both ends of the Republican hierarchy. The outcome of this tension will shape not only the midterm contests but the trajectory of Muslim civic participation for a generation.
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Muslim Candidates Make History as Anti-Islam Rhetoric Reaches Post-9/11 Levels in US Midterm Race
A surge in Islamophobic messaging across the United States has coincided with the most successful election cycle for Muslim candidates in the nation’s history, creating a collision at the heart of America’s democratic experiment. Researchers tracking hate speech and electoral discourse say the current environment rivals the intensity of anti-Muslim sentiment that followed the September 11 attacks more than two decades ago.
The flashpoint came within hours of Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Democratic primary for a Michigan US Senate seat, when Republican senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama took to social media to declare that voters had “just voted to send a TERRORIST” to Washington. El-Sayed, he insisted, was a “RADICAL ISLAMIST” bent on destroying America. It was a signal, analysts say, that the party’s most aggressive voices had abandoned even the pretence of restraint.
A Record Election Cycle Meets a Record Backlash
The timing is stark. El-Sayed’s primary win puts him on a path to potentially become the first Muslim ever elected to the US Senate. He joins a growing cohort: four Muslim members of Congress, with a fifth widely expected, compared with none in 2001. Zohran Mamdani was inaugurated as New York City’s first Muslim mayor in January 2025, and Ghazala Hashmi became Virginia’s first Muslim woman elected to statewide office this year as lieutenant governor.
Yet the celebration of these milestones has been met by what experts describe as the most concentrated wave of anti-Islamic rhetoric in electoral politics since the terror attacks. Saher Selod, director of research at the non-partisan Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), did not mince her assessment. “It’s probably the worst of what we’ve seen,” she said. “We’re certainly seeing in 2025 and 2026, ahead of these midterms, really very Islamophobic ads – more so than what we saw after 9/11.”
The numbers underpin her concern. ISPU’s Islamophobia Index, a 100-point scale calibrated against common anti-Muslim stereotypes, climbed from 25 in 2022 to 33 among the general public by 2025. The steepest rises came among white and Hispanic Americans, suggesting the sentiment is spreading beyond its traditional bases.
From the Ballot Box to the Pulpit of Power
The partisan divide on the question of Islam and violence has widened dramatically. A Pew Research Center survey conducted this spring found that 51% of US adults believe Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence, up sharply from 25% measured just six months after the 2001 attacks. Among Republicans, the figure now stands at 76%, against 29% among Democrats. In 2002, the corresponding numbers were 32% and 23%.
Anti-Muslim hate crimes reported to the FBI spiked to 481 in 2001 from 28 the previous year and have never returned to pre-2001 levels. Separately, ISPU found that 63% of American Muslims experienced religious discrimination in the past year, the highest proportion of any faith group it monitors.
The attacks are not confined to anonymous online posts. They have emanated from the highest ranks of the Republican Party. Donald Trump infamously called for a “total and complete shutdown” on Muslims entering the US during his 2015 presidential campaign and attempted to enact a version of the ban via executive order in early 2017; the supreme court ultimately permitted a limited version targeting majority-Muslim countries. This year, Trump labelled El-Sayed a “jihadist” from the Oval Office and claimed broadly that such figures were being elected “all over the place”. Vice-president JD Vance called El-Sayed “very, very evil” at a Michigan rally and invoked his own late grandfather to attack comments the candidate made in 2022 regarding a legal challenge to an Oklahoma anti-Sharia ballot measure.
Other elected Republicans have been equally unrestrained. Senator Ted Cruz told 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”. Representative Nancy Mace wrote that every Muslim in public office was “a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic”, and separately argued that Islam “must be removed from civil society in the US”. Representative Randy Fine of Florida posted on social media: “We need more Islamophobia, not less. Fear of Islam is rational.” Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee stated plainly that “Muslims don’t belong in American society”.
Republican leadership has been mostly silent, a fact that observers regard as tacit endorsement. Mobashra Tazamal, associate director of Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative, which studies Islamophobia globally, put it bluntly: “It is almost as if the veil has been lifted. It is so bigoted, and it’s so crude, and there is no red line. It’s just straight bigotry.”
The Machinery of Suspicion
The rhetoric has spilled into concrete policy battles. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has spent the summer campaigning against what he terms the imposition of Islamic law, ordering a review of state grants to two major airports and referring both to federal regulators over privately funded wudu stations, ritual washing facilities Muslims use before prayer. He described them as illegal religious favouritism. Abbott has also fought a proposed mosque-anchored housing development outside Dallas.
Nationally, the Center for the Study of Organized Hate documented a coordinated campaign involving 89 elected officials over 13 months, comprising 1,111 social media posts and eight pieces of legislation, linked to a “Sharia Free America Caucus” that has swollen to 65 members. Anti-Sharia campaigns are not new; close to two dozen states passed largely symbolic laws in the early 2010s. “This isn’t an issue. It’s not something that’s real,” said Tazamal. “It’s constructed, and then these politicians claim to be tackling this constructed problem that they create.”
