Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed’s grandparents react to historic win in Michigan

Jan and Judy Johnson, grandparents of Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, discuss their blended family and what it was like watching their grandson become elected to Congress.

Abdul El-Sayed’s election to the Senate is a watershed moment for American Muslims, and a complicated one. It solidifies the community’s rising influence in national American politics even as Islamophobia is also surging in some quarters, backlash to which most likely contributed to his success.

Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed (D) on Wednesday said Michigan “rejected a hateful, spiteful campaign” run by his opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers (R), in the state’s Senate race. “Michigan proved just how big we are,” El-Sayed told The Associated Press, after he was projected the winner.

In his victory speech at his campaign headquarters in Detroit, Sen.-elect Abdul el Sayed (D-MI) declared, “We don’t want our money sent to do apartheid, or genocide, or war.” El Sayed might have wanted to throw shade at Israel, which, throughout his campaign, he made out to be a boogeyman as he…