Janet Harris

I’ve been staring at this photo for a while now, and I can’t stop. Look at it. No speech, no confetti, no cameras doing their thing. Just a man and his wife holding each other on the night he became a United States senator from Michigan. The look on her face tells you everything about what the last year cost them. Abdul El-Sayed, congratulations. You did it. To everyone who follows this page, I want you to understand what we just watched happen, because this is a lot bigger than one Senate seat. Eight years ago, this man ran for governor of Michigan and lost his primary by double digits. Plenty of people would have taken that as their answer and gone home. He went back to work instead. He ran the health department for Wayne County and Detroit, taking care of people who usually get forgotten. Then he came back and asked Michigan to trust him again. What he got in return was one of the ugliest campaigns this country has seen in a long time. He got called a terrorist. He got called a jihadist. The President of the United States went after him with racial slurs and lies, over and over, betting that Michigan voters would be scared of a man named Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. He won his primary by less than a point, against the money and against nearly every big name in the state party. Then, two days before the election, the woman he beat in that primary went back on her promise to support the nominee and endorsed his Republican opponent. Two days out. Think about what that does to a campaign, and to the person at the center of it. He kept going anyway. Last night Michigan answered. More than two and a half million people looked past all of the fear and voted for a doctor, an epidemiologist, the son of Egyptian immigrants who was born and raised right there in Michigan. In January he’ll be sworn in as the first Muslim senator in American history, and the first Democratic doctor in the Senate since 1969. I keep thinking about the Muslim kids across this country who woke up this morning and saw his face on the news. Kids who’ve been told, quietly or to their faces, that they’ll never really belong here. Today they saw a man who looks like their dad, their uncle, their big brother, standing in front of an American flag as a senator-elect. Nobody can take that moment away from them. When he took the stage just before 2 a.m., he said that in a fight between the money and the many, the many can win. I believe him, because I watched it happen. Ordinary people knocked on doors, made phone calls, chipped in a few dollars they didn’t really have, and refused to let hate decide the outcome. So to Dr. El-Sayed, and Dr. Sarah Jukaku, the woman holding him in this picture who stood beside him through every insult and every sleepless night: thank you. Thank you for not quitting. Thank you for showing a whole lot of people that this country still has room for them. The people who threw everything they had at this man were counting on fear being enough. Michigan just showed them it wasn’t, and from now on every campaign built on that same fear has to answer for what happened here.