Megyn Kelly Tells GOP to Drop Muslim Brotherhood Attack on Abdul El-Sayed

Megyn Kelly says Republicans are wasting their time trying to tie Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood. On Thursday's episode of The Megyn Kelly Show, she argued that anger over the Iran war will blunt the attack and that the GOP should go after his health care and transgender positions instead.

The advice comes less than three weeks before Election Day, in one of the closest Senate races in the country. El-Sayed leads Republican Mike Rogers 48.7 percent to 45.3 percent in PolitiKool's polling average for Michigan. Control of the chamber is rated a toss-up in PolitiKool's polling average of the Senate map.

"So I just don't think this is a fruitful line of attack. I genuinely don't," Kelly said. "I would not be pushing this stuff if I were in charge of Mike Rogers campaign or the GOP's efforts to take him down."

Megyn Kelly Says GOP Is 'Rightfully Raising' the Issue

Kelly was not defending El-Sayed. She said "the GOP is rightfully raising this." She called his answer to the question "sketchy," and she said that "clearly the mother did have ties because those tweets that he was being asked about were from El-Sayed's half sister."

Her claim rests on those posts. She also said of the mother's involvement: "Now it was a while ago, and I have no idea what the current status is."

On Meet the Press last week, moderator Kristen Welker asked El-Sayed twice whether he or his family had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. He answered "No" both times. It was the same Meet the Press interview that critics on the left and right went on to argue over.

Old posts on X by his half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, then resurfaced. A professor at the University of Chicago, Abdelhadi wrote in 2012: "Had an amazing talk with my mom about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college #respect." In another post that year she wrote, "My family has long been MB, but I've always felt that it has navigated the political sphere poorly/destructively." El-Sayed's campaign called the accusations "bad faith attacks on Abdul's faith and family," Fox News reported.

Kelly also played a clip of an NBC reporter pressing El-Sayed on the posts. El-Sayed said, "I have no ties. We have no ties," and told the reporter he was "using hearsay evidence from a tweet." Kelly dismissed that defense: "We're not in a courtroom."

Why Megyn Kelly Thinks the Attack Won't Work in Michigan

Kelly's argument was about the electorate, not the facts. "The anger over Israel is white hot," she said. "It's white hot amongst independents, which are probably going to decide this race, and amongst enough Republicans that they're not going to pull the lever for a Mike Rogers."

"The Republicans who are very, very angry at Trump over this war are not going to vote for a neocon GOP-er, period," she added.

Polling backs up part of that. In an I&I/TIPP poll conducted September 29 to October 1, 71 percent of Republicans supported U.S. military action against Iran, compared with 30 percent of independents.

Independents have also turned on Israel. In a Gallup poll conducted February 2 to 16, independents said they sympathized more with the Palestinians than with the Israelis, 41 percent to 30 percent. It was the first time in Gallup's trend that independents leaned that way. Republicans still sided with Israel, 70 percent to 13 percent.

War fatigue on the right has become a theme among conservative hosts. Steve Bannon warned this week that war-weary Trump voters could stay home.

What Kelly Would Attack Instead

Kelly said she would go after El-Sayed's support for single-payer health care. "I'd be poring over his Medicare for all pushes and how that's going to deprive people of their private health insurance eventually and his trans stance, which is as radical as they come," she said.

She also predicted the outcome outright: "I do think that up in Michigan, El-Sayed is going to win."

That puts her at odds with Trump himself, who has linked El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood and called him "a con man."

What Happens Next in the Michigan Senate Race

With El-Sayed's lead inside a few points, the GOP's choice of attack could matter. The open question is whether the Brotherhood story moves the independents Kelly expects to decide the race, or whether the Iran war keeps them out of Rogers's reach.