Twenty years ago, as America fought in the Middle East, a junior Democratic senator from the Midwest, a forty-something man with a Muslim name, decided he was going to run for president. Against the odds, Barack Hussein Obama of Illinois, who’d dabbled in Marxist academia and whose father was born in Kenya, went on to become the first non-white commander-in-chief.

Two decades on, as America fights another war in the Middle East, an even more unconventional Midwestern Democrat is rapidly advancing. Dr Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, whose father was born in Egypt, is currently the favourite to win his senate race in Michigan in November – even as Republican campaigners spend millions of dollars branding him a terrorist sympathiser.

El-Sayed resents ‘the next Obama’ label, which has been attached to him ever since 2017 when, as a smooth-talking and charismatic 32-year-old, he made an audacious but unsuccessful bid to be Michigan’s governor.

‘I get compared to Obama because my name is funny and I’m brown,’ he has said. ‘There are a lot of things I disagree with President Obama on – in terms of both domestic and, certainly, international politics. I’m not him, and I have no intention of being him.’

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Which makes sense. Today’s young progressives tend to regard Obama as a fuddy old centrist who betrayed their ideals. To ‘inspire hope’ and wind up Middle America now, the new generation needs someone far more provocative than Barack, who was a Secret Muslim Communist only in the fevered imaginings of Tea Party Republicans. El-Sayed, by contrast, is proudly Muslim........

© The Spectator