Terrorism has barely featured in candidates’ campaigns ahead of next month’s US midterm elections, even though President Donald Trump’s administration has taken a series of steps against the Muslim Brotherhood since taking office.

The administration has moved against the Islamist group both at home and abroad, amid growing warnings about the threat it poses. Yet the issue has been largely absent from the platforms of many candidates.

Noah Rothman, an analyst at the conservative magazine National Review, says that “no one is talking about terrorism”, even though it is on the minds of Americans in the Midwest.

Voters’ concerns ahead of the November vote center on the economy, healthcare and the stability of American democracy. But Mr. Rothman argues there is real anxiety among voters about “terrorist violence”.

Michigan under the spotlight

One sign that terrorism remains on voters’ minds is the scrutiny of candidates’ backgrounds from both parties. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for the US Senate in Michigan, has become one of the most closely watched figures in the race.

Mr. Rothman says Mr. El-Sayed has faced sustained criticism. He points to remarks the candidate made a day after an attack on a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, on 12 March, which critics said sought to explain the attacker’s motives. Mr, El-Sayed noted that the attacker, Ayman Ghazali, had lost a nephew and niece, the children of his brother, described as a Hezbollah commander, in an Israeli strike on Lebanon.

Following fierce criticism, Mr. El-Sayed later apologized for his comments, saying: “It was a risk, and our whole team was very worried about saying something like that, but leadership requires being willing to take a position if you believe it is right.”

Mr. Rothman argues that Mr. El-Sayed’s response “takes on greater significance today”, given what he describes as signs that the candidate has misled Michigan voters about his and his family’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, which the US has moved to designate as a terrorist organization.

Why the fear persists

A report by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), published to mark the anniversary of the 11 September attacks, warned that rapid advances in technologies such as drones had left US territory vulnerable to attacks by terrorist groups.

It said that, combined with digitally skilled militants using social media as a weapon, the country faced increasingly lethal autonomous weapons alongside a growing number of young people embracing extremist ideas.

The report also said violence in the Middle East, triggered by the 7 October 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas, which emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood, and the conflicts that followed had fueled extremist sentiment that could later be directed at the US.

It described the threat from drones, whether operated by terrorists or hostile states, as the most pressing challenge today, noting that the Federal Aviation Administration recorded more than 400 illegal drone flights over US airports in the first quarter of 2025 alone.

Fresh scrutiny

This climate has placed Mr. El-Sayed and other candidates under closer examination.

Fox News reported that Mr. El-Sayed has family links to the Muslim Brotherhood, despite his denial of any connection in an interview with NBC. It said recently surfaced information had brought fresh scrutiny of the Democratic Senate candidate.

US media outlets have circulated a 2012 post on X, then Twitter, by his half-sister, Imaan Abdelhadi, in which she said their mother had been an active member of the Muslim Brotherhood. “Had a great conversation with my mum about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1970s, when she was at university,” she wrote.

According to Fox News, their mother, Faten al-Koumi, studied at Alexandria University in Egypt, which a Brookings Institution report says was a center of strong Muslim Brotherhood activity in the 1970s.

In another post that year, Ms. Abdelhadi, now a professor at the University of Chicago, wrote: “My family has always been Muslim Brotherhood, but I always felt the group handled the political sphere in a bad or destructive way.”

The news platform Visegrad24 highlighted President Trump’s claim that Mr. El-Sayed is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. It also pointed to Ms. Abdelhadi’s remarks that relatives had been imprisoned for their membership of the group.

The platform said that in a January 2011 article for the Huffington Post, Mr. El-Sayed argued that even if the Muslim Brotherhood came to power in Egypt, the resulting state would bear no resemblance to Iran and would not mirror Hamas.

It added that in November 2012 he signed a statement by Egyptian-American leaders backing an expansion of the powers of then-President Mohammed Morsi, and urging him to purge the media and the police as quickly as possible.

Morsi, a senior Muslim Brotherhood figure, was elected Egypt’s president after the Arab Spring uprisings but was ousted by the military in 2013 following mass protests. He died in 2019.

After the Brotherhood was banned in Egypt in the mid-1950s, many of its leaders moved abroad, where they spent decades building a global Islamist movement, and more recently, the platform says, have acquired property, businesses and institutions across Western countries.

Government action

The Trump administration has been tightening restrictions on the Muslim Brotherhood since last year. In November, the president signed an executive order to designate certain branches of the group as foreign terrorist organizations.

That same month, Texas placed the Muslim Brotherhood, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) and their affiliates under strict enforcement measures, barring them from buying or owning land in the state.

Translator’s note: In keeping with BBC style, I attributed contested claims to their sources and used neutral wording in a few places (for example, Morsi’s removal and the Brotherhood’s US designation status). Quotes are translated back from the Arabic, so they may differ from the original English wording and should be checked against the source posts and interviews before publication.