The Republican Party is weaponizing Islamophobia to survive the 2026 midterms.

Within hours of Abdul El-Sayed’s Democratic primary victory in Michigan, Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville called him a “TERRORIST.” Donald Trump called him a “jihadist” from the Oval Office. Vice President JD Vance called him “very, very evil.” Ted Cruz told Fox News that El-Sayed and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani were “Islamists” who “want Sharia law” and “hate Jews, they hate Christians, they hate capitalism, they hate America.” Representative Nancy Mace posted that “every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic.” Representative Randy Fine of Florida wrote, “We need more Islamophobia, not less. Fear of Islam is rational.” Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee declared, “Muslims don’t belong in American society.”

This is not fringe noise. It is a mobilization.

The Center for the Study of Organized Hate documented a coordinated campaign involving 89 elected officials, 1,111 social-media posts, and eight bills tied to a “Sharia Free America Caucus” that has grown to 65 members. Posts naming El-Sayed rose nearly 1,900 percent in the week after his victory, from an average of 155 a day to more than 3,000. That is not a stray insult escaping from an undisciplined politician. It is a message moving through an organized political apparatus.

And it is arriving at the exact moment Muslim candidates are winning office in unprecedented numbers.

There are now four Muslim members of Congress, with a fifth likely on the way, compared with zero in 2001. Mamdani was inaugurated as New York City’s first Muslim mayor in January 2025. Ghazala Hashmi became Virginia’s first Muslim woman elected to statewide office, as lieutenant governor. El-Sayed’s primary victory put him on track to become the first Muslim ever elected to the United States Senate.

The victories are historic. So is the backlash. The Republican response is to treat Muslim identity itself—not a specific policy, vote, or act of misconduct—as disqualifying from American public life.

That is the point of the rhetoric. It is not an argument about one candidate. It is an attempt to declare an entire religious identity incompatible with public power before its representatives can accumulate enough offices, institutional memory, and ordinary civic legitimacy to make the declaration harder to sustain.

For years, anyone who said this plainly paid a price. The label was always ready: bigot, Islamophobe, troglodyte. Speaking about political Islam meant being accused of attacking Muslims. The distinction between a religion, a population, an ideology, and a political program was deliberately blurred—not by accident, but because the blur protected the people who wanted to exploit it. A critic could be forced to defend himself against the worst interpretation of his argument before he was allowed to make the argument at all.

That is the bad-faith technique the catalog calls equivocation: one term—Islam—is made to carry several different meanings, then the meanings are switched mid-argument. A serious discussion of Islamism, Sharia-based political claims, Islamist entryism, or the public conduct of a particular candidate is recast as an attack on every Muslim person. The original argument disappears. The accusation of prejudice does the work.

The correction is not difficult. Criticize a political program as a political program. Judge a candidate by documented conduct and stated positions. Defend the equal citizenship of Muslims while refusing to grant immunity to any ideology, movement, or officeholder. The same standard must reach everyone.

The Republican Party is not applying that standard. It is applying a category to a population.

The playbook is older than this election cycle, but its 2026 application is unusually clear. Republican strategists have known for decades that anti-Muslim messaging can mobilize a small but reliable conservative base. The Institute for Social Policy and Understanding found that Americans who identify as somewhat or very conservative are 13 percentage points more likely than other Americans to endorse anti-Muslim stereotypes. Religiosity, by contrast, shows no comparable relationship. The driver is not devotion. It is political identity.

With approval sagging, an unpopular war with Iran damaging the administration, rising costs squeezing voters, and the white working-class coalition visibly eroding, the party has returned to a familiar instrument: tell the base that the country is being taken from them by people who do not belong.

The party is not manufacturing a panic from nothing. It is manufacturing a political use for fear that already exists.

The polling shows the trajectory. The Pew Research Center found this spring that 51 percent of American adults now say Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence, up from 25 percent six months after the September 11 attacks. In 2002, 32 percent of likely Republican voters and 23 percent of Democrats said Islam was more violence-prone. Today, 76 percent of Republicans say the same, alongside 29 percent of Democrats.

