Is Terrorism a Midterm Sleeper Issue?

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

 

Nationally, voters’ top concerns heading into next month’s election are the economy, health care, and the stability of American democracy. By contrast, public safety does not rate.

 

With Joe Biden out of office, “immigration” has become less salient. So, too, has the issue of “violent crime,” along with America’s rates of violent criminal offenses. “Terrorism” doesn’t even register as an issue in 2026. But in certain localities, the prospect of not just criminal but terroristic violence is a live concern among voters.

 

Take Minnesota, where Governor Tim Walz’s top lieutenant, Peggy Flanagan, is waging an unexpectedly difficult campaign to succeed retiring Democratic Senator Tina Smith. This week, a Star Tribune/KARE 11 poll of the North Star State’s voters found a four-point race between Flanagan (47 percent) and GOP nominee Michele Tafoya (43 percent), with independent voters favoring the Republican candidate by six points.

 

Flanagan’s struggles are, perhaps, largely explained by the exposure of the massive fraud ring in Minnesota over which Walz presided — a scandal that cast a pall over his party and forced him to forgo a third campaign for governor. But at the bottom of the poll’s write-up, the Star Tribune reminded its readers that the state is still on a heightened state of alert following an attempted terrorist attack on the Mall of America last week. “I was driving by the Mall of America 15 minutes ago, and I thought: ‘God, would I feel safe going in there?’” 60-year-old real estate agent Andria Gandrud told the outlet’s reporters. “I want to feel safe.”

 

Last week, federal authorities arrested 18-year-old Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud following a two-year investigation into his efforts to execute a mass casualty attack on behalf of Islamist terrorist groups abroad — both the remnants of the Islamic State and the Somalia-based outfit al-Shabaab. “I wanna get martyred inshallah,” Mohamud told an FBI informant. His purchase of an AK-47 and 200 rounds of ammunition from an undercover agent indicates that the suspect sought to murder as many Minnesotans as he could.

 

“The recent charges recall similar investigations from more than a decade ago when a wave of Somali-Americans from Minnesota faced charges for wanting to leave the United States to fight alongside Islamic extremist groups,” the Star Tribune reported late last week. “One major 2015 case led to indictments against 11 Minnesotans charged in a conspiracy to provide support to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.”

 

The recent attempted attack underscores how elevated the Islamist terrorist threat to U.S. security has become in recent weeks. Proactive efforts by law enforcement interdicted a plot against the Texas and New York state capitols, Jewish institutions in Los Angeles and New York City, and American service personnel in Kansas and California. But aspiring terrorists only have to get lucky once.

 

Of all the potentially catastrophic events that law enforcement thwarted this year, the attacker who targeted dozens of Jewish preschoolers in his March 12 attack on Michigan’s Temple Israel synagogue came closest to engineering an epochal bloodletting. There, 41-year-old Ayman Mohamed Ghazali rammed his truck into the synagogue’s façade and opened fire on the building. As his truck burst into flames and the facility’s security personnel returned fire, Ghazali turned his weapon on himself before he could murder his targets. The media’s self-proclaimed security experts were quick to blame President Donald Trump for angering bloodthirsty Islamic radicals with his war against Iran. But the FBI swiftly noted that Ghazali was “inspired by Hezbollah’s militant ideology,” and his goal was to kill as many Jews as possible.

 

That event has become a focal point in this year’s U.S. Senate race in Michigan. As is his conspicuous wont, Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed published a statement on this terrorist event from the perspective of its perpetrator. “A week earlier, an airstrike killed his niece and nephew,” the Democratic nominee wrote (true enough: Ghazali’s brother was a Hezbollah commander involved in combat operations against the IDF in Lebanon). “We can and must condemn the attack on Temple Israel, and we can and must condemn the violence 6,000 miles away.” He infamously added, “Hurt people hurt people.”

 

With the primary race behind him, El-Sayed apologized for those remarks. But he was quite proud of himself at the time. “It was a risk,” El-Sayed said in an internal call with campaign staffers. “All of our team was really worried about saying something, but leadership is being willing to say the thing if you believe it to be true that nobody else is going to say.”

 

El-Sayed’s insouciance has added relevance today amid indications that he is misleading Michigan’s voters about the nature of his and his family’s connections to the U.S.-designated terrorist organization the Muslim Brotherhood.

 

During a sit-down interview with Meet the Press host Kristen Welker on Sunday, El-Sayed repeatedly assured her that neither he nor his family had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. It was later revealed, however, that Abdul’s sister insisted her whole family were staunch supporters of that organization. That was in 2012, right around the time El-Sayed signed an open letter in support of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Egyptian President, Mohamed Morsi, calling on him to “purge the media and the police.” El-Sayed’s campaign insists the allegations are “racist” and “untrue,” but El-Sayed’s associations render those denials unpersuasive.

 

Between his birth mother’s work for a charity that supported Hamas and al-Qaeda and his father-in-law’s ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an unindicted co-conspirator in a high-profile terrorism financing case, El-Sayed’s associations would be a source of concern even if the terrorist threat were in retreat. Underlying all of it is the public’s unexpressed apprehension — a nagging suspicion that El-Sayed’s commitment to combating Islamist terrorism is conditional, and that his election will have consequences that extend well beyond banal politics.

 

No one is talking about terrorism, but people are thinking about it — particularly in the upper Midwest. And if Democrats in this part of the country underperform on Election Day, they can attribute it to what may be the sleeper issue of the year.