Ilhan Omar rushed online to celebrate the newest Democrat senator, and she didn’t say a word about health care or gas prices.
Democrats spent the whole campaign insisting faith had nothing to do with the race.
And Abdul El-Sayed once made one promise that her post just tore to pieces.
Omar Kept Score by Faith Instead of Votes
The Associated Press called Michigan’s Senate race at 2:27 am Eastern time on November 4. With about 98 percent of the vote counted, Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed (D-MI) led former US Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI) 52.5 percent to 45.5 percent.
The result keeps the seat of retiring US Senator Gary Peters (D-MI) in Democrat hands, in a state Donald Trump carried in 2024.
Then US Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) logged on. “Congratulations, Abdul El-Sayed,” Omar wrote. “You turned that inshallah into alhamdulillah.”
She lifted the line from El-Sayed’s own victory speech in Detroit. He told the crowd he had said “inshallah,” Arabic for “God willing,” every time somebody asked about the race, and that the night called for “alhamdulillah,” or “praise be to God.”
Then Omar got to what she really wanted to say.
“I am overwhelmed with gratitude knowing that we will now have 8 Muslims serving in Congress,” she wrote. “They told us we couldn’t speak up, couldn’t challenge the status quo, and couldn’t make it this far. But we did. Alhamdulillah.”
Omar never said who “they” were. She rarely bothers.
And look at what made the cut. A religious headcount made it in. The new senator’s plans for health care, taxes, and the cost of filling a gas tank didn’t, even though El-Sayed’s own crowd had chanted about his health care scheme hours earlier.
The Kennedy Line El-Sayed Borrowed and Omar Threw Away
Here’s the awkward part for Omar. All fall, El-Sayed told voters his faith wasn’t the point. “I’m not running to be the first anything,” he told Newsweek.
At a town hall in Caro, he reached for John F Kennedy. Kennedy, he told the crowd, famously said he wasn’t running to be a Catholic President but a candidate who happened to be Catholic, and El-Sayed said the same went for him and the Senate.
It was a smart line. It also came from a speech Democrats once understood, back when their party still knew how to talk to a Christian country.
On September 12, 1960, Kennedy faced several hundred Protestant pastors at the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, many of whom worried a Catholic would take orders from Rome. He told them, “Contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic.”
And Kennedy didn’t ask anybody to keep a running tally of Catholics in Congress. He asked voters to judge him on the job.
Omar skipped the senator and went straight to the headcount, and El-Sayed handed her the opening. “They told us that someone with a name and a story like mine, a Muslim, was unelectable, let alone in a statewide Senate race in Michigan,” he said that night.
So much for “the first anything.”
Maybe that’s a little harsh. A candidate who takes heat over his name wants to throw it back at his critics on election night, and plenty of politicians would do the same. But a victory speech sets the tone for six years, and El-Sayed chose to open his with religious language and close it with a pitch for Medicare for All.
The Headcount Hides What the New Senator Actually Wants
The faith scoreboard makes a handy distraction, because the actual agenda doesn’t sell nearly as well.
El-Sayed beat US Representative Haley Stevens (D-MI) in the August primary with US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in his corner. He campaigned on a government-run health insurance system and called Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide.
He didn’t soften a word of it at the podium. He opened by leading a “Medicare for All” chant and later said, “The goal is to use that seat to transform our politics.”
He promised “full freedom over our bodies,” which is Democrat code for abortion on demand. He said voters didn’t want their money “sent to do apartheid or genocide or war.” And he told the room, “We don’t need to be great again.”
Single-payer health care sounds generous from a stage. But Canada runs that kind of system, and the Fraser Institute found Canadian patients waited a median of 30 weeks from a family doctor’s referral to treatment in 2024. Government health care rations by the calendar.
But Democrats won’t campaign on the waiting list. They’ll campaign on the history-making headcount, and every seat they fill this way drags the party further down the road to socialism.
Imagine a Republican congressman thanking Jesus on election night for a fresh count of Christians in the Capitol. The cable panels would be shouting “Christian nationalism” before the coffee got cold.
A Faith Scorecard Works Against Assimilation
The Constitution settled this long ago. Article VI bars any religious test for federal office, so the job carries no religious qualification and no religious scoreboard either.
America’s Christian heritage made that kind of pluralism possible, and the deal always ran both ways. Worship as you please, and serve the whole country once you take the oath.
Omar’s post treats Congress like a parliament of blocs, where each faith tallies its seats the way a ballpark fan tracks the standings. But that model fits countries carved up by sect, not a nation that asks newcomers to become Americans first.
And it grows harder to resist when the country admits people at volumes too high for assimilation to keep pace. Politicians then court voters as faith groups and diaspora groups instead of as citizens, and the headcount becomes the whole pitch.
None of that touches anybody’s right to pray. It touches whether Congress belongs to the country or to a collection of tribes keeping score.
El-Sayed spent the fall borrowing John F Kennedy’s line about a candidate who simply happens to share a faith. Before most of the country woke up to the results, Ilhan Omar had already filed him away as one of eight.
Sources: Breitbart, “‘Alhamdulillah’: Ilhan Omar Hails Abdul El-Sayed’s Michigan Senate Win”; CBS News Detroit, “From ‘inshallah’ to ‘alhamdulillah’: Abdul El-Sayed celebrates historic Michigan Senate win in victory speech” (full transcript); Newsweek, “What Abdul El-Sayed Has Said About Islam”; Bridge Michigan, El-Sayed Caro town hall coverage; John F Kennedy Presidential Library, Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, September 12, 1960; HuffPost, Kennedy Houston speech history; Fraser Institute, Waiting Your Turn: Wait Times for Health Care in Canada, 2024.