They voted for Trump in 2024. Now he calls their Senate candidate a “jihadist.”

In 2024, Husham Al-Husainy, an Iraqi American imam from Dearborn, Michigan, endorsed Donald Trump for president. Many other Arab and Muslim voters in the state did the same, part of a coordinated protest against the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. On election night, Al-Husainy recalled, Trump thanked Arab and Muslim Americans for their support.

Today, says Al-Husainy, “there is no thanks, there is an attack.”

This year, Al-Husainy is supporting the Senate campaign of a Democrat whom Trump has baselessly called a “jihadist” and a “member of the Muslim Brotherhood”: Abdul El-Sayed, who would be the first Muslim U.S. senator if elected in November. Al-Husainy, who described El-Sayed as “peaceful,” told MS NOW that most local Muslim voters he knows who supported Trump in 2024 plan to vote for El-Sayed over Republican Mike Rogers.

People think “they changed,” he said of the Republicans.”We doesn’t.”

Trump won nearly half the vote in Michigan’s Arab-majority precincts in 2024, research suggests, while Green Party candidate Jill Stein siphoned off a significant share from Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. These voters represent a small but significant portion of Michigan’s population, with most of the estimated 400,000 people concentrated in the Detroit metro area.

But two years later, Arab and Muslim state strategists say Republicans aren’t courting those voters in a high-stakes Senate race; they alienate them with Islamophobic attacks – many of which target El-Sayed.

“They had a huge opportunity to cultivate a healthy relationship with the Muslim community in Michigan,” Rexhinaldo Nazarko, a Michigan political strategist who works to mobilize Muslim voters, said of Republicans. “They ruined everything, that’s for sure.”

Trump’s “jihadist” remark came Friday at a rally in Georgia, where he also mocked El-Sayed’s name. On Truth Social, he repeatedly called El-Sayed “Mohammed” – his middle name. Rogers falsely stated that El-Sayed “believes America deserved the 9/11 attacks” and that he failed to condemn a terrorist attack on a Michigan synagogue earlier this year.

Such attacks are not new to El-Sayed, nor to prominent Muslim candidates in general. But coming from a party trying to win votes in a swing state weeks before the midterm elections, they intrigued some longtime observers.

“I don’t understand Republicans when they do this: It doesn’t expand their base, it actually inflames their existing base,” said James Zogby, a prominent Democrat who heads the Arab American Institute, a Washington-based advocacy group.

Republicans have already found common ground with Michigan’s Arab and Muslim voters. In 2000, George W. Bush lost the state but won the Arab American vote. In 2022, some conservative Muslims in Dearborn joined a right-wing campaign to remove books with LGBTQ themes from school libraries.

“In some ways, Republicans see them as a lost cause, but they are a decisive voting bloc that can swing elections,” Nura Sediqe, an assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University, said of the state’s Arab and Muslim voters. “With such slim margins, there was an opportunity to court business owners and those who have historically voted Republican. »

But local leaders, including Nazarko and Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, say Republicans haven’t tried to win over their communities.

“There has been no authentic outreach to the Muslim community because they don’t believe that Muslims should be at the table within the party,” said Hammoud, the city’s first Arab-American and Muslim mayor.

He pointed to Trump’s first-term travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries, as well as recent comments from Rep. John James, the Republican candidate for governor of Michigan. In an interview with Newsmax this summer, James called Shiite Muslims in Dearborn who were marching to commemorate Ashura, a Muslim holy day, “extremists.” After the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned the remarks, James doubled down, calling CAIR a “radical extremist group.”

“This is the language of candidates from this party,” said Hammoud, a Democrat. “They don’t see Muslims as human beings, as equals, as people they want to associate with. They like their vote every now and then, but that’s it.”

Then there are Trump’s recent moves, which threaten to undo the goodwill he still enjoys among some Arab and Muslim voters. Last December, he called Somali immigrants – most of whom are Muslim – “trash” and said they should leave the country. This week, Trump supported the re-election of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — a move that flies in the face of Michigan voters who backed him over Harris to protest the Biden administration’s support for Israel.

Bishara Bahbah, president of the group formerly known as Arab Americans for Trump, called Trump’s support for Netanyahu “a major betrayal of Arab and Muslim Americans who voted for the president in 2024” in an article on X.

Arizona-based Bahbah renamed his group Arab Americans for Peace last year after Trump said he would “take over” the Gaza Strip.