Michigan’s Muslim voters helped Donald Trump win in 2024. Now, Abdul El-Sayed is running to become the US’ first Muslim senator, his faith and loyalty are under attack. Al Jazeera’s Mikail Malik spoke to Muslim Americans in Dearborn.
Published On 31 Oct 202631 Oct 2026
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Come Election Day, a Quaker leader will travel from the nation’s capital to her home state of Ohio. A Christian minister and a Jewish rabbi will stand vigil outside a polling place in Arizona. A Buddhist nun will offer support to voters in Wisconsin.
In battleground states across the country, these faith leaders and hundreds of their colleagues will assume the role of poll chaplains for one day. They will deploy to nine states — Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Virginia and Texas — where contentious races are expected to raise political tensions.
Faiths United in Saving Democracy, a nonpartisan coalition of interfaith and secular partners, is helping to train and certify this volunteer force of clergy members and lay peacekeepers in time for the Nov. 3 elections.
They’ll wear identifying hats and vests, and stay outside the poll centers, with the goal of maintaining a calm, reassuring presence to encourage more voters to exercise their rights without fear or hesitation, said co-founder Barbara Williams-Skinner. As of Oct. 19, they’ve recruited 1,235 poll chaplains and peacekeepers, she said.
While the idea of poll chaplains has been around for several years, Williams-Skinner said “2026 is going to be different” because there is widespread concern that the presence of federal immigration agents could create a chilling effect.
“The fear is real,” she says, worrying that it could deter eligible voters in mixed-immigration-status families and communities of color. Department of Homeland Security officials have consistently said they have no plans to send immigration agents to the polls, although DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said they could show up for a specific reason, such as arresting someone if they have a warrant.
The coalition has offered training online and in person. Participants get information about immigrant rights, de-escalation techniques and phone numbers to call in tight situations, Williams-Skinner said.
The initiative, strongly rooted in the Black church, has expanded to include diverse faiths as well as non-religious people, she said.
“This is a movement built by unusual coalitions,” she said. “You have white, Mainline Protestants, Quakers, traditional Baptists, Black church leaders, imams, rabbis — all kinds of people who probably would not work together or haven’t worked together in the past.”
While most participating groups are moderate or progressive, Williams-Skinner says it is a strictly nonpartisan initiative.
“We don’t get hung up on who’s moderate or who’s conservative. People just need to be able to vote, unafraid,” she said.
A Pew survey following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in September 2025 showed 85% of Americans, across political lines, believe political violence is on the rise.
Polling places have been targeted by protesters in past elections. In 2022, members of a group claiming to monitor ballot drop boxes in Arizona were ordered to stay at least 250 feet away after voters complained about intimidation. In 2020, following Election Day, a crowd stormed a vote-counting center in Detroit, many incited by online conspiracy theories about election fraud.
As the mob banged on the center’s doors and windows, the Rev. Steve Bland was among several faith leaders who put their bodies between the building and the crowd. Bland, who leads Detroit’s Liberty Temple Baptist Church, is continuing that work as a poll chaplain.
The pastor says de-escalation often involves “using the right words to calm a situation” or giving intimidated voters the moral support and reassurance that they are safe to exercise their civic right. Bland said he did precisely that for an elderly, Black woman during a prior election.
“She left and came back with two of her grandsons who also voted,” he said. “Without that intervention, three people wouldn’t have voted that day.”
The Rev. Bankole Akinbinu, senior pastor of Baptist Grove Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, said training in conflict resolution and de-escalation has given him the confidence to serve as a poll chaplain. A millennial, he has sought to engage younger people by recruiting peacekeepers from college campuses.
His motivation comes from seeing voter suppression attempts in North Carolina and other states.
“I look at our forefathers and the struggle they had to endure to afford us the privilege of voting,” Akinbinu said. “I look at my children and the nation I want to hand them.”
Steven Huefner, deputy director of the Election Law Program at The Ohio State University, says poll chaplains might be able to calm the frayed nerves of a voting public that is constantly exposed to divisive rhetoric and news about political violence. While political violence has increased, he says, it’s not widespread.
“Election workers are well-trained and can run elections quite well,” he said.
Faith leaders have historically played the role of peacekeepers, said Wendy Cadge, professor of sociology at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and founder of the think tank Chaplaincy Innovation Lab.
And now chaplaincy — beyond traditional worship spaces — is attracting more clergy.
“People are feeling called to chaplaincy because they want to be with people in difficult times,” Cadge said. “They don’t want to worry about what color the carpet is in the church or if their youth programs are attracting enough people. It’s a different kind of work.”
Clergy deploying on Election Day say they are heeding a strong, faith-driven calling to serve as poll chaplains.
In Arizona, Rev. Katie Sexton, executive director of Arizona Faith Network, embraces the initiative as a way to reach across the political divide.
“The ballot box is a place where we’re all seen as equal,” she said, adding that it reflects the Christian belief that all humans are created in the image of God. “There is such power in that.”
On Oct. 6, Sexton and several others participated in a training session — one of the last before the midterms — at Temple Chai, a Reform synagogue in Scottsdale.
Rabbi Emily Segal, who leads the congregation, will be a poll chaplain for the first time next month. The work, she says, aligns with what the Torah and Talmud teach about a healthy and just society.
Throughout American history, interfaith coalitions have created powerful change and served as sources of inspiration, Segal said. “Any time we can come together with faith partners around our shared values for societal good is a real source of holiness for our community.”
Bridget Moix, a Quaker leader, will travel to her native Ohio on Election Day.
“In our faith tradition, we think about voting as a sacred act we want to protect,” she said.
For Reirin Gumbel, resident teacher at the Milwaukee Zen Center, it’ll be a third time, come November.
