On August 4, Abdul El-Sayed, a leading progressive candidate, won Michigan's Democratic primary for the US Senate. 

The 41-year-old will face Republican Mike Rogers in the November 3 midterm elections. The winner will succeed retiring Democratic Senator Gary Peters.

Michigan is a battleground or so-called "swing" state, where both parties have a strong chance of winning. The large Arab American and Muslim population plays a key role.

If El-Sayed wins in November, he would become the first Muslim US senator in history.

Soon after his primary victory, several false claims about El-Sayed were spread online, including claims promoted by prominent political figures.

According to Lawrence Pintak, a journalism professor at Washington State University and author of America & Islam, El-Sayed is an ideal target for political disinformation.

"He checks off all the boxes: He's a Muslim, he's a progressive, and he is vocally critical of Israel," Pintak said in a written statement to DW.

DW Fact check examined claims about voting irregularities during the primaries, El-Sayed's political ideology and whether he said the US deserved the 9/11 attacks.

Alleged ghost votes

Claim: "Of course they cheated. Nobody actually votes for communists," a Facebook post claimed, linking to an article headlined: "Abdul El-Sayed got three times as many votes in Detroit as there are registered voters."

The article states that El-Sayed "received 1.4 million votes in Detroit alone — a city with approximately 480,000 registered voters."

DW Fact check: False

The Facebook account that shared the claim, "America's Last Line of Defense," states that "nothing on this page is real." The page has around 748,000 followers and is linked to a website run by Christopher Blair, a well-known creator of fabricated political content. The BBC once described him as the "godfather of fake news."

However, this disclaimer is often lost when the content is reposted on other pages, allowing the false claim to spread without context.

The invented story echoes a claim shared by US President Donald Trump days earlier about a county in Michigan: "Miracles happen in Wayne County, including more votes being cast than there are voters, by a lot." 

Trump did not provide any evidence to support his claim of alleged voter fraud.

According to the Michigan Voter Information Center, Michigan has approximately 7.3 million active registered voters, while El-Sayed received 743,455 votes statewide in the Democratic Senate primary, not 1.4 million votes in Detroit alone.

Michael Hameleers, an associate professor of political communication at the University of Amsterdam who researches misinformation and disinformation, warned about the impact of such allegations.

"It is a prominent delegitimization technique to put democratic institutions and the fairness of elections in question," he said.

"Especially in a context where people perceive disinformation and fraud as highly likely, it may be a fruitful strategy to cast doubt on elections."

A 2023 US study found that exposure to unfounded claims of voter fraud can significantly undermine confidence in elections, particularly among Republicans and Trump supporters.

Claims about political ideology

Claim: US President Donald Trump has repeatedly described Abdul El-Sayed as a communist, most recently in a Truth Social post published shortly after El-Sayed's primary victory.

DW Fact check: False

El-Sayed's campaign has focused on government-sponsored health insurance, taxing billionaires and reducing the influence of corporate money in politics.

In the past, he has rejected claims that he is a socialist or a communist by stating he is a capitalist. "I'm not a socialist. I'm just a capitalist who understands how capitalism works," he said.

El-Sayed emphasized his views on capitalism as a point of difference from self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. 

In a recent interview with The New York Times, he responded to Trump's claims that he is a communist by saying: "The man is so clearly a joker."

In a comment to DW, Lawrence Pintak also called the claims historically bizarre. He sees it as part of systematic attempts by the Republican Party "to spin 'progressive' and 'democratic socialist' to be synonyms for 'Communist.'"

An analysis by Reuters found that Trump has significantly increased his use of the term in recent weeks.

Pintak told DW that the loaded term works well on social media.

Misattributing views on 9/11

Claim: After El-Sayed secured the Democratic nomination, his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, posted a statement on X, calling him "someone who believes America deserved 9/11."

DW Fact check: False

9/11 refers to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, in which planes hijacked by militant ​al-Qaeda Islamists struck the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon near Washington, killing nearly 3,000 people.

The allegation has come up repeatedly but conflates previous remarks made by El-Sayed supporter Hasan Piker with El-Sayed's own views. 

Piker has supported El-Sayed during his 2026 US Senate campaign, appearing with him at rallies and in livestreams. 

During a 2019 livestream, Piker said America had "deserved" 9/11, a remark that generated widespread criticism. Since then, however, he has walked back this statement.

When asked by US-based fact checkers PolitiFactfor evidence to support his claim, the Rogers campaign pointed to a video clip of El-Sayed refusing to disavow Piker's 2019 comments. 

Pintak, who researches Islamophobia, described "guilt by association" as one of the disinformation tactics used against El-Sayed. 

He points out that El-Sayed has become a target of disinformation at a time when the Republican Party has shifted from an anti-immigrant focus back to an anti-Muslim narrative. 

"Attacks on Muslim candidates, and El-Sayed himself, are nothing new," Pintak said, pointing to Islamophobic reporting during El-Sayed's 2018 campaign for Michigan governor and false claims portraying New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as an extremist.

During the 2018 midterms, Pintak led a research team that found Muslim candidates, from local school boards to Congress, were systematically targeted by "a social media narrative of manufactured outrage [that] was disproportionately Islamophobic, xenophobic, racist, and misogynistic." 

The researchers concluded that such attacks were often aimed at undermining candidates' legitimacy and reducing trust among voters.