On Tuesday, Michigan’s Democrats served up a string of victories for the left. Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow triumph in the Senate primary may even have raised President Donald Trump hopes about his chances of keeping the chamber. But my favorite subplot of Michigan’s primary night, and surely the result that most surprised Trump, came in the 8th District. Amir Hassan, a candidate Trump had endorsed and rallied with, lost his Republican primary to Thomas Smith, an unknown who had withdrawn in mid-July after mounting basically no campaign and raising basically no money.
“I fell short last night. I make no excuse. It was a tough race,” Hassan said in a video from his car Wednesday morning. Reflecting on his failed endorsement, Trump lamented: “It was a little bit of a person that I thought was a good person — didn’t have much of a chance, but I said: ‘I don’t care. I’m doing it anyway.”
Fundraising cannot explain Hassan’s defeat. He had ample financial backing, though he still raised less than the Democratic nominee. Nor is Trump reviled in the predominantly white 8th District, which backed him for president in 2024 even as it sent a Democrat to Congress. The apparent explanation is that the Republican electorate could not get past Hassan’s Muslim-sounding name.
Hassan, who has described himself as Christian since early in the campaign, is African American and has no Middle Eastern background. The surname proves nothing about its bearer’s religion, as Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) might attest (no relation). Still, even Trump’s stamp of approval failed to sway the race, handing the president his first House-primary endorsement defeat of his second term.
Smith had actually endorsed another candidate. The fact that he won anyway suggests many of his voters had no idea who he was and went simply by the Caucasian vibe of his name.
A foreign-sounding name, Middle Eastern or otherwise, does not invariably spell doom. It did not doom Vivek Ramaswamy, who trounced his Groyper-esque opponent Casey Putsch in Ohio’s gubernatorial primary earlier this year. Ramaswamy, however, entered the race with national celebrity and a vast fortune, both of which improves an electorate’s pronunciation. Tuesday made grim reading for anyone who imagined the Republican base wholesale having moved beyond this sort of crude identitarian reflex.
To some on the right, the result was cause for celebration. “’Amir Hassan’ claims he’s not a Muslim, but it doesn’t matter,” chimed Laura Loomer. “His name sounds like he’s fresh off the boat and MAGA voters reject the Islamic infiltration of our country and party.” If Tuesday offered any indication of the Islamic “takeover” of the Republican Party, as Loomer so often describes it, she and her fellow extremists haven’t much to fear.
It may make especially grim reading for El-Sayed, who now enters the general election against former Rep. Mike Rogers (R), whose name is as gloriously generic as “Thomas Smith.” Republicans are already harping on El-Sayed’s proper first name, Abdulrahman, and his bro-fisting with lefty streamer Hasan Piker, who once declared that “America deserved 9/11,” in an effort to reduce El-Sayed to some sort of Islamist caricature. After a bruising primary, El-Sayed must win over Republicans as well as Haley Stevens supporters, some of whom regard him as antisemitic, radical and interested chiefly in Arab and Muslim voters.
El-Sayed’s response is to stick to policy. “Yeah, my name is Abdul. I’ll say the whole thing: Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. And I want you to have health care, because you know what? Chances are, you probably had a doctor you trust with a name like mine,” he told Semafor’s David Weigel in June.
It will nevertheless be far easier for Republicans to persuade Michigan voters that El-Sayed wants to impose socialism-inflected Sharia law than it was for Andrew Cuomo to make the charge stick in New York City against Zohran Mamdani. But it is also possible that El-Sayed can Mamdani his way out of it.
William Liang is a writer living in San Francisco. He volunteers for Connie Chan’s congressional campaign in California’s 11th District.
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