The controversy surrounding individual candidates reveals a pattern researchers have tracked for years. El-Sayed drew criticism, including from Vance, after responding to a March attack on a suburban Detroit synagogue with the phrase “hurt people hurt people”, noting that relatives of the attacker in Lebanon had recently been killed in an Israeli airstrike. He later apologised, suggesting his remarks had been misconstrued. He has also faced scrutiny over his public association with leftwing streamer Hasan Piker, whom mainstream Democrats and Republicans have attacked for past comments minimising the September 11 attacks.
Mamdani has faced sustained criticism, including from rivals in his own mayoral race, over his refusal to unequivocally condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada”. Jewish groups say the phrase amounts to a call for violence against Jews, though Mamdani has never personally used it. He subsequently said he would discourage the term after a rabbi explained that it evokes memories of bus bombings and restaurant attacks for many Jewish New Yorkers. Voters ultimately decided the race without disqualification on the basis of these controversies.
The devastation in Gaza, mass settler violence in the West Bank, and the suppression of pro-Palestine speech within the US have added another dimension. Criticism of Israeli policy by El-Sayed and Mamdani is cited by those who label their colleagues “jihadists”. Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk and other Muslim residents were among the first detained for pro-Palestinian campus advocacy, even though most protesters were not Muslim.
What the Polling Reveals
Researchers caution against treating every attack on El-Sayed or Mamdani as straightforward bigotry. Both men have faced legitimate questions about specific statements and associations. But Selod and Tazamal argue the decisive question is whether criticism of religious identity is being used as cover for a broader claim: that Muslim identity itself, irrespective of any policy position, is disqualifying from American public life. “With Abdul El-Sayed, we’re seeing these kinds of intense Islamophobic attacks against him, as opposed to attacking his platform or critiquing his policies,” Selod said. “It’s a playbook. They’re going to attack him for his religious identity to see if this will help pull voters away from him.”
The resurfacing of this strategy was on display this week in New York, where Mamdani attended a ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of 9/11 at Ground Zero, as his predecessors have done every year. A petition bearing more than 100,000 signatures, laced with hostility, urged him not to appear. Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York City during the attacks who now aligns closely with Trump, claimed without evidence that Mamdani “doesn’t agree that September 11 was an Islamic terrorist attack” and that his attendance “offends” him, adding: “They have every desire to take us over … they want to dominate us.”
Cheri Sparacio, one of the petition’s organisers whose husband died in the attacks, said her objection was “not about the mayor’s background or faith, but his public actions”. Mamdani attended anyway, and on Friday morning the two men shook hands at the ceremony.
The current moment cannot be untangled from the security architecture built after 2001, Selod said. “All of the surveillance programs that were put into place, your no-fly list, ICE – these are a product of 9/11,” she said. “We didn’t have Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We didn’t have the TSA. These were all put into place to protect the nation against threats of terrorism.” That architecture has since extended well past its original scope. The Boston Regional Intelligence Center, a post-9/11 “fusion center” designed to detect terrorist plots, has also been used to monitor Black Lives Matter demonstrators, according to local reporting and ACLU of Massachusetts records. “It’s expanding beyond a Muslim population to target others,” Selod said. “Muslims are one to two percent of the US population. My hope is when people start to see how it’s expanding beyond that population, maybe they’ll start really critiquing these programs.”
ISPU polling suggests the sentiment tracks politics rather than faith. Americans who identify as somewhat or very conservative are 13 percentage points more likely than others to endorse anti-Muslim stereotypes, while religiosity shows no correlation. Caleb Elfenbein, a Grinnell College professor who has mapped Islamophobic rhetoric for years, sees a small, organised network reactivating on a predictable schedule: “It really looks, and feels, like a very cynical effort to take advantage of a general sense of fear that can be activated at any given time.”
Whether the strategy succeeds is uncertain. Polling indicates the Republicans are likely to face heavy losses in November’s midterm elections, and the party is simultaneously wrestling with an unpopular war with Iran and rising costs that have squeezed its approval ratings. Tazamal, however, does not expect a retreat. “I don’t think the GOP is going to do away with it,” she said.
Why it Matters
The convergence of historic Muslim electoral achievement and an unprecedented surge in anti-Muslim rhetoric represents more than a fleeting political episode. It tests fundamental American assumptions about who belongs in public life, how far surveillance infrastructure can stretch, and whether electoral incentives truly drive the inflammatory language coming from both ends of the Republican hierarchy. The outcome of this tension will shape not only the midterm contests but the trajectory of Muslim civic participation for a generation.