The ISPU’s Islamophobia Index rose from 25 in 2022 to 33 in 2025, with the steepest increases among white and Hispanic Americans. Sixty-three percent of Muslims reported experiencing religious discrimination in the past year, the highest share of any faith group measured. Anti-Muslim hate crimes reported to the FBI spiked to 481 in 2001 from 28 the year before and never returned to their pre-2001 levels.

These are not the numbers of a country in comfortable equilibrium. They are the numbers of a country being trained to experience a religious minority as a political threat.

Mobashra Tazamal, associate director of Georgetown’s Bridge Initiative, described the result plainly: “It is almost as if the veil has been lifted. It is so bigoted, and it’s so crude, and there is no red line. It’s just straight bigotry.”

The phrase matters because the old respectable vocabulary has fallen away. The campaign no longer needs to disguise itself as a narrow concern about security, integration, or constitutional order. Its elected officials are saying what the machinery has been built to say. Representative Mace says Islam “must be removed from civil society in the US.” Fine says fear of Islam is rational. Ogles says Muslims do not belong in American society.

Republican leadership has been mostly silent. That silence is not neutrality. It is permission.

The legislative architecture is visible in Texas. Governor Greg Abbott has spent the summer campaigning against what he calls the imposition of Islamic law, ordering a review of state grants to two major airports and referring both to federal regulators over privately funded wudu stations—ritual washing facilities used by Muslims before prayer—which he called illegal religious favoritism. Abbott has also fought a proposed mosque-anchored housing development outside Dallas.

These are not isolated acts. They are the policy arm of the same rhetoric.

Muslims in Texas have described systematic harassment that they directly connect to Republican officials’ language. That is how political permission works. A national figure says a religious group is a threat. A state official converts the language into administrative suspicion. Local actors understand the signal. The people targeted then have to prove that their existence is not itself evidence against them.

Close to two dozen states passed largely symbolic anti-Sharia laws in the early 2010s. The “Sharia Free America Caucus” is the newer vehicle. The underlying current has been moving for years.

The new feature is not the suspicion. It is the target’s visibility.

The candidates being attacked are not hidden operatives. They are public officials winning elections in full view. Their success makes the old accusation harder to maintain, because each victory turns a supposed exception into a fact of civic life. Four Muslim members of Congress become five. One Muslim mayor becomes another statewide officeholder. A Senate candidacy becomes a plausible path rather than an impossible breach.

The two phenomena—the rise of Muslim political representation and the rise of recognition that the backlash is organized against it—are co-extensive. That is not a coincidence. That is the public catching up to the machinery.

The actual record still matters. El-Sayed drew criticism, including from Vance, after responding to a March attack on a suburban Detroit synagogue by saying, “hurt people hurt people,” while noting that relatives of the attacker in Lebanon had recently been killed in an Israeli airstrike. He eventually apologized and said his remarks may have been misconstrued. He has also faced scrutiny over his public association with the streamer Hasan Piker, whom Democrats and Republicans have criticized for past comments minimizing the September 11 attacks.

Mamdani has faced sustained criticism, including from rivals in his own mayoral race, over his refusal to unequivocally condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which Jewish groups say amounts to a call for violence against Jews. Mamdani has never personally used the phrase. After a rabbi told him that it evoked memories of bus bombings and restaurant attacks for many Jewish New Yorkers, Mamdani said he would discourage it.

Those are documented matters. They deserve argument, scrutiny, and, where appropriate, condemnation. They do not establish that every Muslim officeholder is a “trojan horse.” They do not establish that Muslims do not belong in American society. They do not convert a disputed statement into proof of a religious conspiracy.

The difference is the entire argument.

The catalog calls one version of the Republican move in-group/out-group special pleading: a category-defining feature is applied to an out-group while comparable conduct by the in-group is ignored. The party does not ask whether every Christian officeholder is a threat because a Christian politician has made a reckless statement. It does not ask whether every Jewish officeholder is an agent of a foreign government because one Jewish politician supports a foreign state. It does not ask whether every white officeholder is a racial extremist because one white officeholder is.

