A 2025 Pew Research Center poll found 42% of Muslim American voters lean Republican. Where does the GOP’s revival of Islamophobic rhetoric leave them as we head into the midterms?
Trump unleashes on Dem. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed
President Trump attacked Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, calling him a “man of hate.”
November’s midterm elections, which will determine which political party controls Congress, are less than 10 weeks away. And Republicans, already likely to lose control of the U.S. House, are now in danger of losing the U.S. Senate too.
Time for a Republican boogeyman to frighten voters – a revival of Islamophobic rhetoric.
A standing election time tradition in the Republican Party is to pick some group – Chinese Americans during COVID-19, LGBTQ+ Americans in 2024 – to present as an un-American threat to the rest of us. But this Republican Party has run short of ideas on everything from how to fix our economy to which scary people we should be scared of.
So we’re getting a retread.
Republicans want you afraid of Muslims
President Donald Trump made anti-Muslim prejudice a major part of his first campaign for president in 2016, and then applied it to how he ran his first term.
Two weeks ago, Trump sullied his second term some more by claiming at the White House, “We have jihadists being elected all over the place.”
Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former Detroit public health official who won the Aug. 4 Democratic primary in Michigan for the U.S. Senate, is the new face of fear for the Republican Party.
U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, an Alabama Republican, puts anti-Muslim prejudice at the very center of his campaign for governor in his state and has emerged as his party’s point man for trying to scare voters.
El-Sayed and Tuberville are not playing the same political game here. El-Sayed speaks in nuanced terms, explaining the Republican embrace of culture wars as a distraction from real issues. Tuberville blusters in bigoted bumper-sticker-ese.
Tuberville’s main scare tactic is to claim – falsely – that Muslims are trying to force onto all Americans the sharia, Islamic law that observant Muslims follow to live what they see as a moral life.
The Republican National Committee, in recent fundraising emails sent in Tuberville’s name, claimed that “Islamists are rigging our elections” and “have infiltrated every corner of our country.”
El-Sayed, in an Aug. 24 interview, compared sharia to canon law, which Catholics use to govern their church.
“I don’t begrudge you your right to practice your faith as you choose,” El-Sayed told Fox News host Jesse Watters, a Catholic. “I don’t know why the idea that I could practice my faith as I choose is a problem. Nobody is trying to push sharia law on anyone else, just like – I hope – nobody is trying to push canon law on anybody else.”
Tuberville responded to that with a social media post: “Sounds like something a terrorist sympathizer would say.”
That’s the thing about bigots – they’re almost always just so lazy about their bigotry.
Do Republicans know some Muslims voted for the GOP?
A. Britton O’Shields, a staff attorney at the Alabama office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told me that Republicans are reviving anti-Muslim rhetoric to drum up fear of a “common enemy” to silence Muslims critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza and to distract voters “from real issues” – like the economy, data centers and the Epstein files.
“Sen. Tuberville is a coward, plain and simple,” O’Shields said. “He has been repeatedly invited to engage with his Alabama Muslim constituents, but he would prefer to incite hatred against them to gain attention on social media and distract from his failures as a senator, including his support for President Trump’s efforts to shield the Epstein files and his support for the disastrous war in Iran.”
Mohamed Gula, CEO of Emgage, which educates and mobilizes Muslim American voters, pointed to Republican legislation to ban sharia and a right-wing congressional caucus embracing that effort as signs that Republicans are trying to create a “dichotomy” between what it means to be an American and what it is to be Muslim.
“One of the core principles of Islam as a religion, based on where you live, is to respect the laws of the land,” Gula told me, explaining exactly why sharia isn’t being forced on anyone in America. “You don’t see it anywhere in America because it actually goes against our principle of Islam to do so.”
Muslims make up about 1% of the population in Alabama, according to the Pew Research Center, the same as the percentage across America.
In 2025, Pew also found that 53% of Muslim American voters are or lean Democratic while 42% are or lean Republican.
Where does the Republican revival of Islamophobic rhetoric, as the party stumbles into the midterms, leave Muslim American Republicans? O’Shields and Gula came to different conclusions.
O’Shields offered this: “I know some passionately Republican Muslims in Alabama, and they’re honestly more motivated than ever to build power within the party to ensure that elected officials of good faith continue to have opportunities to engage with their Muslim constituents and protect the constitutional rights of everyone in Alabama.”
Gula predicted that Muslim American voters will be spurred to organize in response to the bigotry, adding, “I think it’ll be hard for Muslim Americans who consider themselves Republicans to go back to a Republican Party that finds this to be OK.”
Either way, they sound very much like motivated midterm voters.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Chris Brennan on Bluesky, @bychrisbrennan.bsky.social, and on X, @ByChrisBrennan. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, Translating Politics, here.