“As Buddhists, the Metta Sutra we chant says every being has the same rights, and that we should have compassion toward all,” she said.
Imam Mohammed Ali Elahi, spiritual leader of the Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, is considering becoming a poll chaplain for the first time. In a highly contentious campaign in Elahi’s state, Abdul El-Sayed is the first Muslim Democratic candidate to run for a U.S. Senate seat.
The imam said he is tired of anti-Muslim vitriol that has surfaced ahead of the midterms.
“As interfaith clergy, we stand for principles not personalities,” he said. “The Quran tells us to stand for what’s right — truth, justice, peace, human rights and the dignity of human beings, whoever they may be.”
Bharath writes for the Associated Press.
BANGOR, Maine — Ever the optimist, Speaker Mike Johnson said he believes Republicans will hold on to their U.S. House majority, defying a surge of Democratic momentum in the final stretch of the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.
It’s the crowds he says he’s seeing as he crosses the country campaigning for GOP candidates. The caliber of recruits and incumbents he calls workhorses, not show horses. And the nearly half a billion he has raised for House Republicans.
He also has faith.
“We run to win, and that’s biblical: You run to win,” he told the Associated Press during a campaign stop in Maine.
“And I believe that we will.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, right, applauds along with President JD Vance as President Trump delivers his State of the Union address during a joint session of Congress in February in Washington.
(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)
The speaker of the House is one of the most consequential elected officials in the United States, second in line of succession to the president. While Johnson quipped to Fox News recently that he may return to his hometown of Shreveport, La., to start a lawn care business if Republicans lose power on Nov. 3, he fully expects to buck an American midterm tradition that often sees the president’s party dumped in Congress.
It can be said that Johnson, who has drawn so close to President Trump that he routinely fields 1 a.m. calls — they spoke the night before as Trump rallied in Alaska — walks on the sunny side of the street. That’s despite voter frustration over high prices and the Iran war, and his own challenge of leading one of narrowest House majorities in modern times.
In his three years as speaker, Johnson has pushed past the doubters and naysayers, holding his thread-thin GOP majority together to deliver Trump’s agenda. He notably led passage of the big tax breaks and social service cuts bill. Most days he does not have a single vote to spare.
“So many times everybody had written off, there was no way he was going to be able to pull off a particular vote,” said Republican Rep. Mark Harris of North Carolina, who joined the speaker on the campaign swing. “Yet he always seems to pull out the win in the end.”
In the interview, Johnson did not speak brashly about expanding the House majority on election day, as he has in the past. But on track to visit more than 20 states and 40 congressional districts though November, he said the political mood reminds him of the 2024 election that swept Republicans to control of Congress and the White House.
“It’s not going to be a giant majority,” he said. “But I genuinely believe that we will have a working majority.”
Johnson first fell into the speaker’s job almost by accident, a desperate choice by his GOP colleagues after a contingent of renegade Republicans ousted his predecessor, then-Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California in 2023.
Johnson had been a lower-level member of House leadership, but distinguished himself before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by organizing support for Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud in the election that he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
In the time since, Johnson has secured proximity to Trump’s power. He joined Trump at a UFC fight in New York and once gifted the president a speaker’s gavel as Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” into law. It was a symbolic act, but one that critics saw as giving away the authority of a coequal branch of government.
More recently, Johnson abruptly sent lawmakers home early rather than face a vote forced by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as lawmakers tried to halt the Iran war, which has not been authorized by Congress.
Over coffee in Bangor, after rallying for House candidate Paul LePage, a former governor, Johnson brushed back criticism that Congress has eroded under his watch as Trump works to amass executive power.
“Absolute nonsense,” Johnson said.
“We did not yield Article 1 authority to the president,” he said, referring to the powers spelled out in the Constitution. “We used our own,” he said, to muscle GOP priorities past Democratic opposition.
Johnson has focused the election on Democrats he portrays as “communists.” A handful of far-left liberals, backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, are on the ballot.
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader who is in line for the speaker’s gavel if his party sweeps to power, is preparing a first-100 days agenda for when the new Congress convenes in January, if there is a change in control.
What the Republicans will do if they retain power is less defined.
“Lots of plans,” Johnson said, “along the same course of what we’ve been doing — less taxes, less regulation.”
Trump “wants to go big for his legacy,” he said. “We have big things on the horizon that we can do.”
The president has essentially purged the House GOP ranks of those perceived to be disloyal. Among them are Massie, who lost his primary, and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who retired early after breaking with Trump over release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Pressed how he would keep Republicans in line, Johnson said he is preparing to change the House rules if he returns as speaker.
“There’s going to be some changes that are going to make the machinery work smoother,” he said.
Faith has often been strong among House leaders. Two former speakers, Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich are Catholics, as is John Boehner, who invited Pope Francis to address Congress.
Johnson, a former constitutional lawyer who was first elected alongside Trump in 2016, is expected to win his own reelection next month.
“My faith is a huge component of how I think and how I act and what I do,” said Johnson, who led a public prayer on the National Mall as part of the nation’s 250th anniversary.
He is drinking lots of coffee these days, he said, cutting back on the Celsius, and still has 1,413 unread text messages, a slight dip from the frightful number reported a few months ago by the Wall Street Journal.
One text is from someone praying for him.
Johnson said he is grateful for the outpouring of prayers he receives, for him and the country.
“I pray for God’s will. And I believe God’s will is for us — and not the communists — to be in charge of America,” Johnson said.
“And it does say in the New Testament, you run the race to win,” he said, citing 1 Corinthians 9:24. “This is a biblical admonition. So we will.”
Mascaro writes for the Associated Press.