It asks those questions of Muslims because the category itself has been marked as suspect.

The infrastructure built after September 11 makes the political project more dangerous. The no-fly list, ICE, the TSA, and fusion centers were created in response to threats of terrorism and then extended well beyond their original target. The Boston Regional Intelligence Center, a post-9/11 fusion center built to detect terrorist plots, has also been used to monitor Black Lives Matter demonstrators, according to local reporting and ACLU of Massachusetts records.

A surveillance state built for one threat rarely remains confined to that threat. It learns a habit. It develops a vocabulary. It acquires databases, contractors, grants, personnel, and institutional memories. Then politicians provide a new population to watch.

This is where the electoral strategy meets the administrative state. The rhetoric declares Muslim politicians and their constituents a security problem. The existing machinery supplies the tools for treating them as one. The language is political, but the consequences can become bureaucratic, financial, physical, and local.

New York has already displayed the ritual form of this conflict. At the ceremony marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11 at Ground Zero, Mamdani attended as his predecessors had every year. A petition with more than 100,000 signatures, riddled with attacks, asked him not to. Rudy Giuliani, mayor of New York City at the time of the attacks and now closely aligned with Trump, claimed without evidence that Mamdani “doesn’t agree that September 11 was an Islamic terrorist attack,” and that his attendance “offends” him. Giuliani added that Muslims “have every desire to take us over … they want to dominate us. Mamdani is a clear supporter of that.”

Cheri Sparacio, one of the petition’s organizers, whose husband died in the attacks, said her objection was “not about the mayor’s background or faith, but his public actions.” That distinction is the one the campaign keeps refusing to make.

Mamdani attended anyway. On Friday morning, he and Giuliani shook hands at the ceremony.

Even the recognition of recognition has its ritual courtesies.

The question is not whether the GOP has discovered that anti-Muslim rhetoric produces attention. It has. The question is whether the rhetoric can rescue a party facing heavy losses in November. The GOP Senate campaign arm has been warning for months about voter anger over affordability and political drift, while the party searches for a message that can survive contact with the median voter. The economic record is not doing the work. The foreign-policy record is not doing the work. So the party has returned to the most reliable substitute for governing: grievance.

The calculation is simple. If voters cannot be persuaded that prices are falling, tell them someone else is taking the country. If the coalition is shrinking, tell it that demographic change is invasion. If Muslim candidates win office, describe their victories as infiltration. If the evidence does not support the charge, repeat the charge until the evidence becomes politically irrelevant.

That is flooding the zone: not one argument, but a high-volume stream of accusations designed to overwhelm the audience’s ability to distinguish a documented policy dispute from a collective indictment. It is also manufactured grievance, the persecuted-majority claim in electoral form. People who control the presidency, the legislature, the agencies, the broadcast platforms, and the political money are invited to imagine themselves as the besieged.

They are not.

The candidates under attack are not the primary victims. They are the visible front of a much larger project: to declare an entire religious identity incompatible with American public life, then build the rhetorical and legislative infrastructure to make that declaration enforceable.

This is what the 2026 midterms are now about. Not only whether the GOP can win on its economic record. Not only whether Trump’s second-term agenda survives. The deeper question is whether a party can lose on prices, war, and governance and still convert cultural fear into a governing program.

Republican elites will not abandon this language because they are headed toward heavy losses. They have decided that losing on a wave of grievance is preferable to losing quietly.

The Islamophobic turn is not a miscalculation.

It is the calculation.

The choice this November is therefore larger than any one candidate. Voters who reject this machinery will not merely be defending El-Sayed, Mamdani, Hashmi, the four sitting Muslim members of Congress, or the fifth member on the way. They will be defending a constitutional proposition older than the panic and more durable than the party exploiting it: American public life has room for every American.

The country has said, out loud, what it was told it could not say. It is unlikely to unsay it. The work now is to decide what, exactly, that recognition will produce: a politics that turns fear into exclusion, or a democracy disciplined enough to distinguish a person from a program, a faith from an ideology, and evidence from a slogan.

The first choice is already organized.

The second will have to organize itself.